89 | Bet

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a/n: 
Y'all: I bet she isn't gonna post.
Me: Bet.


Rosalie's thumbnail was nonexistent, so she had moved on to her pinkie nail as she sat through French. French was the class that made it most obvious to Rosalie (and their entire French group, really) that Joanna Spencer had Fucked Up. Rosalie's view to the front of the classroom was unobscured now by Joanna's vibrant orange hair and poor posture. She found herself staring at the open space as their test scores were handed back one-by-one.

Their teacher came down the aisle with a stack of papers, slipping them to students as she went. She skipped over Joanna's seat and went on to Jamie-Lee's.

Rosalie straightened a little when she realized that she had been slouching. She looked up at her teacher's face, but found her already turning to Dylan Cox, and then Lennie. Rosalie's hand hesitated over the folded corner of her paper when she heard their teacher say, "Job well done, Mr. Pittmen."

She didn't say that to me, Rosalie thought, lips pursed tight. She swallowed hard and discretely curved the packet of paper so Jamie-Lee couldn't see the score when she unfolded the corner.

93%.

Rosalie felt like she was watching her valedictorian status fall right into Lennie Pittmen's hands.

She folded the corner back up and put her pinkie nail back between her teeth. She felt so infuriated with herself that it made her stomach churn, boiling like the blood under her skin. How could she let herself get so distracted? She couldn't blame it on Nationals, Regionals, or State.

Then why haven't I been focused? she wondered, her eyes spacing out all around the general vicinity of the empty desk.

She turned her test upside down as the bell rang. The frustration simmered into a healthy (or rather, severely unhealthy) dose of embarrassment as she heard Lennie stand from his seat behind her.

A finger tapped on the side of her desk. She startled and looked up to find Jamie-Lee smiling at her, leant over his knees, test in hand. "What'd you get for number ten?"

"Oh, um..." Rosalie started, awkwardly, her hands flat over her test. She didn't even think to look at the questions she got wrong. In her mind, every last question was scribbled over in red cross marks.

"Dude, you can just ask me to go over it with you later," Lennie said. Rosalie glanced over at him where he was standing at the other side of her desk, books under one arm. He gestured vaguely to Rosalie and said, "She's probably got better things to do than tutor you."

Jamie-Lee got all uppity in an instant, hands on his hips. "Excuse you, but tutoring me would be a dream."

"Yeah, because you're such a dreamboat, dude," Dylan mocked with a roll of his eyes.

Rosalie started packing up her things without saying a word as the three of them argued over it. "She's still got practices to focus on anyway—"

"Who said I was even suggesting a tutor? I speak perfect French."

"Écrire, c'est une autre histoire," Lennie said, and Jamie-Lee tipped his head to the side and squinted a little.

As Jamie scratched his head over what Lennie just said, Rosalie rose from her seat and snuck past Lennie, though "sneaking" wasn't exactly possible in a half-empty classroom. It took less than a second for them to realize it, and when they did, their footsteps trailed after her. She felt like she was at the head of a bundle of ducklings as they left the classroom together, and went to the cafeteria—together.

On the way to the cafeteria, they passed the entrance to the library. The floor-length glass windows stopped Rosalie, just for a second, and she caught herself searching for an empty table in there. In doing so, she called attention to herself from the guys when Jamie-Lee accidentaly ran into her from behind.

She staggered forward as Jamie put his hands out and caught her by the waist. "Oh, sorry! I wasn't paying attention—"

"You never pay attention to your surroundings," Lennie said.

"My attention is just fine, excuse you," Jamie snapped.

Rosalie shooed Jamie's hands off of her waist as she turned around and towards the library door. "If you two are done bickering, I'm gonna work in the library today. I'll see you guys later," she said with a smile. She slipped into the library and waved at Jamie-Lee's dumbfounded face.

When she shut the door, Dylan turned to them and bopped them both on the top of their heads, and she swore she heard him through the glass saying, "You scared her away!" as Jamie-Lee rubbed at his head and Lennie fixed his perfect hair. Rosalie shook her head at them and wandered off down an aisle of books.

