Being new to the squad meant that Isadora was still trying to figure out who to trust and who not to trust. She still hadn’t quite gotten some of the Vixen’s vibes down yet, however she was on her way to figuring out which people she was never going to trust and which she wanted to confide in – if the moment came to it. Unlike some, Isadora liked the first few weeks of the semester. She adored getting to know her professors outside of class and start cracking her books open. While Isadora knew that she was the furthest away from the smartest person at the school, she did take learning seriously. Most of the time that was her excuse for not talking to the other Vixens – or really anyone for that matter. She had better things to do than pretend that she was going to place nice with others. Isadora didn’t want to be rude, however anyone that she talked to, she made sure that they knew that she was here for her education first. Cheer was just her way of getting outside her comfort zone.
She wondered how many of them were going to try and pry information out of them. A group of cheerleaders that cheered for a team of broken people had to be broken themselves in some way. Isadora liked others to talk about themselves rather than spill information about herself. She didn’t want to be in a similar position as she had been before. Bullied for something she had no control over. Isadora wasn’t a monster. She liked most people. She wasn’t a murderer; she wasn’t her mother. So it was a bit hypocritical to want to know the Foxes without letting them get to know her. There were things that they could know about her. She’d always been so proud of her past until people thought she should be ashamed of it.
She didn’t have an excuse not to go, though she had been hoping that her friends would find something to do. Parties weren’t her thing. “Last year my friends and I got together for a scary movie marathon where we then had a discussion about how terrible the movie was – either scientifically or plot wise.” Okay, so that sounded lame, but Isadora liked that. “You can photoshop me into the picture,” she shrugged. “You could always make your costume. My dad did that for me when I was younger. Surprisingly, there aren’t any costumes of famous female scientists. I learned a bit about sewing when one year my Marie Curie dress got a small tear in it and my dad was out of town.”
The way Noah saw it, the Vixens weren’t much like the Foxes. The exy team wore their tragedies on their sleeves, showed distrust and reckless determination in their faces even through their helmets, while the cheer squad was much more subtle about their pasts. The press wasn’t trying to uncover any skeletons in the closets of the Vixen Den, so they could hide these things easier. Maybe some of them had something to prove, or maybe they were just trying to break the molds they had been placed in before joining the squad. Noah didn’t really ask. He didn’t feel it was important, but rather believed that these people were his present and maybe even his future, and if their pasts were to remain to themselves, then so be it.
Noah himself didn’t want to talk about his own past, after all, and only a handful of people even knew about his accident. It was how he wanted to keep things, so he could be this new version of himself he’d spent the last two years finding, the boy who loved to cheer and loved his friends and wanted to experience all the freedoms of life, even when caution held him back. He didn’t want to be the tragedy everyone back home saw, the waste of potential and the boy kept in a bubble, the boy who couldn’t experience his childhood. He would make up for it now, starting with all the friends he could have had, all the parties he could have attended. So he wouldn’t pry into Isadora’s life, but he would hope she came to the party, to have another friendly face in the crowd and someone he could hopefully grow closer to this year; he didn’t see that as something so selfish or demanding, at least.
“We do movie nights at the Den a lot, you should suggest a movie!" Even if parties weren’t her thing, the junior simply wanted to extend the invitation, to hopefully invite her into squad activities to help her settle in better. “Aw, come on, you can take the picture and then go to you room, you know.” Of course, he wouldn’t force her, but he knew he needed some help coming out of his shell at first, too. “Seriously? That’s awesome! My sisters always helped me make mine, since there were, like, five of us who needed costumes every year. They did most of the stuff, though; I was kinda young.” And he didn’t go out on Halloween his entire high school career, but he kept that to himself.
