Misc RH OC Scraps

[SUNRISE] She's the Man

Scarlet Rose was usually alone, and she liked it that way. When she didn't have classes she would go out into town so she wouldn't be bothered by any fellow students, so she could be somewhere nobody knew her and do her own thing without having to think about the opinions of the people passing her by without a second glance. It was like they weren't real people. She was the only one in the world.

But recently that peaceful personal world of hers had been shattered, over and over, by an annoying jerk who just insisted on coming up and talking to her. It had started when she was reading in a park and some kids playing nearby accidentally kicked a soccer ball in her direction. A random boy appeared and caught the ball before it could hit Scarlet. She had politely said thank you but privately hoped that he would move on and leave her alone. Instead he sat next to her on the picnic table bench and tried to peek at what she was reading. She glared at him and hoped he would catch the hint.

The boy was pale with a smattering of freckles across his nose. He had black hair, deep brown eyes, a thin face with thick eyebrows. His fashion sense-- if you could call it fashion-- was garish. He always had on a stupid-looking baseball cap. He wore bright orange plain sweaters and basketball shorts a lot of the time. He was an eyesore, but that would have been fine-- if he didn't stick himself in Scarlet's line of sight at every opportunity! Ever since he'd caught that stupid ball, he'd been acting like they were friends, people who knew each other. He'd asked her to do favors for him. Suddenly the world outside Shadow High wasn't as Lele-friendly as it had once been.

So, now, Scarlet was hoping to find a bit of solitude at her own school. She sat in the far back of the bleachers at the football stadium, tapping her pen against her lip thoughtfully as she brainstormed the plot beats for her newest sci-fi novella. The cheers of the crowd weren't too distracting. It was sort of nice background noise. The band playing the school fight song was especially nice. Maybe she could use musical tones for some purpose in her new world-building, sound waves were science after all. She wrote the idea down.

"Hey! What are you doing here?"

Lele jumped, making a huge mark on her paper. She looked up.

There was a very pretty girl smiling at her. A pretty girl with long hair that cascaded down her back with the merest whisper of waves, naturally black but bleached and dyed autumn orange at the ends. The girl was breathing heavily and holding her shirt away from her chest-- it was a little wet-- she must have been exercising hard. Lele tried not to stare, quickly looking down to assess the mistake on her paper. "N-nothing... Am I not supposed to be here??"

"No, I just thought you weren't that much of a sports person," the girl sat down next to her, laughing a little. The sunlight made her soft brown eyes look honey-yellow. A million thoughts were running through Scarlet's head. Who was she? She looked familiar somehow. Was she one of the football players? No, she couldn't be, the game was going on-- what had she been doing? Running up the entire bleachers to get to her?? How was she so gorgeous? How did she seem to know her? The girl started to look uncomfortable and backed away a bit. "Sorry, I must smell, I was helping the team practice before the game started," she rushed to explain, her cheeks gaining some color. Lele wasn't about to say that her heavy breathing and sweaty shirt were actually incredibly attractive, so she just nodded, flustered. The girl apologized, then took out a baseball cap to fan herself with.

It was that same ugly cap that the annoying boy wore. It was brown and said women want me, fish fear me. It struck Lele that this girl had extremely similar physical features to that weirdo who wouldn't leave her alone... Oh, she got it. "You must have a brother."

The girl blinked, taken aback. "Yeah, I do! How'd you-- oh, cuz I do sports? Haha! Yeah, I grew up with a few brothers, we could get a little rowdy. I always used to wrestle with my closest brother. He actually goes to Rainbow High too!"

Scarlet buried her head against her knees, groaning. "I can't believe he talked to you about me... Why is he talking about me?" Though, if she'd known he had such a gorgeous sister, maybe she would have asked him to...

Lele felt a hand on her back and froze. Out of the corner of her eye she could see the long dyed hair next to her. The girl must have been leaning close to try and comfort her.

"Hey, I'm sorry, if I'd known you didn't want to be talked about I wouldn't have told him anything. But we didn't say anything bad. I was just saying how cool you were and how much I liked you, stuff like that. It's okay. I'll tell him to forget all about it." Her voice was so soothing. Even if the things she was saying didn't make an ounce of sense. A girl like that saying something like "I like you"... She had definitely meant it platonically, they'd never even met before, but it still squeezed her heart and made her face flush. Maybe she should thank the annoying boy next time she saw him.

A similar, but less comforting, voice sounded above her. "Yo, Umber. What's up with her?"

"I upset her," the girl explained, sounding genuinely regretful, "I'm trying to apologize. Uh, this is Scarlet, the girl I told you about-- except, please forget that I told you about her--"

"Geez. What a handful. This is why I don't mess with all that stuff."

"Harris, that's rude. You don't mess with people like that cuz nobody would wanna be with you." She muttered to Scarlet, "my brother's here."

Scarlet peeked up-- she was considering giving that man a piece of her mind-- but she quickly faltered.

The boy standing above her looked different than the annoying boy she knew. He had angry-looking, thin deep blue eyes, no freckles to speak of, and his black hair was cut neatly into a mullet with shaved sides. She didn't know this boy. He looked down on her with cold contempt. He told her to "suck it up, whatever it is."

"You SUCK at sweet-talking women," the girl, Umber, huffed. It had been a while now and she seemed to have cooled off, so she twirled her long hair together-- piled it on top of her head-- and put the stupid cap on, hiding her long orange tresses from sight. It was like watching an unholy monster emerge from the depths of a swamp.

She was the boy.

Scarlet felt all the color drain from her own face, and a horrible twisting in her stomach. She scrambled to shove her pen and notebook into her bag. This was NOT a safe place to write! "Sorry-- just remembered-- homework--" She stumbled over her words and the bleachers as she removed herself from the situation as quickly as possible.

"Oh-- okay! See you later, I hope!" Umber called after her, still looking concerned.