The Bradshaw library, for the most part, went unused by Rosalie. It was difficult for her to find a purpose there aside from research papers and, well, papers in general. As much as she loved to read over the summers, the school year pushed her free time to its limit. And now, with Nationals on the way, she couldn't make extra time to dedicate to reading. Even with their practices limited now, she found all of her free time being occupied more and more by homework.

Wasn't school supposed to get easier senior year? she thought, studying the books on the shelf. There was a book put on display, its cover facing her, and she tugged it down from eye level and studied the cover. Before putting it back onto its stand, she paused at the gap between her and the aisle across from her where a tuft of ginger hair went off to the side.

There were plenty of gingers at Bradshaw, but there Rosalie was, scrambling to put the book back before hurrying around the end of the aisle to peek around the corner.

The row was empty.

Rosalie had never yearned to see someone so much before. She had felt it, for a short while, when Sami transferred to Adams.

She figured this was only worsened by the fact that she knew Joanna would come back, and so she anticipated seeing her everywhere she went. But then she remembered: she was barely through the first week of Joanna's suspension.

Either that or I'm losing my mind, she mused, scratching at her bun as she turned to head for one of the benches cut into the windowsills along the library wall. There, amongst the stretches of light interspersed between bookshelves along the window walls, she found someone vaguely familiar sitting in the window sill Rosalie had seen from down the aisle sitting empty.

Rosalie stared at the girl, and she stared back, black hair standing high and fluffy over her pale eyebrows. The hair sat on her head like it was floating, and were it not for the rumpled collar and untied Bradshaw tie, Rosalie might not have recognized those piercings.

"Joanna?" Rosalie hissed, and Joanna flung a hand up to her lips, gesturing for Rosalie to shut the fuck up.

Rosalie gasped and slapped a hand over her mouth. She looked around at the state of the library, and the fact that there were so few empty seats. She hoped no one heard her.

She hurried to the window sill, dropping her books on the cushion as she knelt against it, leaning towards Joanna. Joanna pulled her knees up and dramatically readjusted her black wig, which very clearly looked like it hadn't been brushed after she bought it three years ago in one of those sketchy, pop-up Halloween stores.

"What are you doing here?" Rosalie hissed.

"I got bored," Joanna said, and leant over her knees to hiss, "and no one that I know goes to the library. I figured I wouldn't run into anyone, so what the fuck are you doing here?"

Rosalie's shoulders slumped as she leant back and scowled at the windowpane. She rubbed her finger against a smudge on the glass and muttered, "I'm pretty close to not being a..." She mumbled the rest of it, ashamed because she knew that had Joanna not been hospitalized the previous spring, she would have likely been valedictorian, too.

"Excuse me, but what, bitch?" Joanna said.

Rosalie scoffed, rolled her eyes, and said in an annoyed voice, "Valedictorian."

Joanna startled with a horrified, shrill gasp like Rosalie had just exclaimed that her nonexistent husband was cheating on her. "You're kidding!" Joanna shrieked in a normal voice that had people looking at them from all along that side of the library.

Rosalie covered her face, hiding her smile as she whisper-yelled, "Not so loud!"

"My Rosalie, not being valedictorian? What has this world come to?" Joanna said dramatically, and Rosalie shushed her again as Joanna put the back of her hand to her forehead and swooned a little, which pushed the wing back just a tad. Rosalie reached over to straighten it for her.

The gave Joanna firm pat on the top of the head afterwards before dropping her hands back to cushion between them.

Joanna leant forward further, all jesting over with. "Valedictorian is bullshit and you know it. If you're valedictorian, you're smart enough to know that it's for pretentious intellectuals to feel like they did something in high school since they clearly didn't have a social life."

Rosalie should have expected something like that to come from Joanna's mouth. "I have and had a social life before you came around, you know."

"Fine. Then valedictorians are just a different brand of pretentious intellectuals from doctors putting their PhDs in frames on a wall so they have physical evidence of the decade they spent in hell so everyone goddamn knows it."

"Valedictorian is an incredible selling point to universities and jobs."

"Yeah, for the summer after senior year. Doesn't mean shit after college. Nothing in high school means shit within two years after graduation," Joanna said with a flick of her hand. She perched her elbow on her knee, her chin on her hand, and studied the people in the library with an air of annoyed pity about her. "If it happened two years ago, it's no longer relevant."

