Chapter 1
Elias Marshall is the luckiest person alive.
Without even trying, he gets girls, grades, and attention everywhere he goes.
Nothing seems to touch him, and it doesn't seem like anything bad is about to happen to him anytime too soon.
Lana Rivers is, to put it nicely, miserable.
Her mom and dad despise eachother, she has no friends, and her grades are as good as popcorn and ketchup put together.
The only thing she attracts is rainy days.
They both abhor each other.
One is perfect, the other is disastrous.
So when they are forced to compete in a dance competition together, the only things that will come out of it will be total annhilation, and somesweetmoves.
❝how accidently a fate
is made...
or how accidental it all may seem
when it is inescapable.❞
-Philip Roth
LANA WIPED THE GLOBS OF MUD OFF HER PANTS, scowling at whoever stopped and stared at her.
It wasn't her fault she slipped into the muddy puddle.
Her mind was already to jumbled to pay attention to things around her.
Or in her case, things under her.
"Damn it," she furiously scrubbed at the persistant brown stain on her knee (which by now, looked like dog poop) but it wouldn't budge.
Almost as if the universe was trying to displease her, the brown stain only smudged wider.
Lana couldn't go home.
She stormed out of the house for a very good reason, and entering back in in less than an hour would mean she was admitting defeat to her parents unfair demands.
"I'll just ask Nicole for her gym pants," Lana compromised, picking up the shards of dignity scattered on the pavement, and continued to walk to school.
She was used to this.
It's not like this was her first time tripping in mud.
Her eyes snapped to the opposite sidewalk, and narrowed as she saw the person she had learned to hate.
Elias Marshall walked down the opposite pavement like he owned the world.
Normally, Lana, like every other living woman with functioning ovaries and hormones, would have stopped to relish his beauty.
His perfectly sculpted jaws, his vibrant green eyes.
Not to mention his tousled brown hair and his model body.
Yes, Lana might have thought Elias was gorgeous, but that was all.
Elias didn't make her heart beat faster, or her cheeks grow rosy (her cheeks did burn...
With anger).
Elias's presence only brought her a sense of mis-belonging and a lot, of hate.
Because Elias was lucky, and Lana would be happy to get by without falling into conspicuous puddles.
Elias continued to mindlessly skip around.
Lana eyed a puddle a few feet away from him, but when Elias reached the watery mess, his foot merely avoided it.
"Asshole," Lana hissed in jealousy, angrily looking at her pants again.
She hated Elias.
Hate.
Hate hate hate.
She loved the way it rolled off her tongue.
"Hate."
Without a second glance, Lana continued walking to school, her mind abuzz with ways to get rid of the suspicious stain she just realized, was right next to her butt, and how to surreptitiously kill Elias Marshall.
▪ ▪ ▪ ▪ ▪
Elias was feeling lucky today.
No, he felt lucky everyday, but today felt even luckier.
So the first thing Elias did was talk to the soccer coach about the availability for a position as captain.
He got it.
Then, he decided that today would be the day he would break it off with his overly clingy girlfriend, Reese Valdez, even though she always hinted that if he broke up with her, she would cut his balls off and feed them to her dogs.
She did cut him with her nail, but overall, he was very much alive and very much a man.
However, everything went downhill the moment he set eyes on Lana Rivers.
When their gazes met, all Elias got was a shriveled glare and a very subtle middle finger.
All he gave back was an impassive face, but his thoughts were murderous.
Oh, how much he despised her.
She might have been pretty with her brown locks and caramel skin but her grey, cat-like eyes only held murky hate.
And the hate encompassed her body until all he saw was the devil in disguise.
They walked past each other without a second glance.
Good riddance, Elias thought, before plastering on a fake grin and joining his friends.
EliasHATEDHISMATHclass the most.
Well, the main reason was because Lana was in the same class, and their assigned seats were parallel to eachother.
He plopped his stuff down on his desk and smothered a weary sigh.
Violette wouldn't leave his side the whole morning, probably because of his recent break up.
"What are you sighing about?
Too many rainbows in your butt?"
Elias whipped his head to the source of the snooty voice, which belonged to none other than Lana Rivers.
"Stop being a creep," he lamely shot back, before turning in his seat.
It seemed that whenever he was around Lana, his luck shut down, leaving him as an unprotected shell of a human being withverybad comebacks.
Lana scoffed and turned away, and Elias couldn't help himself from exhaling in relief.
Lana's demeanor always left his skin crawling.
She never really understood the difficulties of being popular.
▪ ▪ ▪ ▪ ▪
LANA HATED HER HOME ECONOMICSclass the most.
Well, probably because Elias was always at the far corner of the room, taunting her from the other side, sandwiched in the middle of his group of friends.
Usually she would ignore him.
She found slight comfort with the exchange student, Josie, who didn't know English that well.
But at some point, Elias always went past the limit.
She was in the middle of talking with Josie while mixing her bowl of cookie dough, when Elias shouted from across the room:
"Hey Lana!
What toad did your mom marry to make you look like that?"
The last few insults were quite libelous, but as soon as Elias mentioned her mother, it became personal.
Her parents might not get along that well, but they were still her family.
And hearing those horrendous words come out of his mouth made her blood boil.
Elias didn't seem to notice that Lana was walking towards him.
He was too busy laughing along with his friends.
Lana could slightly make out Josie's quiet protests but she persevered on until she was up close, right next to him.
Elias stopped laughing, and something that looked like fear flashed through his eyes.
With one swift movement, Lana poured her gooey cookie batter onto his scalp, leaving him sputtering as the mixture trailed down his face.
His friends seemed to freeze, looking in horror at his caked hair.
"Oops, I almost forgot," Lana said innocently, taking dry flour, from the table, in her hand and smashing it on his face.
A girl next to him shrieked and glared at her, before rushing towards Elias and cooing at him.
Lana sneered.
Elias coughed, frantically waving at his face and eyes.
Lana could hear Mrs. Mendez screaming behind her, but a smile tugged at her lips nonetheless.
With a mocking wink, she let Mrs. Mendez drag her to the principal's office, her grey eyes twinkling in the lucid light.
He never really understood the difficulties of being awesome.