((Sorry I'm so late! For some reason I stopped getting emails when there were new posts! D:))
Xanti started as Cherie shoved the backpack into her arms. She froze, standing like a statue as the other girl began to rifle through the bag. Then her discomfort at being forced to engage turned into a mix of disbelief, and sheer admiration for her classmate. Cherie was putting together her gun.
Then, in a whirl of movement that was almost dizzying, Cherie had finished it...and fired it. Aaand suddenly all the attention in the room, hell probably all the attention in the damn building, was focused in Xanti's direction. Dammit, Cherie. Her eyes narrowed, carefully studying the scene. In spite of herself, she almost liked Cherie Treyburn. The girl seemed spirited. Plus (an ENORMOUS plus in Xanti's book), she had actually started a friendly conversation with Xanti...just because! And that was the kind of thing that would earn you points with Xanti Serseri any day. So she kept an eye on Janette, silently vowing to back Cherie up if she needed it. She might be a skinny twig of a thing, but growing up in foster care and being the misfit in a rich kids' school had taught Xanti the basics of kicking butt, if she had to.
"You gave a Treyburn a gun?! Are you deranged?!"
Xanti realized that Janette was speaking to her. But unlike so many of her previous run-ins with the social elite, this time there didn't seem to be taunting involved. Just...disbelief? Did Janette actually not know that her sister carried around firearms on a regular basis?
In a sudden rush of uncharacteristic boldness, she stepped forward to Cherie's side and threw off her hood, revealing the snow white waves that had caused her so much torment over the years, giving her the school-wide reputation of "freak". Beneath her brown contacts, her eyes turned a red so deep that for a split second, her strategically common "brown" eyes seemed to almost gain a reddish tint of their own. Then the hue vanished, so quickly it might never have even been there, and she was staring boldly at Janette with what were once again plain, unextraordinary, mud-brown eyes.
"No, I am not deranged. Nor is this my doing. Although I must say I've met very few people with as many guts as your sister has." This last she said with an admiring tone in Cherie's direction. "But while you're babbling on over there acting like Cherie doesn't know exactly what she's doing, it has not slipped my notice that you still haven't given Clovis his book back. Which, I believe, was the point of the gun...am I right, Cherie?"