(La Belle Et Le Bad Boy)
(Chapter 1)(The Triangular Rectangle)

I hate it when people lie to me. I hate it worse when they do it to my face -for months at a time- and I'm just standing there, taking every word they say as gold. Does this mean I hate Elliot? Yeah, probably. But I think I have a right to hate the guy who's been cheating on me for two and a half years. What kind of seventeen-year-old guy leaves their girlfriend of four years to run off and elope at three in the morning with some girl they can't possibly love. He's a child! No. He isn't, I don't mean that. I can't mean that, because we were going to get married. "As soon as we get out of high school," he'd tell me, "we're going to move to New York City and get an apartment together. Then I'll christen our new lives by whispering how much I love you into your ear until you agree to marry me, Scarlett Kweller. I mean it Scarlett, you'd better accept it, because I'm never letting you leave me." I should have realized he never said anything about him leaving me.

He doesn't really love her. He can't. Could he? I've known -and loved- Elliot my whole life; until now at least. So how could he possibly love her? He's only known her for something under three years, and compared to me, that's nothing. Nothing? No. It's something, I'm sure it's something. It'd better be something to make it worth giving everything else up, to make giving us up. I love you Elliot. I love you. I love you. I love you. I hate you.

I hate you Elliot Finch.

Okay, so maybe I'm not the most rational of people at the moment. In fact, I know I'm not. Why else would I be stupid enough to be walking around this city at this time of night? I know I shouldn't be doing this. I also know I'm doing it anyway.

Screw stupidity. I want to be stupid. I want something I can drink, inhale or inject to make my brain sleep or stop. I want to get caught. I want to get raped. I just want what I'm supposed to be avoiding; I want what I've always been told I shouldn't. I had the nice guy who I was going to marry and spend the rest of my life with. I've even been saving myself for marriage, and look what I've got now. I think everything I've ever known is wrong. I think I've had everything backwards.

It's time to set things straight, to twist everything around until my ideas are mangled into truth. I am officially a new person. This is good. This is definitely a good thing. Screw Elliot; Let's get drunk.

Yeah, I'm seventeen. Yeah, I'm underage. Guess what? No one cares. The guy at the door of this club doesn't care. All I have to do is flutter my eyelashes and swing my hips a little in his direction and viola! I'm in. The guy behind the bar of this club doesn't care. Note the vodka in my hand. Tasty.


The club was dim and hazy, not sleazy, but not exactly not sleazy either. Somewhere on the other side of the room there was a guy rapping in French, or at least the very drunk Scarlett thought it was French. She kept wondering if it was the vodka or if the guy really was there. He had this real slick voice and kept stressing the words at the end of his phrases, making them pop off his tongue in miniature explosions. Or maybe that's just how French always is.

"Ils s'etaient rencontres sur les bancs d'l'ecole." Flowed the voice on the other side of the cigarette haze as Scarlett smiled at the bartender after receiving another drink. They kept appearing in front of her, more or less than usual, perhaps due to the fact that her pale white skin and pale white hair made her stick out, more or less than usual, in the pale white smoke. She never paid attention to who was sending them to her, she really didn't care a whole lot, but accepted them and took advantage of the gifts anyway.

Leaving a lipstick stained glass on the counter, Scarlett decided she was drunk enough to begin enjoying herself and abandoned her stable bar stool for her tricky high heeled feet. She wasn't about to let anyone know she was having trouble walking, that wouldn't go well with the new Scarlett Kweller, so she tried to keep up an air of sexy sobriety.

"Entre une heure de colle de maths ou d'un cours d'espagnol." Suddenly it seemed like a good idea to find where the rapper with the beautiful voice was. It gave her and her high heeled feet somewhere to walk to, even if she had no idea which direction this guy was originating from. Wadding through tables and chairs, other drunk people faded in and out of sight, ghostly shadows with glasses full of alcohol and cigarettes leaking fog. They were conversing with each other or trying to seduce the woman to their left or just drifting away into the music and the air. Then there was this one guy, with a book. It was the oddest thing, to see a guy sitting alone, reading a book in the middle of a bar. The oddest thing.

