Snippet #1841148

Time passed, and the cigarette still held in Izzie's mouth dwindled away to nothing. She reached up to retrieve the spent butt of the cigarette, tossing it aside to the ground before immediately reaching into one of the inside pockets of her jacket for another. She withdrew it slowly, with a calmness and clarity that she simply did not seem to possess otherwise--any other student in that shithole of a school seeing her now would be taken aback by the almost mantra-like grace with which she slid the pencil-thin between her dark, razor-sharp lips, struck the match, and, cupping it with one hand, brought it to light the tip of the cigarette before waving the small flame out and tossing it aside.

The music player, set to simply randomly go through the songs uploaded to it, had switched to Death's Scream Bloody Gore, thundering into her head at unhealthy volume. A smirk alit upon the young woman's features. For all her love of Death and Chuck Schuldiner, she could not bring herself to sing his earlier lyrics along with the song like she could with his later work. Because frankly, she could really feel and be moved by the words when she sang lines like "Passion is a poison laced with pleasure bitter sweet". Not so much when the line in question was "Hanging your mangled corpse for display, my revenge was fulfilled upon this day". But that was what the evolution of a writer was all about, wasn't it? Hell, Izzie could remember when she'd first started out writing her own lyrics.

Recalling some particular examples from that time brought a shudder to her spine. Yeah, best not to think of that.

The sensation of something vibrating in her pocket brought her attention back to reality, and Izzie reached her hand into the pocket of her jeans to find the screen of her old cell phone emblazoned with a text message icon--below it, the word 'Iris'. Izzie'd never put much stock in texting, preferring the more straightforward tactic of just calling whoever you were texting. Which may have had something to do with the fact that texting with the ancient specimen she'd been provided with was a more or less insurmountable task on par with scaling Mount Everest naked. Clumsily she flipped the phone open, and read across the message. Yo, Izzie, I'm going to be running late. I might be even later if I get distracted like yesterday...

That brought a smirk to Izzie's stony, cold features. Of course. Iris was prone to finding some little animal on its own somewhere, forget completely about where she was going, and wind up spending the rest of the day finding a zoo to take care of the damn thing. Izzie'd never understood that. But there were many things about Iris Izzie just didn't get--just like there were, even if Izzie didn't realise it, many things about the Brazilian delinquent that Iris didn't really understand.

Well, even if Iris skipped half her classes in heroic pursuit of a new home for a kitten she'd found abandoned somewhere, Izzie'd figured on skipping at least the first class of the day--English. Which she really didn't think she needed, since her English, tinged with an accent though it was, was just fine as far as she was concerned. Hell some mornings she only came to school to come here--her own personal little sanctuary. Far more so than the shitty little apartment she currently called home could ever hope to be. Even if she was completely alone, wallowing in memories of pain and misery, at least here she could find some semblance of comfort. Some taste of the clarity and peace of mind that Izzie knew she would never, in whole, feel.