Queen of Spades (House of Car...

On her way to the pet shop, a car drove by and spashed one of the slush puddles all over Alice. It was at this point in time when she realized that just maybe today wasn't her day. Between the pain of her injuries, the visit from the police, her break down in the principal's office and Lexi's continued attacks, Alice realized with wry humour, that today kind of sucked. A lot. So she was expecting the monumentally crappy day to continue on into her evening, which was a good thing because when she walked into Salali's shop, she was unfortunatly witness to a very beautiful red head wrapped around Malcolm with her tongue down his throat.

They didn't hear the dull ding of the door announcing her enterance, and instead Alice was forced to clear her throat loudly to announce her presence. "I'm guessing this is Shawna?" she asked no one in particular. Malcolm looked a little embarassed and couldn't make eye contact, but Shawna beamed at Alice.

"I would be!" she walked forward with a happy smile on her face, one hand extended out towards Alice. "I guess he talks about me a lot then huh?" she gushed. "You would be?" she asked politely while Alice smiled and shook her hand.

"Just another volunteer. It's a pleasure to meet you though. I'll leave you two some alone time. Mal." Alice deflected the redhead and inclined her head to Mr. Vega. She kept the smile on her face and no one could tell she wasn't actually happy, but she was swearing herself blue inside. This is why having a crush is a stupid, stupid idea. Of course he'd try and work things out with his girlfriend, they lived together! Even if he hadn't, there was no way it'd ever happen. He was her teacher! Alice shook the thoguhts away and tried to walk into the back area like she was happy to be there.

"So Mal was telling me that the police came by the school?" Salali made it a question after a few minutes of silently directing Alice to fill the food bowls..

"Yeah, she wanted a statement." Alice dodged the issue, really not in the mood to get into it again. "I found out today that over March Break I will be going to Cozumel Mexico with the senior class." Alice beamed at Salali, focusing on the only good thing to happen today. It was a trick her father had taught her as a little girl, no one likes being unhappy, so when you're down, find one happy thing to think of and bear it like a sheild. Didn't always work but it kept her from starting to scream and just never stopping.

"Do you have a passport?" Salali asked. Alice nodded, which surprised the large Native woman.

"My dad took me on a buisness trip once, we went all the way to Ireland when I was five. I've always updated it on my own, even making sure to change to an adult one so...." she shrugged. One of the unspoken reasons behind her vigilance with the passport was the chance that she would grab it and run, leave the country entirely. Yeah right, that only happens in movies, in real life there's things like money and starvation; Alice thought ruefully.

"Do you need to go shopping for this trip?" Salali asked. Alice frowned, running a mental checklist of her belongings. There never was much, and a lot of what she owned was tragically worn out. Stuart was never gentle on clothing and a lot of her closet suffered tears and stretched out fabric.

Alice nodded, brushing aside those terrible memories. "Yeah, I do. Not too worried though, I've got some cash squirreled away." she admitted. Salali had seen her retrieve the wad from the foster house, so there was no point in trying to lie about it now. "I'll make a list of what I think I'll need and run it by Kim tomorrow at school. Then I guess you and I will just have to go shopping." Alice grinned at the equally happy looking Native woman.

"Did I just hear shopping?" Malcolm asked as he strolled in the door. Alice didn't look over at him, or even at him directly when she did acknowledge him. He didn't look terribly confortable under her regard either. It wasn't like he fidgeted, more like he scuffed his feet a little.

"Mr. Bottomswell informed me today about the senior trip. Cheapest time to buy summer clothes is this time of year, so... shopping." Alice answered with a shrug. It would be easiest for both of them if she acted like seeing him make out with his girlfriend hadn't bothered her. He was uncomfortable with being caught and she was jsut uncomfortable period.

