Filed to story: Brace Face Betty Drama Story
I snatch up the slip of paper and scrunch it in my hand, then toss it across the room. I’m aiming for the trash can, but I’m a terrible shot. I miss, and the balled-up nomination slip ends up on the floor with all the other anonymous threats to my life.
Out of the corner of my eye, Jacob Weaving hunches over his desk, scribbling furiously into his notebook. He’s supposed to be writing an essay on the Cuban Missile Crisis, but I can picture the scrawled mess he’s drawn instead-a manga fuck doll with giant, bare tits and parted lips, legs spread wide open. Anime porn is Jacob’s specialty. Out of the corner of his eye, he catches me watching him, and a smug, infuriating smirk fishhooks his mouth, pulling it up at one side. “Need a ride home later, Betty? Cillian and Sam are waiting in the lot. We really enjoyed the last time we all hung out.”
“I’d rather crawl on broken glass.”
Jacob feigns shock. “No need to overreact. Just thought you might like to play us a few songs or something. No harm, no foul.”
But there has been harm. There’s been more than one foul on Jacob Weaving’s part. He’s a pig. A psycho. An evil, twisted, disgusting excuse for a human being, and I hate him with every fiber of my seventeen-year-old being. I grab the purple sparkly ballot box Mr. French thrust at me when I arrived at detention thirty minutes ago, swing my bag onto my back, and I get to my feet. A loud screeching sound fills the room as my chair legs scrape the floor, and Jacob sits back, lacing his fingers together, stacking them on top of his stomach as he observes me heading for the door.
“Abandoning detention before you’ve been dismissed? So brave, Branson. Your courage makes my dick hard.”
I kick at the screwed-up paper littering the floor by French’s desk. Yanking open the door, I pause before I leave, casting a disgusted look back at him over my shoulder. “We both know it isn’t my courage that makes your shriveled-up dick hard, Jake. You prefer it when I’m screaming and afraid, don’t you?”
A cold, detached viciousness settles into the handsome lines of his face. Because Jacob Weaving is handsome. He’s the hottest guy at Ravenshire. He’s tall, and he’s ripped, and there was once a time when the sight of him smiling would have made me weak at the knees. Not anymore, though. Now, when he smiles, all I see are the many lies and the secrets, lurking just beneath the surface of his privileged, All-American demi-god charm, and it makes me want to puke. It makes me want to claw my way, broken and bleeding out of my own skin, so that I no longer have to be me anymore.
“Careful, Branson,” he snarls under his breath. “Your fall from grace has been pretty hard already. Wouldn’t wanna go making things worse for yourself.”
My own smile is a ruined, sour thing. “Worse?” I want to laugh, but I’m afraid to. My body’s been betraying me lately; It can’t be trusted to carry out the simplest of tasks. No matter what emotion I try to project, I end up displaying the exact opposite, and I cannot afford to cry in front of Jake Weaving right now. I draw in a deep breath, stepping out into the empty hallway, and I let the door swing closed behind me. Jake’s eyes remain on me, burning into my skin like twin brands, until the door clicks shut and he’s gone.
I’m going to be in shit for bailing on detention, but I don’t care. Sometimes, it’s as though even the Ravenshire faculty are in on this sick, twisted game I’ve found myself caught up in. They know about Jake. They know about our history, and yet they’re still willing to leave us alone, unsupervised in a room together after school hours?
Madness.
Pure and absolute madness.
I check the watch at my wrist, Mickey Mouse on its face, grinning, one arm longer than the other, pointing out the hour and the minutes, and I hiss between my teeth. It’s almost four p.m. which means Mr. French will be coming by to cut us loose any moment. My boots ring out, my footfall echoing loudly off the unending row of scuffed grey lockers that line the hallway, and I fight the urge to run head-on for the exit. This always happens. I’m terrified the corridor will never end. That I’ll find myself striving toward it forever, reaching out to push the chipped pale blue painted door open, but it’s always just out of reach. Or when I get there, it’s locked, and no matter how hard I push, rattle it, or plead with it to open, I’m stuck inside this hellhole of a building for the rest of time.
I do reach the door, though. When I push on it, palms pressed flat against the wood, it inches back quickly, and a jolt of relief makes my body feel momentarily numb. Outside, the late autumnal air smells like freedom. I can taste it. On the other side of the emptied-out parking lot, my old Nova is sitting there, waiting for me to climb inside, start the engine, and get the hell out of here, but-
I can hear voices.
Principle Darhower’s deep baritone voice has been a daily staple of my life for the past four years; it’s easily recognizable. I don’t know the woman’s voice, though-firm and authoritative-nor the male voice, thick with a southern accent, that speaks after her.
