I couldn't possibly have been more pleased while standing in front of the mirror that day. Seriously...I was looking my best, and that was always important. Well, to me it was, and that's really all that matters, right? Who cares that Mom would probably have fainted had she walked in on me at that moment? Or that she would later give me the longest, more boring, but also most heated, lecture that she'd ever come up with. (That's one of the downsides to having a mother who is such a gifted speaker... Even her lectures are somewhat convincing...)
But I was pleased.
"Pretty Boy" shirt, check. Mom had wanted me to burn that one when she first saw it. So I just had to keep it, and wear it as much as I possibly could. Besides, I liked it.
Low-slung black leather pants that almost looked like they had been poured on, check. Those Mom didn't even know I had. She wouldn't even ask me to get rid of those...she would just burst in and do it herself. I wouldn't even be surprised if she decided to rip them off of me (not matter how inappropriate that would be) right at the moment when she saw them on me and dispose of them right then and there.
Freshly-dyed dark purple hair (a drastic enough change that few people outside of the family would even recognize me), check. That had been the hard part to accomplish. The dye wasn't that hard to get...but I had almost turned my hands a permanent bluish purple color trying to get it into my hair. At least it had come out good. ^_^
Fake glasses to make me look a little more intellectual (since I heard that my target liked that kind of thing), check. Those were Deran's, a pair that I had filched after he got his new pair recently. They were surprisingly stylish for him, and not too bad in my opinion. I had just taken them to the store and gotten them fitted with plain glass, so that I could wear them without feeling like the world was spinning and warping around me.
More silver and black bracelet than I could count, check. Those were normal. I never left the house without them. Particularly not when the leaving involved something as important as a social even. There were just a few more than normal...
Yeah, perfect.
Mom would have a fit...but that's what my balcony and window were for. I had cut open the netting they put around my one uncontrolled exit from the building the night before, in the middle of the night when no one was watching. Then I'd put it back together so that it barely looked like it had been touched, so that no one would notice that I had done anything to it until it was too late and I was gone. My door was locked, and I had made sure to blow up at dinner time about something trivial, so that everyone thought that I was just being a moody teenager who no one could figure out again instead of having some sort of thought out plan to escape.
All I had to do was pull open the netting and make the jump, which I did just moments after pulling myself away from the mirror. I made sure to check the ground below for guards, who were more common than ever before since that strange woman visited Mom on Hope's birthday. No one was in sight, so I jumped, and before long I was winging my way far from the Chapel and in the general direction of the "bad" part of town, the part where the fun stuff happened, but where good boys like the son of the leader of our land never went.
After all, I had a certain someone waiting for me there. He knew I was coming, and I couldn't really disappoint him, now could I?