He just sat there, his eyes echoing the printed words, whispering silent sentences to his brain and making him so different from anyone else there. With a flick of his finger a page was turned, swirling curls of smoke out of the way, looking like the paper was starting to catch fire. And maybe it was. Maybe it was burning and maybe the rapper across the room really was speaking French.

And maybe Scarlett really was different tonight.

"C'etait un fille fun fana de football." Yes, all of that was definitely true. That was definitely French and if one was true, somehow that meant they all were. As Scarlett was drawn to search for the rhythmic ghost of a voice once again, the boy with the book was drawn to his own ghost, a pale white girl with painted red lips.

He eyed her suspiciously, this girl who liked French rap and had a beauty mark high on the apple of her cheek. It was odd to see her here, not because he'd never seen her here before, but because she was wearing a satin dress and velvet heels. It was the oddest thing, to see a girl standing alone, wearing a dress like that in the middle of a bar like this. The oddest thing.

As soon as she'd wandered into his attention, more vivid than the stories contained in the beaten paperback he had in his hands, she'd disappeared back into the smoke. Maybe he was hallucinating; it wasn't like it'd be a first or anything. But then again, no. She'd been a beautiful hallucination -no- a beautiful girl. Hallucinations were never beautiful, they were a torturous plague that refused to retreat from their war with his mind. People said they weren't real, but they were, because how could something that's always been there not be real? And other people did see them, his fingers tightened their grip on the collection of short stories he held, how else could this man, this author that wasn't him, record their existence so accurately in this printed text? He saw them too. He must see them too.

"Lui ne craignait pas les balles, c'etait le goal." That voice was a hallucination, Scarlett was convinced of it now. She'd wandered in circles, searching for him for so long she was officially lost in the maze of smoke and unknown faces. Insanity was the only thing she could find to approach and she didn't want that. Or did she?

There she was again. The beautiful hallucination. His finger slid into the crease between pages, marking his place while he stared at his vision of living fiction in satin. The girl with her dress was just as enchanting as his stories, maybe even more so, and he found he couldn't take his eyes off her.

There he was again. The boy with the book. She'd been this way before, he was the one person in this place that was distinctive enough for her to remember. But he looked different this time; he had his eyes on her instead of buried in his book. Similarly, she also had her eyes on him instead of connected to his book.

Scarlett smiled softly at the scruffy looking boy, her eyes quirking with her lips as he adopted a look of astonishment. Since when do beautiful hallucinations smile? And why would they smile at him, the crazy kid who sees things that aren't there? Forgetting the book in his hands, he dropped it to the table, losing his place, so he'd have a free hand to give her a small wave. Where was his composure?

This girl was making him crazy, uh, -er than normal and he had no idea why.

Pulling the chair across from him out, Scarlett took a seat, still smiling oddly. This -he- was what she was looking for tonight. He was understated trouble, a bad boy who wasn't the way he was by choice, but simply because he was. The book -the book was just intriguing, it didn't hide the unexplainable hint of danger he had lingering around him. And you know how good girls like Scarlett love bad boys like this one.

"Interesting," Scarlett commented idly, flicking a finger against the cover of his book, resting her chin in the palm of her other hand, "Read here often?"

"You're very pale," was all he could reply, admiring her skin and soft, chin length hair. It was a stupid thing to say, but it was all his stuttering brain could come up with.

A quick laugh escaped her throat. "You look a little dirty in the smoke, but you're kind of pale yourself."

"I spend too much time indoors -in bars- reading, I guess."

She didn't bother to give her own explanation, but poked her finger in his direction instead of his book's this time. "What's your name, very pale boy?"

Straightening up a little in his seat, he tried to look offended, "I'll have you know I'm very manly -I am not a boy. Very masculine, terribly masculine."

"Yes, I can tell. Does this terribly masculine boy have a name?"

"Charlie Evans." He scowled a bit in defeat.

"Ah, Charlie," the right corner of her mouth rose in amusement, "Very masculine indeed, names ending in -ie always are. Marie, Laurie, Julie, Natalie-"

"I am not a woman, stop implying that." His fingers distastefully ran across the binding of his book; Charlie didn't like having his manliness challenged by pretty girls in pretty dresses. It gave him a complex.

"Scarlett Kweller."


"I'm Scarlett Kweller."

