Chapter Text
Larissa hated dorm parties. That many people crammed into one room, all varying degrees of drunk; sweaty bodies stumbling over one another and spilling their overfilled cups; the jocks playing beer pong over the desk; the couples in the corners wrapped around each other like the tendrils of a parasitic plant… Yeah, she hated it. If it was up to her, she would much prefer to skip them altogether and hide out in her room with a Daphne du Maurier novel or a repository of old movies. Except that wasn’t an option when it was her room everyone was crowded into, thanks in no small part to her roommate Morticia who, for some inexplicable reason, actually liked these things and on that account had commandeered the entire dorm for the entire evening. So Larissa was very much trapped with no way out, especially since it was the last night before winter break, and therefore her last chance to fulfil the promise she had foolishly made to Morticia back in September that she would actually come to one of her parties that semester. A promise she was cursing her past self for more and more with every passing minute.
As things stood, she was more or less hiding in a corner, watching the unfolding chaos uncomfortably and cradling her third cup full of pear-flavoured cider in her hands. She wasn’t usually much of a drinker, but she was starting to see why her friends were: after all, there was no way anyone could get through one of these parties stone-cold sober with their sanity intact.
‘Don’t you just hate these things?’
Larissa looked around to see who had spoken. A short distance away, looking at her expectantly, was one of her classmates - Adrian Michaelis, a vampire who nevertheless preferred to dress less like a Lost Boy and more like a lost member of a normie boyband. He had the typical striking combination of porcelain-pale skin and jet black hair that made people - usually girls - stare after him for a good few seconds after he walked by. He was one of the boys whom the rest of their year had designated as ‘popular’, a label which he liked to wear like a medal. Larissa had been his history tutor last year, which had left her with the distinct impression that, while he was nice enough, it was quite plausible that he didn’t actually have a brain in his skull at all.
‘What, you mean you’re not enjoying this full-frontal sensory assault?’ she questioned, turning to face him with a wry smile.
‘Hell, no,’ said Adrian with a laugh. ‘I’ll admit, though, I did not think this would be your scene.’
‘Oh, trust me, it is definitely not.’ Larissa suppressed a shudder. ‘I’m only here because Morticia didn’t actually give me much of a choice. I did consider hiding in the library, but the librarian told me last week that if she saw me in there again before next term, she'd kick me out.’
Adrian nodded sympathetically, although he probably hadn't set foot in the library since freshman year. He glanced around as if an idea would present itself to him. ‘Well, since you don’t want to be here, and I don’t want to be here,’ he said, gesturing towards the window with the beer bottle in his hand, ‘Wanna fuck off outside for a bit?’
‘Sure. I guess.’
She let him lead the way through the room towards the door leading out onto the balcony. The cold December air hit like an icy slap across the face the moment they stepped outside, their breath condensing briefly into a fog which soon dissipated on the wind. The treetops were dark jagged shadows against the inky night sky, the orange glow of the Jericho streetlights glinting in the distance. Larissa shivered, rubbing her upper arms to stave off the chill that had seeped under the thin sleeves of her shirt.
‘Here,’ Adrian said, and shrugged off his jacket. She tried to wave him off, but he tucked it over her shoulders anyway.
They stood side-by-side, leaning on the edge of the balcony. For a little while they made small talk about trivial things as they gazed down into the courtyard below them. They talked about classes, traded stories about funny incidents the other hadn’t been witness to. They talked about their plans for winter break, what they were going back to at home. They talked about music and movies, although their tastes didn’t align. It was about ten minutes into the conversation when Larissa became acutely aware that Adrian was staring at her. She was used to people doing that for one reason or another, but that didn't mean she didn't find it uncomfortable. She was about to tell him to knock it off when he spoke first.
‘You know,’ he began, ‘You’re actually really pretty.’
Larissa raised an eyebrow. ‘You might want to lose the tone of surprise!’
Adrian winced. ‘That sounded better in my head,’ he said. ‘I did mean it as a compliment.’
He looked sufficiently sheepish, so she decided to take pity on him. ‘I suppose I’ll take it in the spirit it was intended,’ she said, smiling just enough to prove she wasn’t really that irritated.
Adrian grinned bashfully in response. ‘See?’ he said. ‘Actually really pretty and actually equally gracious.’
Larissa snorted. ‘Well, now you’re just being ridiculous.’
‘Made you laugh though, didn’t I?'
‘Mmm,’ was all she said in reply. She glanced up at the sky, her eyes tracing the shapes of Orion and Perseus in the stars. When she looked back at Adrian, she noticed he was still gazing directly at her face.
He opened his mouth, then closed it. A second later, he tried again. ‘Would you be mad if I kissed you right now?’