"I guess that makes sense." Mal nodded. "Anyways, I was just coming in to tell Salali that I'm going to have to back out of tonight, sorry. There's some personal things I need to attend to." he stated and Alice tried not to feel sick as she realized that was a euphemism for going to go screw Shawna's brains out. This day was just going swirling down the drain for Alice and she suddenly had the overwhelming urge for moose tracks ice cream and a good action movie. Like Pitch Black, yeah, watching a hard, hot bodied alpha male run amok sounded just about perfect to Alice.

"You're eyes just got real creepy." Mal stated, drawing Alice out of her day dream. She squashed the rising blush and smiled.

"Sorry, was just thinking about having meat for dinner." she answered and swallowed a giggle at the unintended freudian slip. "Was deciding between chicken or beef." she added in, trying not to sound completely lame.

"That's nice, volunteering to cook. But honey, you and I are on our own tonight, which means fast food for dinner in between tasks." Salali laughed.

"Goodnight ladies!." Malcolm called out to the two and headed towards the door.

Alice couldn't resist the sudden urge to be a complete ass. "Goodbye Mal. Have good sex!" she called after him. Salali looked at her, stunned and then started to roar with laughter. The door out slammed shut and Alice cracked up too. She wiped tears from her eyes as Salali clutched her stomache and pretended that they were entirely due to the laughter.

Alice woke up earlier on Tuesday morning and had a hard time remembering the clear timeline from last night. It had been pure flight of the bumblebees in there, with both women dashing around to feed, brush and exercise the animals and clear out, freshen up and reset the containers. Several of the animals were just borders for families away on vacation and the ones with a green tag on their collar were good group players that the women gave free reign to in the back lot. Other shops had used this space for parking. Salali had turned hers into a fully manicured lawn with bushes, flowers and a tree for the dogs to play in. Inside one of the 'display pens' was easily converted into a huge cat tree that the social ones could play on.

And then there were the rescues. Cats and dogs that had been starved, beaten, neglected and locked up. Several had terrible scars and one puppy had survived all of his littermates, the only one of eight to live. Alice loved that little mongrel, he wasn't tiny but he was sleek, short brown fur, lithe muscles and a network of old scars on his chest and neck. He'd been rescued from a dog fighting ring, and despite the early abuse was showing signs of becoming socialized. He didn't snap and snarl at the other dogs unless they crowded him or got carried away, and he was no longer angry and terrified towards humans. It didn't escape Alice's notice that he reminded her a lot of herself and that just seemed to build the kinship more.

The wonder of it was that the little mongrel seemed to respond to her affection, actually coming to investigate her hand when she laid it inside his pen. She calmly sat still while he had slowly creeped closer, and she found that if she wasn't watching him, he was more confident. So she used her peripheral vision to watch the little darling stretch his nose out to snuff her, and tried not to jerk as his wet nose tickled her palm. Salali watched the interaction with a smug smile on her face, she'd told Alice that he wasn't a biting dog, and she'd approached the puppy without fear or malice. After the puppy had gotten her scent, Alice carefully wothdrew her hand and opened the pen door. He scurried back out of reach and once again she just sat near the enterance and waited. This time the mongrel was quicker to come investigate, snuffling around Alice's knee where she sat with her legs crossed. She was holding a brush in one hand and a dog bone in the other and once he was confident enough to clambor across her lap to get the treat, Alice carefully started to pet him. Light, gentle strokes with her hand until he accustomed to being touched. It was a slow process, but eventually Alice had fed and brushed him, petted him and he fell asleep on her lap. She picked the puppy up and dropped him off back inside the cage, a new, clean blanket in there for him to sleep on.

As Alice walked into class, she couldn't get her mind off of the puppy and offered a distracted hello to Mr. Vega. He frowned at her distant attitude, but other students stared to pour in so he had no chance to question her about it. She was writing down a list of names on her paper instead of focusing on the discussion of the death of Ophelia and Mr. Vega stopped by her desk. She looked up at him and realized something as he was about to speak to her.

"Is that a hickey on your neck?" she asked, and although she said it quietly, he scowled down at her.

"That's not an appropriate question Ms. Spade. And you should be paying attention to class work not..." he looked down at the sheet of names, clearly not understanding it.

