Welcome to Trainwrecks, a free-to-read fiction serial that follows a group of six Seattle-adjacent friends from the year 2004 to the year 2015. Join Luna Cruz, Sebastian Velasquez, Dimitri and Victoria Hale, Duke Kingston, and Jasmine Nolan as they stumble their way from adolescence to adulthood, falling in love, making mistakes, overcoming their pasts, and staying together through it all.
For series introduction, character profiles, relationship charts, and general orientation, check out the Table of Contents!
Author’s Note: In this series, the banner at the beginning of each chapter designates which character the narrative will follow. The characters’ colors and icons can be found on their respective character profile pages. Today’s chapter, for example, follows Luna Cruz (yellow star).
“Note to self: This school does not believe in fat people,” Luna Cruz muttered as she tugged her maroon uniform blazer over her chest. Her attempts to modify the garment had been mostly successful: she could now shrug it on without feeling like she would Hulk it apart with her massive arms, but if anyone asked her to button the blazer up, she’d be screwed.
The morning was unusually sunny for the Pacific Northwest, the temperatures already back in the sixties after dabbling in actual warmth a few weeks ago. Luna, having been born and raised in Renton, Washington, loved a sixty-degree day. Whenever she visited her family in Puerto Rico, her cousins asked her how she could stand the cold, to which she replied by asking them how they could stand the heat. She breathed in deep, tasting the nearby Lake Washington on her tongue, the delicious hint of autumn in the air. Oh yes, she’d take this over being hot any day.
A familiar honk drew her attention, and she waved at the enormous red truck pulling up to the curb of Remington Academy of the Arts, Mercer Island’s private high school for the artistically inclined. The passenger door swung open, and when her best friend Duke Kingston stepped down onto the sidewalk, Luna let out a surprised shriek. He recoiled and hit the door. “Geez! What?”
“You’re so… tall!” Luna closed the distance between them, held her hand up to her forehead, then moved it forward until it collided with Duke’s nose. Sure, he’d been taller than her at the start of the summer, but not by this much. And as if that hadn’t been bad enough, his voice had deepened too.
He swatted her hand away. “Believe me, I know. My joints have been hurting like a bitch.” He’d also tanned while abroad, his red-brown skin now closer to the shade it had been when he’d first moved to Washington. In his uniform blazer, white oxford shirt, maroon tie, and slacks, he looked every bit as rich as his parents were—a far cry from his usual band t-shirts, jeans, and scuffed sneakers.
“Luna, you look adorable!” Mrs. Kingston cried from the driver’s seat in her French-accented English. Not even eight o’clock in the morning and she was already in a cocktail dress, makeup on and honey blonde hair done in perfect ringlets. “I’d take a picture, but I’m holding up traffic. Have a wonderful day, mon petit chou!”
“Yeah, yeah,” Duke drawled. He slung his arm around Luna’s wide shoulders and steered her towards the school’s main building, an imposing, castle-like structure that had been built as an artist’s retreat in the seventies. It stood on the edge of Lake Washington and was visible from both the bridge that crossed onto Mercer Island and the highway beyond. “We’ve got fifteen minutes before class, and I know you’re dying to tell me what I missed.”
Luna’s excitement burst forth. “Oh my gosh, for the first half of the summer? Absolutely nothing. Like, I’m happy your mom finally made peace with her family and you got your French citizenship, but I almost died of boredom! Dimitri found me face down in the living room one day and screamed because he thought I’d passed out. It was so funny.” They stepped through the open front doors into a grand marble foyer. “If it hadn’t been for his sister’s return to the States, I might not be standing here today. True story.”
“Missed you too,” Duke said with a grin.
She gave him a quick, tight side-hug. “I’m so happy you’re back!”
She’d met Duke two years ago, when he’d transferred from his native Oahu in the middle of seventh grade. At the time, Luna had taken a week-long vow of silence to improve her American Sign Language skills, which her teachers had only reluctantly agreed to. She’d just had her textbooks knocked out of her hand by a boy in her science class when Duke came out of nowhere and punched the guy so hard he broke his nose. “You gonna help her pick those up, yeah?” he’d snarled in the terrified boy’s face. He’d gotten suspended for it, but Luna had stuck by his side ever since, and the bullying she’d endured up to that point stopped almost overnight.
“Speaking of that shithead Dimitri’s sister,” Duke said as they turned into a corridor crowded with students, “what’s she like? Is she terrible? If she’s related to him, she’s gotta be terrible.”
“Not true! You love Dimitri’s mom.” Luna dug into her backpack for her class schedule to make sure they were going in the right direction. She’d walked her own route twice during freshman orientation, but that had been two weeks ago, and all of Remington’s tall, window-lined passages looked similar. “Victoria is perfectly nice. I don’t know why Dimitri said she has a bad temper. She’s quiet and shy and the complete opposite of her brother. You know, she would have been my best friend if her parents hadn’t split up. We’d have been like sisters.”
Duke’s lip curled. “Too bad you got stuck with the literal devil instead.”
They rounded the corner into the music hall where Duke’s first period class took place. The faint honk of instruments issued from behind closed doors. Whereas Luna had chosen to major in visual arts, Duke had gone into the music track, which meant he likely had the same homeroom as Victoria. She was a pianist with dreams of Juilliard. Duke was a music-loving guitarist. Luna felt confident the two of them would hit it off. In fact, she’d even entertained the idea of Duke and Victoria falling in love and living happily ever after, but she would keep that to herself for now.