"You're a color with a last name. Interesting," he mocked her in return, leaving her to scowl a little like he had earlier.

But she didn't scowl, she just closed her eyes as she listened to the musician again. "I know."

"C'qu'il lui promettait c'etait des ballades en Corvette."

"Scarlett." Her dress was this low cut, pale green number that came to her knees in a swirl of satin and looked like a mirage in the patchy light. Licking his lips, he wished it were. "We should go out in the world for once, you and me, take on the city just for tonight -maybe get a tan beneath the streetlights or something."

She stood, her velvet heels clicking against the dirty floor as she walked the two steps to his side, taking his hand and pulling him up. Smirking, she looked him in the eye and ran a finger back and fourth across his scratchy stubble, "You like me, Charlie, don't you?" He licked his lips again, tracing his hands up her sides to rest on her beautiful hallucination of a waist. She wasn't real, she couldn't be real. He never believed people when they called him crazy until now; now he was the one calling himself crazy for believing this girl, this Scarlett, was really leaning against him, running her fingertips across his chin. She leaned in, her breath enjoying the feel of his lips, such a small distance between them, "Let's go." Then she claimed his hands and raced him into the night.

"Pour l'instant en survet, il volait des mobylettes." The words followed them out the door, only seeming to grow louder as they walked away from them.

Scarlett looked at Charlie expectantly, impatience creeping into her. "Car?"

"I don't have a car. No- well, I do. But not now, not here. It's..." He scratched the back of his head, "-I actually have no idea where it is. But it's somewhere, uh, else."

"You have to have a car!" Scarlett almost looked offended, "You said we were going to see the city, and I walked here, so you have to have a car!"

Charlie grinned in a way that made Scarlett shrink back. He looked conniving and full of power and she knew he knew something she didn't. There was an ace of spades up one of his sleeves, or both of them.

"I have a motorcycle."

Oh no. Scarlett wasn't your motorcycle kind of girl; She was all bicycles with training wheels. But Charlie grabbed her hand anyway, entwining their fingers together to make it more difficult for her to run away from her fear. Stashing his book in his back pocket like he'd obviously done a million times before, he grabbed his shiny black helmet and put it on Scarlett, pressing a finger to her lips when she began to object. Climbing onto the bike, he held a hand out to help her onto the back, patiently keeping it there for an extended amount of time as she hesitated.

"Mais entre eux c'etait toujours complicite."

He had a motorcycle. Great. Well, Scarlett did say she was going to be the opposite of herself tonight, didn't she? Maybe it was the vodka, or maybe it was that Charlie looked real sexy on that machine, giving up his helmet to her and letting his dark hair get tousled up by the wind. Scarlett licked her lips as he had earlier; she was going to do this. Taking his hand, she soon found her arms wrapped around his torso, her chin resting on his left shoulder. She was mildly drunk and on the back of a motorcycle with a very strange, and very intriguing, completely unknown guy. The thought crossed her mind that maybe she should try heroin and lose her virginity while she was at it. In that moment, she meant it.

"Why do people ride motorcycles?"

Charlie turned his head to face her, resting his forehead against hers like he was about to reveal a secret of biblical proportions. "You feel like you're flying."

"Escale sur un piedestal un reve delimite." And the motor turned on and the motorcycle turned a corner two blocks from the club, flickering out of sight as the lights of the city blinked on and off around the duo.

"S'il devenait triangle, elle serait rectangle." The wind tore through Charlie's hair and Scarlett's mind, trying to pull them apart as it pushed them together on all sides.

"La belle et le bad boy, le triangle rectangle." Charlie was right; They were flying.


(Author's Note: I am loving writing this one! I really am. Bonus points go to people who review, inform me of any typing errors, and/or give me your ideas/predictions as to what you think should/will happen. It'll take more time than usual for me to get the second chapter out, but that's just because I want to make the chapters on this one long! This one chapter could well be longer than full stories I've written and I'm hoping to continue that!

By the way, "La Belle Et Le Bad Boy" is a real song Translation: The Beauty And The Bad Boy. Normally I'm not much on rap, but this one does it for me. Look up MC Solaar for this if you're interested; it's my inspiration for this whole story. My spell checker does not like French...)