"Names for a puppy." Alice explained, looking down at her desk. The other students were watching them by now and she heard a scoff of laughter at her expense. This class just seemed to be a hit or miss for her, either it went great or sucked horribly.

A detention slip dropped onto her desk. She forced a smile to her face and squashed the sigh. This was probably repayment for her comment about him having good sex. And then noticing the hickey his grilfriend had given him. "My apologies." she offered and put the slip into her shirt pocket. There was more muffled laughter from the class and Mr. Vega turned to scowl at them. He wandered off to the next student to pester, and Alice frowned, watching as he was snappish and short with the other students. It wasn't just her, something was seriously bothering him.

Chewing her lip, Alice pulled her phone out and hid it under her desk. She sent him a text message.

Don't shoot the messenger but you're PMSing today. Everything ok?

She didn't hear his phone vibrate and figured he'd check it later. And when he swept by her desk again to check if she was working this time, she offered him a tentative smile. He looked a little confused and didn't stop to talk. When the bell rang for the next class, she left still distracted by trying to figure out why he was so moody today. Maybe he hadn't gotten laid last night. Her own experiences with sex were extremely negative, but Alice knew that most people felt better afterwards, happier and less stressed. Whereas Mal was just seeming pissed off.

She was distracted at the beginning of science block, but as the classes dragged on, she started to realize that something was up with the students around her. They were shooting her looks and then whispering, laughing like they knew a secret she didn't. This didn't bode well, and Alice found herself tensing up as it crept towards lunch time. If this kind of thing kept up, Alice figured she'd end up with ulcers or an aversion to eating, bad things always seemed to go down for her near feeding times. When the lunch bell rang, her feeling that bad juju was about to occur increased as every student in her class took their time to leave, trying to 'discreetly' follow along behind her. Of course since the average teenagers concept of subtle is tragically deficient, Alice was keenly aware of their presence. When she stepped outside her locker, the hallway around her was filled with too many students, faces that didn't belong here. And then she saw Lexi standing across from her locker, a smirk on her face and something clicked in her head.

So Alice acted like she didn't have a clue that they were plotting something. She stood in front of her locker and spun the dial to open it, almost able to feel the rising tension as everyone waited for the 'thing' to happen. As she was about to open the door, she stepped to the side, out of the way and flug it open. A loud pop and a hiss out air erupted out and paint suddenly splattered out into the hallway. A paint bomb had been planted into her locker, and if they had been just a little more subtle about it, Alice would have been covered in muddy brown paint. It looked like dog poo, but it smelled like turpentine, and drops of the paint were plattered over Lexi and her friends. Not the liberal coating that globbed and dripped out of Alice's locker, but they didn't look pleased with this at all.

"What is going on here?!" one of the teachers demanded.

"Some one pulled a prank on my locker." Alice informed the angry teacher, staring straight at Lexi as she said it. The popular girl scowled back at her, clearly frustrated that it hadn't gone as planned.

"Go get the janitor and clean this up! Seriously, you children have no sense of repect or responsibility. Pranks? Don't you all have somewhere to be?" she demanded of the lingering students, watching the drama go down. They all fled and Alice was left looking at a locker full of destroyed clothes and books. "You'd better go see Mr. Bottomswell about needing new text books." the teacher cooly informed Alice and scribbled something down on the back of a detention slip.

Thankfully the janitor had already heard about the incident and was wheeling his mop over. "Another day at you then miss?" he asked her, jerking his chin at her locker.

"Oh yeah." she agreed and he chuckled.

"If there's anything you want to salvage out of there, grab it now. I have a plastic bag you can keep it in until you get to go home and wash it off." he offered. Alice nodded and dumped her paint drenched sweater and borrowed jacket into the bag. Her dance uniform ended up in there as well. Everything else was ruined, and she wondered if any of the clothing could actually be salvaged. She took a deep breath in and pushed the anger back grateful that she'd been paying attention and hadn't gotten coated in paint. There is always a brighter side to focus on, she reminded herself.

