darker_london | Mild-mannered uni student by day

Charlie was lying on her bed, avidly listening to music and bopping her head along in time. It helped with the pace of homework that needed to be done, she told herself, rationalising it. Otherwise, she clearly wouldn't get it done as well.

The eagerness with which she approached Anna when the blonde girl came by her door showed a lie to this rationale. "Whatcha doing?" Charlie asked, conveniently forgetting about her homework.

"Thought I'd come and talk to you," Anna said.

"Ooh, the best kind of talk," Charlie decided, moving off her stomach and shoving her various papers, pens and books to the side of her bed so that there would be room for Anna to sit beside her.

Anna looked at Charlie a little bit cautiously, but really, Charlie wasn't acting all that strangely for Charlie. "You sure I'm not interrupting the homework you need to get done?" she questioned, coming into the room.

"Pssssh," Charlie said, which wasn't a reply to that question at all, really. When Anna raised her eyebrows and looked skeptical, Charlie hastened her in. "Come in, come in."

With the two girls sitting on the bed together, Charlie looked at Anna, waiting for her to speak.

"It's just that..." Anna sighed, after obviously working herself up to saying those three words at least. She looked up at Charlie and gave a nervous laugh. "You're going to think I'm crazy for saying this," she said.

"Why don't you say it, and let me be the judge of that?" Charlie said, waiting patiently for whatever it was that Anna had to say.

Anna nodded. "Okay, this is it. And you're going to think I'm crazy, but this really happened, and it doesn't change the fact that I like Ryan or anything, it's just weird. And that sentence was long. Okay," she said again. "I was walking on the street, by the butcher, and there was Ryan. That timing was kind of cool, but he was carrying all this blood in a bag. And he said it was for a project."

"Blood?" Charlie asked, lifting one of her eyebrows up. "What kind of project?"

"Well, he didn't say? And I wasn't going to quiz him on it. I kind of assumed it would be a second year uni project at the time, but that doesn't make any sense. Does it?"

Charlie did her very best to give it logical consideration, difficult, considering the nature of the question. "I don't think I can think of any second year assignment that would require a lot of blood bought from the butcher..." Charlie answered carefully.

Anna exhaled heavily. "So what's he using all that blood for?"

Charlie shrugged. "You've got me stumped. Maybe I could ask him."

"No, cause then he'll go all..." Anna made the universal symbol for a man hiding in a cave, specifically from women. "And I don't really want that either." She chewed on the edge of her finger nail. The question hadn't really managed to be resolved.

"Well, it's certainly more fun to think of a reason why Ryan'd need a lot of blood rather than working on homework." Charlie cast a doleful eye to her homework, before her eyes lit up and she turned back to Anna. "Maybe he's a vampire!"

Anna scoffed. "Yeah, right. He's a vampire who acts as a mild mannered uni student by day."

Charlie looked at her best friend blankly. "Yeah? Why not?"