"That's a very... present way of looking at the world," Rosalie whispered, realizing that, as she said it, it was likely Joanna's own way of coping with what happened with Arden. It gave her a subconscious timeline to cope with Kaiserslautern.

"I'll take that as a compliment," Joanna said with a toss of her black hair. She scratched at the underside of the wig against the back of her neck.

"But what are you doing here?" Rosalie said. "It's only been three days since you were suspended."

"So? Boredom has to timer," she said. She pushed forward, onto her knees, right in Rosalie's face. Rosalie tipped back a tad, her hand going back to steady herself against the cushion as Joanna's eyes scanned her face and every inch of attentive shock on it. "And I'm having withdrawals."

"F-From what—the library?" Rosalie said, looking at the aisles of books and, in particular, the table nearest them. No one was looking strangely at them, but fuck, her face felt redhot.

Joanna hummed, and Rosalie felt the touch of her exhale against her cheek. She turned, and her nose brushed with Joanna's. It took a split second for her to fight back the urge to lick her lips. "Hm... Yeah, the library. We'll go with that," Joanna said.

Rosalie pushed off of the seat, staggering to her feet. She grabbed her books and swiped them up to her chest with a huff. "Right, because you totally expected me to be here," she said, and with Joanna grinned, Rosalie realized that Joanna hadn't, and something about that irked her. Not because Joanna hadn't gone looking for her, but because Rosalie realized that only three days had passed and, it seemed, two of those had been spent in the Bradshaw library. "Were you here yesterday too?"

Joanna shrugged idly and straightened herself up, still several inches below Rosalie's eye level as she said, "Maybe."

Rosalie didn't even want to think about what would happen if a teacher or—dare Rosalie even think it—Principle O'Gallagher caught Joanna in a wig, stowing herself away in the library for all eight hours of the school day.

At that exact moment, though, Rosalie's phone buzzed in her breast pocket. She put a hand to it, knowing that Joanna had heard it. It thoroughly broke whatever spell Joanna had put them both under and reminded Rosalie once again that they were in public in a silent work space.

Joanna leant back against the wall and windowpane as Rosalie pulled out her phone and studied the notification on her lockscreen. After a second, she sat down, put a foot up on the edge of the sill, and ensured Joanna couldn't watch as she typed away. Joanna went back to reading whatever book she had taken from the library shelves, but Rosalie could feel the heat of her eyes on her profile.


DREW: Hey cutie 😘
Heard the demon started a food fight

ROSALIE: 🙄 Dare I ask why you know that

DREW: Little birdie told me

ROSALIE: You know, I'm low key surprised you didn't somehow wind up at prom to see it firsthand
Scratch that. HIGH key surprised.

DREW: Who knows? Maybe I was there
And I saw it all. You in that sexy dress

ROSALIE: Yeah you weren't there

DREW: Oh? Do tell

ROSALIE: Because I wasn't wearing a dress

DREW: You went NAKED?
WithOUT me?

ROSALIE: NO, GOSH
I went in a pantsuit!

DREW: Oh my days
That's even better
I mean, not that the naked part wouldn't be incredible or anything

ROSALIE: 🙄

DREW: So what happened to Our Queen (Spencer)

ROSALIE: Suspended

DREW: Ah, classic
At least that's it

ROSALIE: Well, no that's not it

DREW: Oh?

ROSALIE: Yeah
She's essentially banned from nationals 😣

DREW: Oh fuck

ROSALIE: Yeah I know 😖
So that's the tea
I haven't seen her since the suspension

DREW: Damn now's my chance 🏃🏻‍♀️

ROSALIE: This is serious

DREW: Yeah so am I

ROSALIE: You're unbelievable
I'm leaving

DREW: You can't leave

ROSALIE: Yeah, but I can block bitch

DREW: That sounded like Joanna

ROSALIE: It is

DREW: Rats, foiled again


Rosalie swiped her phone back from Joanna and hissed, "Me mentioning that they're getting on my nerves doesn't give you permission to text them from my phone."