The principal kept giving her sympathetic looks as he assigned her a new locker location and took note of what books had been destroyed. She always kept her notebooks in her bag, so it was just text books and clothing that had been destroyed, but it still cause fury to pulse through Alice's veins. Her friends picked up on the sullen anger when she finally got to sit with htem at the lunch table, and they wisely kept the conversation away from the touchy subject. She pushed the food around on her tray and never actually ate any of it. And when the bell rang for final class, Alice walked in, forced to wear her regular uniform.

The teacher read the note Mr. Bottomswell had given her and agreed that she could use the shorts she had on under the kilt and her tanktop as her dance uniform since she had no other choice. Even her dance shoes had been ruined, thick enough paint htat she hadn't even tried to salvage them, just let the janitor pitch into the garbage. So while the other girls danced in their leotards and stage slippers, Alice was in black biker shorts and a tan tank top, her bare feet gripping the floor as she did the choreography without the benefit of dance shoes.

When the teacher wasn't looking her way, she suddenly felt someone shove her from behind, jerking her off balance but she recovered. Looking behind her, no one was looking her way, all the girls acting like nothing had happened. It happened several more times and Alice was holding onto her temper by gritting her teeth and just ignoring it. The other dancers rammed into her, pushed her, tripped her and got in her way at every opportunity and the teacher only ever saw her looking awkward as she tried to recover and keep dancing. Finally the bell rang and a near boiling fury had settled into her stomach. She grabbed her uniform and pulled it back on, not wanting to be late to her detention with Mr. Vega. She pushed past Lexi when the other girl stopped to hurl insults at her, knowing that her patience was too close to snapping to be bothered trying to talk.

She flopped down into a desk back in English class, there before even Mr. Vega was and stuck her headphones in. The brown paint had dried on the back of one of the earbuds, but since it'd been in the pocket of her sweater, the mp3 player had avoided the warpath. The hard bass of her latest song raged in her ears, burning up some of her anger with its intensity. She closed her eyes and focused on taking in deep breaths and counting backwards from 999. It was a meditation technique she'd been using for years to quell her emotional turmoil and let her think rationally. Alot of the time it was only temporary, offering her a brief period of time to either get to safety and break down, or find something that distracted her away from the issue. She actually yelped when one of the earbuds was yanked from her ear, and her eyes flew open to see an angry Mr. Vega glaring down at her.

"This is detention, not nap time." he snapped at her. Her calm from just a moment before evaporated.

"I wasn't napping. It's called mediation. You know, as in the art of mentally controlling your emotional state? Some people like to use it to keep their bad moods from spilling over onto others." she snapped back.

Mr. Vega leaned forward, his hand on her desk. "I will not be lectured to in my own class! I don't care what it was you ere doing, listening to music in school is prohibited." he reminded, shaking the ear bud in his grip.

"I was waiting for you!" Alice replied, exhasperated. "If this is what you're like after a night with your girl friend, you might just want to re-evaulate if you're actually happy with her. Because from an outside perspective you seem miserable!"

"Get out of my classroom!" he hollared at her, pointing at the door. His face was dark and his shoulders tense, entire body almost vibrating with anger.

"Gladly." Alice stated, ignoring the hurt in her gut as she grabbed her bag. At her new locker she grabbed the plastic bag with her paint stained clothing and stormed out into the cold air. She stared at the snow coming down with an incredulous look on her face. It had to start snowing sometime, but of course it had to wait for the day when she didn't even have a sweater to pull on. With stiff movements she put her headphones back in, blared the music and started walking towards Salali's store. It never occured to her that she could have called the Native woman to come pick her up, Alice was just too angry to be rational right now.

The snowflakes were stinging little ice flakes, whipping past her in the wind. She untied her hair and stuffed it down the back of her shirt, using it to protect the back of her neck as she ducked her head and walked. From the school to Salali's hop was a good 45 minute walk and she'd gotten maybe halfway there when a familiar vehicle suddenly cut her off at an intersection.

