“He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow.”

- George Eliot

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There is a cafeteria, in this school, naturally, and naturally it is filled with people. It’s loud, not only when measured in decibels, but in colors too; red with a bad clash of a nearly neon orange. Opal McKay had hidden herself in a darkish corner of the room and was watching the ordered chaos of lunchtime with a growing migraine, all while damning bad color schemes to hell.

Opal really didn’t mind moving, she just didn’t like switch schools; every school had their own special brand of havoc. It was the pointlessness that got to her in the end, sitting away in the corners of lunchrooms watching people collect into sort-of cliques. She’d realized quite some time ago that real cliques didn’t really exist; neither did popularity. There were people in every school that everyone knew, but they were just that, well known, rather than the long fabled beloved ruler of a school.

Opal had already spotted this schools best-known male; they shared an English class before lunch and he wasn’t sitting far from her now. Looking him over she wouldn’t say he was particularly attractive, not bad looking, but he was no Adonis, his hair was floppy and orange -whether it was died or not she couldn’t tell- with big doe eyes and crooked teeth behind a mischievous smile- he hadn’t quite grown into his height either. No doubt though, that he was Foam Pine High’s -Foam Pine, really?- very own Casanova. To think, he wasn’t great looking either.

‘Charm,’ Opal thought, ‘or charisma, whichever,’ people like the carrot-top almost-alpha didn’t need to be beautiful; they’d make themselves beautiful. ‘Charm his way into your affections -and your pants- and then wriggle back out again, like a fish; slick as oil.’

She was amused, at the arrogant tilt of his neck, at the lazy arch to his back, at the half lidded eyes. He was one out of hundreds, a stereotype walking. ‘Probably wakes up every morning and deigns to let the sun shine out of his ass.’ There was a small smile on Opals thin lips as she turned back to her book, ‘watch,’ she told herself, ‘as you’re wrong and he’s the sweetest person you’ve ever met- I’ll laugh,’ not that she’d ever talk to him and find out.

‘If nothing else, he clashes with the décor.’