Chapter 29: Chapter Twenty Eight

I didn't pause for a moment of introspection on the way out. I didn't need to get back into the habit of thinking about thinking, of agonizing about agonizing, and panicking about panicking.

Around two years ago I'd come to the same locker room, but back then my locker was in a different place. The one way the school seemed to help the kids getting picked on was by moving their lockers around, changing their seating placements and offering switching to different forms.

Changing forms would have been a great idea. It was one of the very real examples of how I sabotaged myself.

Pride had petrified me to the classroom floor.

First there was the idea of knowing that they would sit smug and laugh about it, chuffed they'd pushed me to switching forms. And secondly there was the practical aspect of it. If I really thought it would stop what was going on I would have switched despite the humiliation of it, but I didn't.

It was turning your back on the tiger.

It would have been the next step down to hell. A sign that they could take things even further, because I was running, and now they had to chase me.

I'd showed up to put my books back in my locker and found a photo of me taped to the back of it with the marker they'd drawn on me, forced to smile. It was a photo they'd taken maybe two or even three months ago, and I had never wanted to see it.

Not to run a flashback in a flashback but I'd been late to leave class and I'd been caught, cornered and pinned against the wall with the whiteboard behind me, this had sparked the genius idea to use the coloured markers to draw on my face, colouring my lips red and to a cartoonish shape, with some colourful slurs on black here and there.

Actually Patrick wasn't there for that. It was Clyde leering at me with his phone out, giving orders to the other boys.

One winding punch was all it took for me to comply, other fists were raised and I didn't want to have to go to the hospital with whatever they'd put on my face on me.

I'd smiled as they told me to, but tears had run down my face at the same time, and snot dripped out of my nose.

I doubted I would ever get over some of that rage I held for Clyde, who had probably forgotten all about me already.

The photo swam around but  I never looked for it.

I'd made some kind of uneasy peace with the fact that it would be available to others, that, knowing the teachers never got their hands on it, these 'others' would not report it, they would probably think it was just as amusing.

Back then I'd walked in with Victor because his locker was, luckily, just beside mine, on the side the door opened to. When he saw it he didn't laugh, the looked disgusted and gave me a sympathetic look, ripped it down and balled it up, throwing it in the bin.

He put a hesitant hand on my shoulder, wary eyes looking me over, and I nearly leaned into it. "They just think it's funny, okay Elliot?"

I just nodded said nothing, waiting for him to remove his hand instead of moving, wanting more than anything for the guy to hug me, even kiss me, for everyone to see and know.

It was unbelievable how much that brief contact meant to me.

I couldn't go home and cry about it to my mother, really the only person I had was Victor.

Later I would sit in a cubicle with my shoes on the door so no one would recognise them, sob noiselessly and just throw myself into the whirlwind of daydreams, dreams of revenge and escape, but mostly of the latter, because the former seemed so ruthlessly unachievable.

I didn't know how they got into my locker, I had a padlock on the front undisturbed, but it wouldn't be the last time they delivered mail to me through the metal container.

It took me another year to finally realise what they were doing when the back of the next locker I moved into seemed to move slightly.

The lockers were fixed to the wall, but the panels behind the lockers weren't connected to the locker itself properly, that is soldered on, meaning that as long as you pulled the locker forward slightly and the panel was loose enough, or made to be loose enough, then you could get in from the back.

I wasn't sure why it never occurred to me that this would be useful in some way. But I was diligent and made sure to proof my locker as well once I was finished.

You could only get about the width of a hand inside, so I bent my A3 art class folder up against the back of the locker, and double checked that anything tossed inside would fall behind it, still inside my locker, but tragically ignored.

I thanked them quietly for teaching me the tricks of the trade on the way back up to my class.

Mr Stone looked appalled at me for taking so long but I ignored him and sat down.

His distaste didn't last very long, because for the first time in however long it must have been, I was filling out the work in full.

Learning about the French monarchy wasn't exactly a hardship, the stories were interesting and all the spare energy my brain had burnt spinning in circles of self recrimination now needed something new to fill the empty space, the silence.

By the time the bell rang he was standing over my shoulder, reading the answers I had written in my exercise book. Before I could slingshot it back into my bag he picked it up and continued reading.

He looked down at me briefly, nodded, and handed it back to me a stern eye following me as I eventually zipped up my bag with my belongings and left.