“We understand this isn’t an ideal situation. For you or your faculty. If it were up to us, the boy’d already be in for a couple of years over in Swanson County, but the judge ruled he was still classed as a minor.”
“What about juvenile detention?” Principle Darhower says, his tone tight with tension.
I creep back from the exit, allowing the portal to my freedom to fall closed. I’m silent as a church mouse as I tiptoe along the hallway to my left. No one notices me as I peer around the corner, into the hallway that branches off toward Darhower’s office. There, Darhower’s ramrod straight in his trademark stance, arms folded across his chest, head canted to one side, the stark strip lighting overhead bouncing off the small bald patch at the back of his skull that he’s always so diligently trying to hide. Opposite him, a thin, tall woman in a grey pantsuit is leafing through a stack of papers, frowning as she tries to find something. The man next to her is wearing a uniform. The ‘Grays Harbor County Sherriff’s Department’ badge on the sleeve of his dark green bomber jacket tells me everything I need to know about him.
The Deputy sighs, removing his hat and scrubbing the back of his hand against his forehead. He looks stressed. “Juvie’s not an option in this particular case. The facility in Wellson Falls has been shut down. We’d have to transfer him out of state if we really wanted to pursue the charges, and the paperwork alone is just…” He trails off, and Principle Darhower heaves a sigh of his own.
“I don’t need to tell you how disruptive something like this is to our students. The school year might have only just started, but our seniors are already buckling down and prepping for college. We have plenty of our own bad apples. Another trouble maker stalking the halls of Ravenshire is only going to make life harder for the good kids.”
“Jim, we know, believe me.” The woman in the grey pantsuit seems to have found what she was looking for. She holds out a green file to Darhower, and I take a look at her face properly for the first time. Mid to late thirties. Dark hair. Dark eyes. I suppose she’s quite pretty. There’s a sad, tiredness to her that makes her look like a kicked puppy, though. I can picture her opening a bottle of wine when she gets home at night, telling herself she deserves a glass after the day she’s had, and then before she knows it, she’s polished off the entire bottle. She’s a social worker, no doubt about it.
She called Darhower by his first name, which means she’s dealt with him before. Darhower grimaces as he takes the file from her, briefly opening it and glancing at the first page, then closing it quickly, as if he can’t face its contents. “I guess I don’t really have a say in the matter then,” Darhower says. “He starts on Monday.”
The social worker and the sheriff’s deputy trade a glance that looks relieved even from where I’m standing. All three of them shift as if some unspoken command has been issued to them, and they head toward the door that leads to the principal’s office. That’s when I realize there’s been a fourth person there the entire time. With Darhower and the deputy standing so close together, blocking my view, I just hadn’t seen the guy sitting on the chair to their right.
He’s young. My age. His dark hair is almost black, shaved close at the sides, longer on top, thick and wavy. He’s both stretched out and slumped in the chair at the same time, artfully arranged into a position of careless boredom, the soles of his booted feet almost reaching the opposite wall of the hallway. His clothes are dark and simple-grey jeans, and a plain black t-shirt. Tattoos stain the skin of his bare arms. To the left of his chair, a black motorcycle helmet sits on the floor, along with a beaten, ratty looking canvas bag, covered in patches. I only see his face in profile. His eyes are closed, his fingers pressing into his brow like he’s nursing a headache. The cut of his jawline is strong, as is the high slope of his cheekbone. His mouth…I can’t really see his mouth.
He’s silent, he’s still-unbelievably still, actually-but there’s something about the shape and the cut of the guy that fills me with panic. The vibe he’s silently giving off at the other end of the hallway feels dangerous. He’s nothing like Jacob and the other guys on the football team. Jacob’s an instrument of chaos, and that’s precisely what he incites in his dumb ass buddies. They thrive on manipulation and deception, half-grown and on the brink of graduating into their adult bodies, hopped up on testosterone, convinced they own the world, that they’re entitled to it, and god help anyone who tries to prevent them from claiming it.
This stranger, though…
He’s an unknown. An outside threat. There’s nothing about the way he’s sprawled out in that chair that tells me what motivates or drives him. He holds himself with a kind of self-possessed arrogance that makes me want to climb inside my locker and hide there until the end of term. From the sounds of things, he’s up to his neck in trouble, and whatever he did almost landed him in prison.
As if he senses that he’s being watched, the guy slowly opens his eyes, lowering his hand from his face. I suck in a startled breath, kicking myself for lingering so long when I should have slipped away three minutes ago. He doesn’t turn to look at me, though; he only turns his head a little, slightly angling it in my direction. His eyes remain glued to the floor, but I can feel him notice me. The ghost of a smile plays over his mouth, which I can now see is full and perfectly fucking formed.