Joanna wrinkled her nose up at Rosalie and gave her a shake of her head. Her wig made her look like she had spent the past three days on the street instead of at the Cox estate. Rosalie wanted to rip it off her head, but she didn't. Instead, she got up and shook her phone at Joanna in warning before walking off.

"Where are you going?" Joanna said.

"Out," Rosalie mocked, turning back to stick her tongue out at Joanna. When she spun back around, she almost ran face-first into the end of the aisle. She caught herself at the corner of it, spun around, and glared at Joanna because she just knew Joanna was smirking at her.

Joanna rolled off of the windowsill to follow after Rosalie. At the end of the aisle, she caught Rosalie by the wrist and tugged her back. She staggered, her grip on her books tightening as she spun back to where Joanna stood, nose-to-nose with Rosalie in the somewhat private aisle of encyclopedias.

Rosalie knew what Joanna was plotting—it was all arranged perfectly, with Rosalie's back half-turned to the bookshelf, and Joanna in front of her, in perfect control of Rosalie's wrist and rapidly beating heart. Instead, when Joanna put pressure on her, she pushed back, and took Joanna aback with the amount of force she put behind it.

She pushed hard enough to back Joanna into the column between the bookshelves. They were both too shocked to do anything with their predicament until Joanna relaxed, shoulders loosening into a low slant, her head tipped to the side, and that stupid black wig irking Rosalie beyond belief.

"You gonna follow through with that thought or what, Killer?"

"I didn't think that far ahead," she lied, because she didn't want to admit that she was getting deja vu and it was probably from a dream she had ages ago that foreshadowed her bisexual awakening.

Joanna clicked her tongue and pouted. "Oh, boo, you were doing so well there." She gave Rosalie a pat on the shoulder and said, "Better luck next time."

Rosalie stopped her from leaving the only way she could when her books were in her one arm and her other hand blocking Joanna's escape to the great open library. She pushed Joanna back with her lips on Joanna's mouth. It was tense, terse, and aggressive until it became clear that Joanna wasn't going anywhere.

She heard Joanna's hands lift from where she had her fists bundled up along the pockets of her slacks. She let out a shuddered breath against Joanna's lips when her hands pulled at Rosalie's blazer. She tipped back in, steadily, and caught the delicate touch of Joanna's tongue licking her bottom lip. It was hot and wet and was a sensation she continuously forgot about until every moment they kissed, and she was reminded of how distracting Joanna's tongue could be.

She pushed closer, her breath sucking in sharply between kisses. Joanna's thumbs rubbed shallow circles over her waist until Rosalie tipped back, letting out a deep sigh. "You're too distracting," she said.

Joanna laughed. "Gee, thanks."

Rosalie rolled her eyes. "I mean, like, I'm supposed to be studying right now."

"Alright. Then I won't get in the way later when I'm at your place," she said, but her eyes were solely focused on Rosalie's lips.

Rosalie rolled her eyes and looked away, her hand still braced against the bookshelf next to Joanna's weird wig. She licked her lips where she could still feel the pressure tingling from Joanna's mouth on hers. "You'll definitely get in the way," she said.

"Fucking bet on it then," Joanna said. "Ten bucks says I won't."

"I'm not betting on this—"

"What, it's not like the entire damn class is betting on whether or not we fuck or study," Joanna said, and Rosalie turned sharply back to her. Joanna hesitated before wincing, just a smidge. "Right, too soon. Make out or study."

"Right," Rosalie sighed. "Ten dollars isn't enough of an incentive. Fifty."

"Okay, rich bitch..."

"Fine, twenty."

"No way! You know how much coffee I can get with fifty?" Joanna said.

Somewhere down the aisle, someone shushed them. Rosalie startled back, pushing off of the bookshelf as Joanna laughed as she flicked back her ruffled blazer and put her hands on her hips. Rosalie glowered at her, but it didn't last long.

"Fine, fifty it is," Rosalie said.

And, shortly after their shenanigans in the library, Joanna left in the havoc of students making their getaway to the parking lot where Joanna's vespa sat, bright and yellow and ready for the trip to Maple Grove. Rosalie soon followed suit in her own vehicle, fully dreading the state of her homework for that night and expecting to be fifty dollars richer by the end of it.

Joanna kept her

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