"Get in." Malcolm ordered her and rolled his window back up so she couldn't respond.

"Not being comepletely stupid, Alice got in and brushed the snow off of her. Her long hair was wet and tangled, her school uniform sodden and stiff with the cold. "Thank you." she said and started to chafe her hands briskly to get feeling again. Her legs were the worst though, actually burning with the cold.

Malcolm started driving and turned the heat up higher, but said nothing else to her. They were both sitting stiffly in the car, anger dancing in painful abandon between them as neither knew what to say to try and fix the breach that had occured.

"What happened to your jacket?" Mal asked, having taken note of her plastic bag filled with stained clothing.

"Paint bomb in my locker. Ruined everything." Alice replied tersely, carefully coiling her mp3 player back up. She had carefully dried it, greatful that the cheap thing hadn't died in the cold.

The silence stretched between them again, still awkward, but a little less angry now. They were driving slowly behind a snow plow as the first heavy snow fall of the season caused traffic to hit a snails pace. "So what music do you have on that thing anyways?" Malcolm suddenly asked, looking at the mp3 player in her hands.

Alice couldn't help the smile that lit her face. She grabbed the wire from her bag and plugged the player in to blast out the car speakers. She started one of her songs and let the music speak for itself. It was a techno remix of sweet dreams, only it was heavier in the drum and bass than the usual remixes were and she'd layered in pieces of Brittany Spear's Toxic and even though she personally hated most of hte pop singer's work, the two managed to blend rather well. After that song was her favourite, a mash up of Cry Little Sister and Green Eyes. The songs weren't super long, but they only got through three of them before arriving at Salali's shop. Mal stayed quiet while Alice coiled up the wires of her music.

Before she grabbed the door handle he finally spoke. "So who was that?" he asked, honestly sounding curious.

"DJ Mask." Alice replied. He nodded, not having anything to reply to that with.

"Can I tell you a secret?" she suddenly asked, and before he could nod yes or no, she leaned in to whisper in his ear. "I'm DJ Mask." then she hopped out of the car and ran inside to escape the blasted weather.

Salali took the destruction of Alice's locker with equamity, letting go of it with a shrug. When Ace demanded to know how she could be so calm about it, Salali just replied with, "it's already over and done with. What's the point to worrying over it now? Adapt and move on." that shut Alice up and she focused on cleaning out the cages and keeping her mouth shut.

It was a little less hectic than yesterday had been, not because they had less to do, but because Alice was becoming more confident with it as she learned what had to be done. And much to Salali's amusement, Ace had gotten into the habit of talking to the animals as if they understood her. It wasn't the babbling baby talk that annoyed the crap out of her, but more like a running commentary as she familiarized herself with the furries around her.

This time when she sat at the mongrel's cage, he was quicker to come over and sniff at her, though if she moved too quickly he bolted like always. "Salali, would it be ok if I named him?" she asked, looking up from where the mongrel was slobbering on her lap, lightly growling at the pig's ear she'd given him to gnaw.

"Sure satika, it is good for them, makes training them easier." Salali agreed with a wave of her hand. "What name did you pick out for him?" she asked, tapping one of the birds on the beak after it tried to bite at her.

Alice looked back down at the adorable little beastie in her lap and grinned. "Monster." she stated.

Salali raised her eyebrow but nodded. "Monster. Hmmm, suits him, though he seems to be developing an affectionate streak." she agreed.

Alice nodded hapily and then took Monster back to his pen. He curled up and fell asleep and Alice started to help pack the shop up for the night. She got her homework done in record time, took a hot shower and crawled into bed. It was only as she was setting her cell phone alarm that she noticed a text message for her.

It was from Malcolm and all it read was: Sweet Dreams

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A/N: I'm on an old comp today, so I can't bold the text messages like I normally do.

If anyone has a cast suggestion for one of the characters, let me know. I haven't described a lot of the characters yet, so if you have one you think is a good fit, tell me in the comments. I love hearing your ideas!