Wendy/Irene, school!au, 648 words

Irene enjoyed autumn. Most girls, people, they fried blissfully in the rays of the sun, up to their waists in baths of sun lotion and gracefully blessed by light; Irene didn’t get that. She certainly didn’t like the sticky, unclean feeling of claustrophobic sun protectants and sweaty passers-by, nor accepting the knowledge that her skin cells were sweltering to death. Perhaps it wasn’t for everyone.

But she enjoyed autumn, the globally recognised “boring season”, if you will. She enjoyed being able to wear her school blazer indoors without getting a nag-full from her dearly exhausted parents, and as a girl resitting her final school year for the third dreadful time in a row, every year she was greeted with an increasingly exciting and increasingly baby-faced new class.

Somehow, though three years their senior, she still managed to be mistaken for the youngest of all.

“Hey!” The sheer livelihood of the word sent trickling hisses down Irene’s back, triggering her to turn around from her student desk to see the most alert of faces she had ever seen. It was this girl, this plausibly merry girl with wavy turrets of chestnut brown hair, small strands of it cutely braided together and sprawled so elegantly, tucking behind her ears; this girl with defined eyebrows and ginormous eyes. This terrifyingly enticing girl.

“Uh, hi.” Irene croaked, voice deeper than usual, suiting to one that displayed the accepted hierarchy of age all too naturally. She turned herself away and cursed herself under her breath.

“Hey,” the girl repeated again, her voice soft, smooth, toned; also terrifyingly enticing. Without a consent, the stranger dragged the other chair beside Irene’s desk, and – oh look, Irene had already found herself a partner. “I’m going to guess why you’ve been held back again-” she said teasingly, happily. And this was so followed by a dragging, elongated pause, with the younger girl still waiting on the cusp of her last syllable.

“What?” Irene really did not mean to hiss, it was just a force of habit.

“This is where you say your name.”

“Oh!” the older girl with brightly dipped, rose-tipped hair and furled eyebrows suddenly exclaimed, her cheeks beginning to dust over the same pink and delicate colour as her hair. “Irene.”

“Irene;” the younger hummed while quirking an eyebrow ever so slightly for the slightest second, thus leading Irene to wonder how she even picked that motion up. But the next few words of this chestnut plaited girl were uttered as a hardly intelligible, unrealistic mesh of intricacy. “I’m going to guess why you’ve held back a few years. It is due to that fact that you’ve been living a double life as a super hard-core, no-nonsense yet adorably introverted superwoman the past three years - you know, fighting evil with those shatteringly cold stares of yours and flustered half-sentences - but you recently had an epiphany that raw education and thirst for knowledge was your key dream all along.”

Her beautiful eyes were boring, surreal, wide, and Irene could only stare with traces of bemusement painted all over her lips.

“Was I at least a little bit correct?” said the girl, smirking painfully adorably, in Irene’s opinion. As the older girl ducked her head out of bashfulness, she also caught the name of this girl written in bubbles in the right hand corner of her homework planner.

Wendy. Endearingly cheerful and painstakingly irritating Wendy. Beautiful Wendy. Terrifyingly enticing Wendy.

Irene flickered her gaze back onto this Wendy girl, startled unusually by the flare of her eyes and pure warmth of her expression still being intensely intact, attempting a usually easily mustered harsh tone as she uttered, “God, you’re so weird. You may just be the weirdest person I’ve ever met.”

But she couldn’t stop herself from smiling. Subconsciously biting her lip, she reckoned that this could be the beginning of her very favourite autumn so far.