Larissa blinked. ‘I… no?’
No, she wouldn’t be mad about it. She wasn’t entirely sure what she would be. Not that she actually had much time to ponder it, because a moment later his lips were on hers; he was kissing her, and that was that.
She’d kissed and been kissed before, in stupid games at stupid parties, endless rounds of Truth or Dare and Spin-the-Bottle, but she didn’t look back on those occasions with any particular fondness. They had been awkward, uncomfortable, the wrong kind of weird. Maybe this one would be different, or so she hoped. Maybe this one would feel like it was supposed to.
Except it didn't.
Objectively, he wasn’t doing anything wrong. Everything about it just felt- off, somehow. His lips were too dry, rubbing like sandpaper over her own. His tongue was too wet, and that combined with the way it prodded around called to mind one of the slugs Morticia had flicked off the venus flytrap in their botany class yesterday. He tasted like cheap beer, the kind she always refused to drink.
Larissa didn’t feel like she was in her body at all. It was as if her brain had checked out and disconnected, wandering away from the situation and the boy in front of her and onto other, more important things. Had she put her inhuman biology textbook in her suitcase or had she left it on her desk? Did she give Morticia her gloves back after she’d let her borrow them on the walk back from Jericho yesterday? Adrian’s hand shifting up from her waist jerked her sharply back into herself as he moved to cup one of her breasts with the palm of one hand while the other pressed against the small of her back. Suddenly there wasn’t enough air in her lungs and the liquor in her stomach felt like it was coalescing into poison, sickening her from the inside-out. No, she wasn’t mad about it; but she was disconcerted, maybe even a little disturbed.
Larissa pulled back, yanking herself out of his arms. ‘I-’ she took a sharp breath. ‘I don’t feel so good.’
Adrian frowned. ‘Want me to get you a glass of lemonade or something?’
‘No, no,’ she said, shaking her head. She was already stepping away from him. She shrugged his jacket off her shoulders and laid it down on the wall. ‘Thank you, but I'll get it myself. I'm cold out here anyway.’
With that, she turned on her heel and headed for the door leading back into the dorm. She was briefly accompanied by a modicum of guilt for her abrupt exit, but it quickly vanished and was smothered beneath the layers of anxiety and discomfort building up one on top of the other. Why the hell had she gone along with that? She barely even liked Adrian. She saw the moment in her head over and over again, and with every replay it seemed to solidify some indistinct conclusion she hadn't even realised she had been forming.
Inside the dorm, some kind of insufferable pop music emanated from the stereo and pounded into her eardrums, louder even than the thoughts spiralling through her head. It was one of Morticia’s CDs, she realised; Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. The air was heavy and oppressive with the heat of a dozen bodies and smelled like heavy perfume and beer. Larissa completely bypassed the table with the bottles of lemonade, not entirely sure where she was going but not particularly caring so long as it wasn’t in here or out there. Except there was something blocking her path now, a figure composed of dark unfocused shapes. She forced herself to blink, to focus her distracted gaze.
Gomez Addams was standing directly in front of her eyes (well, actually, he was about four inches shorter than her, so he was a little lower down than her eyes) and he was talking to her, but she couldn’t quite register exactly what he was saying. She strained to hear him over the music, to make out something from the snatches of sound and the movements of his lips.
‘Have you seen Tish anywhere?’
Larissa shook her head. The last time she had seen Morticia, she’d been hanging around Gomez’s neck while they talked to a couple of kids from the fencing club, and it seemed difficult to imagine that he could’ve lost her: they were, after all, rather attached at the hip lately.
‘Nope,’ she said. ‘Last I saw her, she was with you.’
‘Oh. Never mind, then, I guess.’ Gomez looked her up and down, noticing for the first time her unsettled demeanour. ‘You okay, chica? You seem a little…’ he trailed off, seemingly searching for the right word. ‘Off.’
‘Yeah,’ lied Larissa, waving off his concern. ‘Yeah, no, I’m fine. It’s just- too loud, I guess.’
Gomez grinned. ‘That’s half the fun!’ he replied.
And Larissa could believe that he wholeheartedly thought so. Yet she was painfully aware that her smile was entirely fake. ‘I’ll take your word for it.’
As unkind as it sounded, she didn’t particularly want to talk to him; this whole uncertainty of mind had started with Gomez, in a way. She’d thought for a while that she might’ve had a minor crush on him, but lately she was starting to think that maybe she had only been telling herself that. After he’d turned her down for the Rave’N, she’d felt embarrassed and self-conscious over the entire situation, but she hadn’t actually felt particularly upset over him. On one occasion she had actually sat herself down and tried to think of all the things she liked about him, but she could come up with nothing more emotive or personal than the same generic comments all girls usually made about the boys they liked. He’s nice. Funny. Not a dickhead like the rest of them (and yes, the bar was that low). It reminded her of being thirteen years old at a slumber party and just saying that she liked the same sort of boys as her friends even though she didn’t really understand where they were coming from. It still felt like that, like she was trying to talk herself into feeling something she didn’t. It didn’t matter how often she listened to Morticia wax on about how attractive he was, she just... didn’t get it.