“Let’s see, your class should be right…”’
“Here,” Duke said, and before she could tell him to watch out, he’d grabbed the door handle and pushed it open with enough force to slam it right into the person on the other side.
Luna gasped as the door opened further to reveal none other than Victoria Hale, her hands pressed to her nose, tears gathering in her wide green eyes. In her school uniform, she looked even more refined than she had in Luna’s living room, her long brown hair artfully curled at the ends, her lashes thick with mascara, her fingernails painted in a shimmering maroon.
Duke had the decency to look flustered. “I—”
“Watch where you’re going, you Neanderthal!” Victoria shrieked before an apology could be given. Luna, Duke, and several bystanders stared at her with their mouths open. She released her offended nose and turned on Duke, her long, elegant fingers curved into claws, her regal face flushed with anger. “Were you raised in a barn? Did it not register in your peanut-sized brain that you ought not throw open doors that anyone could be standing in front of? Apologize at once!” she demanded.
Luna had a flashback to the beginning of summer. “I’ve never witnessed it myself,” Dimitri said as he sat on the couch beside her, watching television while she played Pokémon on her Gameboy Advance, “but Dad says Victoria goes off like a bomb, and not the advanced-warning, ticking-time kind.”
Now, with growing horror, Luna watched a sinister smile spread across Duke’s face. It was the look of someone who’d found himself a new person to hate and would enjoy every second of it. “No, I don’t think I will,” he said to Victoria, his voice laced with venom.
Lightning seemed to flash through Victoria’s eyes. “Excuse me?”
“In fact, why don’t you stand behind the door so I can throw it open again? Maybe this time it’ll knock the colossal bitch right out of you.”
Intervention time. Luna threw herself between them, all smiles. “Hi Victoria! I am so sorry about him! I’ve been trying to tell him he needs to be gentler. He’s working on it, I promise.”
Her presence seemed to throw Victoria off; her curled fingers relaxed and some of the color went out of her cheeks. “Luna?”
She struck a pose and let out a weak laugh. “The one and only!”
“Oh,” Duke’s voice came from somewhere over her shoulder. “This is Victoria, Dimitri’s sister. I see!” His tone suggested that his assumptions about the mysterious sister had been correct, no matter how much Luna had tried to vouch for her.
Recognition flitted across Victoria’s face. She stood tall and proud, and even with the few inches Duke had grown over the summer, she almost reached his eye level. She threw him a haughty smile. “And you must be Duke Kingston. My brother has told me so much about you.”
Luna saw Duke’s nostrils flare and decided there would be no salvaging the ever-important first impression. She backed herself into him and kept walking so that he’d have no choice but to move away from Victoria. “Gotta go! Hope your nose isn’t broken! See you at lunch! Bye!” she said, then turned and shoved Duke down the hallway. Luckily, he didn’t need much persuasion to put as much distance between himself and Victoria as possible. He jerked his messenger bag further up his shoulder.
“God! Here I thought she’d be another psychopath, but she’s a freaking princess.”
“Dimitri isn’t a psychopath,” Luna said. “You just have very different personalities. And Victoria isn’t bad just because you two got off on the wrong foot.”
“Yeah, well she can shove her apology up her ass, if she can unclench it long enough to get it up there.” Duke stopped walking so abruptly that Luna ran into him. “Did you say you’d see her at lunch?”
Luna winced. So he’d heard her after all. “Yes…?”
Duke took several breaths, which Luna recognized as one of his anger management strategies to keep from slamming his fist into a wall. “She’s not sitting with us,” he said, and started back down the hall.
“But she doesn’t have any friends,” Luna cried as she chased after him.
“Gee, I can’t imagine why!”
She grabbed his arm, but he didn’t stop walking, so she simply tried to keep up with him. “If you can’t do it for her and you can’t do it for yourself, then do it for me! Please? I want to be friends with her!” She shook his arm and wailed, “I desperately need girlfriends, Duke!” He stopped in the middle of the hallway. A chime overhead marked the five-minute warning until first period began. Luna peered up into Duke’s face. “Is that a yes?” she asked.
“First period is the other way,” he said, to which she sighed and dragged him back the way they’d come.
She did not succeed in convincing him of Victoria’s innocence, but he didn’t raise any more objections to the lunch arrangement, for which she was able to breathe a sigh of relief as soon as she sat down in her own first period class. As her teacher passed out syllabi, Luna stared out the window, across Lake Washington to her hometown of Renton, hugging the shore and rising up its flanking hills.
So much for her dreams of a Duke-Victoria romance, she thought. But then she frowned at her own pessimism. Bad first impressions did not always equal the death of love. Victoria was now a permanent fixture in their lives, and nothing fanned the flames of attraction like repeated exposure.
Author’s Note: Remington Academy of the Arts is a fictional location loosely based on the real world location of Stadium High School in Tacoma, Washington. Stadium High School is famously known as the filming location for the movie 10 Things I Hate About You.
And so the drama begins! lol As always your writing makes me feel excited and wanting to know what happens next!
I'm so excited to see how all the craziness is going to shake out. :D Congratulations on launching a project like this!!