I left for lunch and decided to take up whistling as I went. I wasn't much good at it, but if I practiced I could claim I played an instrument on my university application.

[Arran's POV]

I wasn't giving up cigarette's but there were only so many toilet breaks you could get away with in each class, especially considering how chatty some of the students there were. So I was back to chewing on gum as I made my way back from the second class down to the lunch hall.

I wasn't particularly hungry but I wanted to keep my protein intake high and skipping meals wasn't the way to do that.

A girl called Bella followed me all the way from my class to the lunch hall and seemingly tried, on purpose, to walk ahead of me, in front of me, and then looked back at me, seemingly winded from the task, and smiled at me and looked away shyly, a shyness that felt in stark contrast to her practically tripping over my feet every time she slid in front of me.

I pretended not to be irritated and ignored her instead of kicking her legs and leaving her behind.

It was exhausting pretending to be nice.

It was my fault, I smiled at the teacher and she got the wrong idea and thought I was a good student, she handed me the worksheets to hand out and somehow in fulfilling that task I had been silently branded the teachers pet.

This apparently made me more favourable to the girls in the class, at least safe enough to approach, given the lot that Elliot contended with were all in the same form I figured their range of selection wasn't so great.

I rejected Bella's proposal to sit with her group of grinning girls with a blunt 'no' and she looked hurt, but not offended, as I left.

She instead drifted off to the table that housed most of Elliot's least favourite classmates and started gushing to the one called Piston.

I watched quietly and she glanced over and saw me looking and looked flustered for a moment, and then leaned in closer suddenly and put a hand on his shoulder.

Piston grinned at her.

I took a careful bite of my chicken and leaned back in my seat, looking him up and down, taking my time observing him.

It was a grin that matched the one he was wearing when I turned the corner and found Piston climbing off of Elliot. I watched as the boy pulled the gravel out of his mouth with his fingers, spitting the rest into the grass, blood stuck to the small rocks.

At this point Piston was already walking away. I watched the boy, unimpressed, with the sections of his diary floating through my head. The boy sitting there on the floor with wet eyes was far more reminiscent of the one in that book, but when he turned to look at me there was no fear in his eyes.

Strong, soulful brown eyes, they matched his overgrown wavy hair. They weren't bad to look at.

There was something appealing about his face in general. Maybe that was why I had felt compelled to touch it.

"You're a masochist, is that it? It would explain a lot..."

"Could be..."

I squinted at the food between my fingers.

My eyes followed Elliot to his seat. He picked at his chicken with his fork and rested it in his mouth before slowly pulling the fork away and dispassionately chewing, staring straight ahead.

Another piece of chicken, his tongue pressed against the fork just barely visible before he closed his lips around it and slowly pulled the fork back.

I narrowed an eye, turned back to my food and continued eating.

Strange.

After a while I finished the last of the chicken and ignored the chips and looked up to watch something interesting take place across the other end of the hall.

Elliot, who had been sitting at an unusually crowded table somewhat near the offending party, stood up, slowly raising his tray after himself, and appeared to look directly in Pistons direction and smile, pointed at him and gestured to the door. Piston appeared to be the only one looking, or the only one that turned his head, the back of his head facing me.

The boy winked at him.

I raised a brow, leaned forwards and watched Piston slowly stand up and watch Elliot leave, and once he had just exited through the doors to the lunch hall he tossed his tray back onto the table and started off after him.

I lowered my brows as I took a drink from my bottle.

Either I had sorely misjudged the exact relationship between them or Elliot was indeed a masochist looking for something worse than a mouthful of gravel.

I sat there for a moment longer, drumming the table with my fingers. My phone alerted me of incoming text notifications, I glanced at them and put the phone back in my pocket.

Bella looked over at me and so did her friends and there was some kind of tittering between them.

I ran my hands back through my hair and got up, dragging my backpack up onto my shoulder after me.

Of course if Elliot was in fact suicidal I would leave him to his own devices. No one deserved to have their suicide attempt interfered with.

But there would be no harm in having a look...

[A/N]   I think last chapters ending would have made for a better cliff hanger, but this one works as well... it all goes down in the next chapter after all... which is why it took me so long to write it in advance.

Anyway, much love to the WPC, and to my darling patrons... well... I know someone who liikes you... (ﾐ￣ᵕ￣ﾐ)♡.°