Thankfully she was spared any further meditation on the enigma that was Gomez Addams, because that was the moment his roommate chose to throw an arm around his shoulders and start talking animatedly about something she frankly didn’t care enough to pay attention to. Larissa took advantage of his distraction to step away, grateful for the opportunity to leave. Weaving her way through the throng of people, she pushed open the dorm room door and stepped out into the hallway.
She closed the door behind her, but it did little to muffle the music pounding through the dorm. It was nothing short of a miracle - or a curse - that none of the teachers seemed to have heard it. At this point, her only coherent thought was that the farther she got from all that noise, the happier she would be. So she crossed the hallway, skirting around the spiral staircase to the bathroom they shared with the other girls in the dorm, and pushed open the heavy door.
She had been hoping to find the room empty, so that she could splash some water on her face and possibly smack her head against the wall in peace. Except, much to her dismay, it wasn’t empty. It was, in fact, currently occupied by none other than Morticia Frump, who was pouting into the large ornate mirror over the sink as she touched up her black lipstick.
Morticia was pretty and popular, and she was the kind of girl who was at once so annoyingly perfect that it made you want to hate her but also so genuinely sweet that hating her proved impossible. Larissa still tried, of course, but more often than not she was unsuccessful. They had been roommates for several years now, and their relationship tended to fluctuate between best friends and worst enemies depending on whether or not there were any academic or extracurricular competitions looming; Morticia was effortlessly the best at everything no matter how hard Larissa tried to be better, and there was only so many times she could come second before disappointment started to mutate into resentment. There hadn’t been many such incidents in the latter half of this semester, however, so for the most part lately they tended towards being friends. Well, except for the whole Rave’N thing, of course, but everyone at Nevermore was trying their damned best to pretend that night never happened for one reason or another, and Larissa was more than happy to play along.
‘Hello, dear!’ said Morticia brightly, without turning around. Everyone she held even the slightest bit of affection for was 'dear' or 'darling' at some point.
‘Hey,’ Larissa replied flatly.
She spotted Morticia’s cup resting on the edge of the sink, lurid red plastic filled with sparkling dark liquid. Morticia’s drinks were always dark in colour, and Larissa never knew whether she actually liked them or if she was just that committed to the aesthetic.
‘What’s in that?’ she asked.
‘Rum and Coke,’ replied Morticia, catching her eye in the mirror. She winked. ‘Probably only about sixty-forty Coke though.’
‘Perfect.’
Larissa grabbed the cup and took a long drink before she could think better of it. It burned the back of her throat, and she felt more like she was drinking paint thinner or nail polish remover than anything intended for human consumption, but she had long since surpassed the point of caring.
Morticia put down her lipstick and turned around, blinking at her with wide surprised eyes. ‘Whatever’s the matter with you?’
Sitting the cup back down on the sink, Larissa wiped the vestiges of alcohol from her mouth with the back of her hand. ‘I kissed Adrian Michaelis.’
Morticia frowned. ‘You don’t sound very happy about it,’ she noted.
‘I’m not.’
Larissa leaned against the wall and crossed her arms, tipping her head back against the cool tiles. A lock of blonde hair fluttered away from her face as she let out a long sigh. Morticia, who had been watching her intently from her place by the sink, crossed the small room to the door and turned the lock until it clicked. Then she sat down on the plush grey bath mat with her back against the bathtub and crossed her legs, the black chiffon of her flowing skirt pooling on the floor around her like ink from a broken pen. She looked up at Larissa, patting the space beside her. With an air of slight reluctance, Larissa pushed herself off the wall and sat down next to Morticia, pulling her long legs up and hugging her knees.
For a few long seconds, neither of them spoke.
‘Was it… good?’ Morticia eventually asked.
Larissa shook her head. ‘No,’ she said, ‘It was actually quite unpleasant.’
Morticia winced. With only a hint of her characteristic morbid curiosity, she asked, ‘What was so bad about it?’
‘Objectively speaking, nothing,’ answered Larissa. She tilted her head back over the edge of the bathtub, gazing up at the flickering overhead light. A moth fluttered around it, moments away from burning itself to ashes on the bulb. ‘Everything about it just felt… wrong, somehow?’
‘Do you like him?’
‘Not really.’
‘So why did you kiss him?’
She didn’t sound judgmental, merely confused. Larissa didn’t blame her; frankly, she was more than a little confused herself. She turned the question over in her head, trying to pinpoint the answer. ‘To test a theory, I suppose,’ she finally said.
Morticia turned her head just enough to meet her eyes. ‘What was the hypothesis?’
‘I…’ Larissa hesitated.
To tell Morticia what was going on in her head would be to tell her something she’d never spoken aloud before, not even to herself. But Morticia was looking at her with such an innocent curiosity, her dark eyes wide and doe-like, and Larissa knew right then that she would’ve spilled the darkest secrets of her soul to this girl before she would any priest.
She looked Morticia dead in the eyes. ‘Nothing I’m about to tell you leaves this room,’ she said.
‘Obviously.’
‘I’m serious.’
‘So am I,’ Morticia assured her. ‘On my soul, Rissa.’
Larissa nodded in acknowledgement. Still she was quiet for a moment. Still she hesitated. Not because she thought there was anything wrong with the possibility that was swirling round in her mind - she was a shapeshifter sitting next to her psychic roommate, for Circe’s sake, everyone here knew that normie societal conventions were bullshit - but it felt embarrassing somehow, like she was naive or stupid for being so uncertain of her own feelings.
But would Morticia even think that? Weird, backwards, morbid Morticia, who thought that funerals were fun and spiders were cute and a thunderstorm was a lovely day. Morticia, who was better than everyone but far too sweet to acknowledge it. Morticia, who was always there for her, even when they hated each other’s guts. No, Morticia wouldn’t judge her, she was almost certain of that.
‘I… I don’t think I like kissing boys, Tish,’ she confessed.
Morticia’s face hadn’t changed. ‘Like, at all?’
‘Nope. Just thinking about it makes my skin crawl, never mind actually doing it.’
‘Okay.’ Morticia nodded slowly, almost to herself. ‘Counter-theory,’ she said, after a moment’s pause. ‘What if it wasn’t a boy?’
It was almost funny, really, how relieved Larissa felt now that Morticia had said it first. This wasn’t a big deal after all; they were just having a conversation, like they had a million times before, telling secrets they’d each trust the other to keep even at their most adversarial.
‘I don’t know,’ she said, shrugging her shoulders carefully. ‘I don’t exactly have any point of comparison. It’s not like I’ve ever kissed a girl.’
‘Would you like to?’
‘Maybe?’ To Hell with it, they were already having this conversation and they were far past the need for self-censorship. ‘Yes,’ she corrected. ‘In theory, anyway.’
‘In theory?’ Morticia repeated, and Larissa could tell without looking that she had raised one of her perfectly pencilled eyebrows.
‘Well, do you know any other seventeen year-old potential lesbians between Nevermore and Jericho?’
Morticia shook her head lightly. ‘Unfortunately, that I do not.’
‘Exactly.’
Both girls were quiet for a moment, listening to the steady intermittent dripping of the faucet into the sink and the muffled noises of the party going on across the hall. Larissa let her head flop sideways onto Morticia’s shoulder - something they were only ever at the correct heights to do when they were both sitting down - and Morticia did the same, resting her cheek against the top of Larissa's head.
‘You could always kiss me.’
For a second, Larissa forgot every word in her extensive vocabulary. Whatever she might’ve been expecting Morticia to say, it definitely wasn’t that. Once she recovered a little of her senses, she scoffed. ‘You have a very high estimation of your own appeal, did you know that?’
Morticia laughed. ‘Hubris is my fatal flaw, ma chérie,’ she said, like the tragic heroine she liked to pretend she was. ‘But at least that way you would know.’
Larissa rolled her eyes. ‘Stop joking around, Tish,’ she said wearily. They were probably both a little drunk, but she was definitely not drunk enough to find that funny.
‘I’m not.’
Larissa very nearly got whiplash from how quickly she jerked her head around to stare at her. ‘You’re-’ There was no way she had heard her right. ‘You’re not joking?’
‘No,’ said Morticia, meeting her eyes. A gentle smile made its way onto her dark-painted lips as she reached up to tuck a strand of blonde hair behind Larissa’s ear, twirling it a little around her slender finger. ‘Dead serious.’
Her gaze flickered downwards to Larissa’s lips then back up to her eyes. Morticia’s eyes were so dark that it was hard to tell where the pupils ended and the irises began. She really was very pretty, like one of those pre-Raphaelite paintings of beautiful girls with flawless pale skin and long shining hair, dead or wicked or both. Larissa studied every part of her expression, searching for any sign of a lie, and found none. If asked, she would blame the alcohol - as if anything could’ve had a stronger influence over her in that moment than those dark eyes.
Fuck it.