by Tiffany Sala
“I’m glad to hear that, for both of your sakes,” said Ms. Miller. “But I’m going to encourage you to maintain a dialogue with me if the situation develops, and there are some things we can do just within the school. Is mediation something you would consider?”
Mediation sounded like the last thing I would want to do. I was certain I’d be setting myself up for a real world of pain if I pushed for it, far beyond the horror of needing to face Steven so closely.
“I don’t think that would help,” I said, and Ms. Miller nodded like she understood exactly what I meant. “I just felt like I needed to talk with someone about what had happened.” Egged on mostly by my mother. I didn’t blame her of course, she was just trying to help me the best way she knew how. But still, I sort of wished now that she hadn’t tried. That I hadn’t gone along with it.
“Well, for the moment,” Ms. Miller said, “if I can give you one piece of advice it would be to leave Callie and her new friends alone.” She raised a hand as my mouth opened. “I know that’s not what you want to hear, but if your goal really is to help her, then you need to be willing to take some of your cues from her. And right now she seems to be telling you loud and clear she needs space, which will have the positive side effect of keeping you from antagonising Steven. So, how about trying it?”
I hated it. It felt like she was blaming me for some of what was happening, and that was so far from fair. But like I’d said before, we were graduating soon, and then none of this would matter: not Steven, and certainly not whoever Callie was dating if she wanted to suddenly throw away years of friendship for a guy who seemed a bit like bad news.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll try it.”
If Callie did want to still be friends, she could come find me.
Chapter Three: Steven
I had a feeling about what had happened when I had a note from my homeroom teacher to go see Ms. Miller.
As expected, when I sat down in her office she just looked at me for about a minute, as if she was hoping for me to cry or otherwise understand just how disappointed she was, and then she started with, “I’ve had someone come to me to talk about you, Steven.”
I rolled my eyes. “Tamika, right?”
“Tamara,” she corrected, and then quickly added, “I can’t tell you the details of other students’ visits with me, of course.” Pathetic.
“That girl was bothering me, Ms. Miller,” I spoke up before she could get going. “I—”
“And I can’t get involved in your interpersonal issues,” she interrupted. That wording did stop me. Had she already decided that Tamara was trouble before I got there? “I want to be clear here, there’s been no complaint made against you, but I wanted to pull you in here because obviously you are treading on very thin ice just having conflict with a female student.”
“My position’s the same with every woman, Ms. Miller. If she leaves me the fuck alone, I’ll leave her the fuck alone.”
She shook her head. “You know you can’t get away with being like that, Steven. If she—if someone had decided they wanted to make an official complaint about you, that would be the end. You’re eighteen years old; this is not some playground joke any more. What happens from here will follow you for the rest of your life.”
I didn’t say anything to that, because how could I? They’d all already decided what they thought of me and I’d wasted too much of my time already trying to turn around those opinions. People took one look at a situation and drew their conclusions about what was really going on, and they never looked back to see if they’d missed anything.
But even worse than the people who condemned quickly and moved on were the people who acted like they were doing you a favour for only partially condemning you to start with.
“I hope you appreciate I’ve stuck my neck out for you once, Steven, and I can’t do it again.” There it was. What I had been expecting the whole time.
“Never asked you to do that,” I said, “but fine.”
“Will you at least promise me you’ll try not to go looking for trouble?” she continued, as if she’d gotten the grovelling response she’d been aiming for. “Let your friends work out their own personal issues. The stakes are higher for you than for all of them.”
“Whatever.” She was right, but why should that mean I grovelled? It had never been my fault.
Probably she did take Tamara’s side in all of this. That was what women did: they supported other women to the bitter fucking end. Even when it made no sense.
Women are the fucking worst, the most stealthy malignant little bitches. I had no idea why Lucas was so keen to get in a relationship with one, he’d been more rational about it before. I could tell Callie was hiding a lot of things, too. Just the way her eyes were always shifting when she was around us. She didn’t like us to start with, and there was probably a lot more than that fact I couldn’t even guess at. If there was one thing I could find common ground with that Tamara on, it was thinking Callie was full of shit.
It was a pity I couldn’t trust her even a little. Maybe between the two of us we’d be able to get Callie back where she belonged: the hell away from me.
After she’d gone and pulled this stunt with Ms. Miller though, Tamara had better hope she had the sense to stay out of my way.
Dad was watching some racing replay on TV when I got home after my run, and Mum was nowhere to be seen because she was out with friends for dinner. That was great in my books. She’d never looked at me the same way after all the bullshit with Julia. She would never admit it, but she was just holding out for me to get the hell out of the house so she could stop thinking about me.
She never did get into being a mother and we both knew it. She just had me because my dad was keen on the idea of having a son, but once I was no longer a cute little toddler and started running and jumping and climbing everywhere she was fed up and wanted to be free to smoke and fuck around with her friends again. And all of that was before I became the sort of monster her friends were quietly sad for her even pushing out of her pussy.
At least on a day like this, we could avoid having to pretend we even tolerated one another and I could get straight onto what I was interested in: Wild Duty.
I’d been through a lot of games since I’d managed to save up enough money to get my really good rig, and I went back and forth on a few of them depending on what was new or had been updated recently, but Wild Duty was the game I’d play if I could only play one game for the rest of my life. It was half survival sim and half intricate war sim, and the two sides were complementary—a word I’d only ever found a use for in the context of Wild Duty—so time you spent on your own gathering resources and assembling structures had an effect in the battling half of the game.
I pulled on my headset. I was a top player at Wild Duty because unlike a lot of casuals, I understood the need to put in the mostly solitary hours base-building as well as running around hacking or shooting at enemies and gathering public glory. I liked doing my ‘solo time’, as we more enlightened players called it. (The fucking casuals preferred the term ‘solitary confinement’.)
But tonight, I wanted to talk to people. I wanted to yell at people. I wanted to be at the head of some dumb crusade to take out some other arsehole’s dumb video game base, celebrated by everyone else who was a part of my team… a fucking legend basically.
It helped that my friends list in Wild Duty were all people I didn’t know. Danger69 and I_Throw_Potatoes didn’t even live in the same country. ParasiteA did, same state even as we’d discovered during a private chat early on. She didn’t live around Hobart though, and she went to a very elite private school, which was a big fucking relief because I never wanted one of my friends I used to get away from school bullshit to turn out to be… that fucking Tamara, or something.
Oh yeah, ParasiteA is a chick. I’ve had my dad walk into my bedroom once or twice while I was talking to her and raise his eyebrow at me like he thought she was a phone sex girl or something, and t
he guys at school get really fucking weird if I say ‘my friend’ and it’s ‘she’ because I’m talking about Para. Because obviously I must hate women, right? Luc and Axel and Mic don’t know about Julia, I managed to keep that from everyone at school but fucking Ms. Miller, but they’ve all noticed I keep girls a bit more at a distance now compared to how things used to be.
It’s different with Para. We’ve never been in the same room and we probably never will unless she finally invites me to come take her away from her shitty family, so there’s no way for it to ever matter about her having tits or anything. We can just give a shit about one another as people, same as with anyone else in the game. And it’s a hell of a lot easier to give a shit about people when they’re in a game and not in your school or your daily life.
Para was the only one of my group online at that point, like me just filling in time until she got called down to dinner. I was on edge right away when she said hello though, because she sounded like she was hiding that she’d been crying. I was pretty familiar with that sound.
“Your dad again?”
Para let out a sniff she’d clearly been holding on to. “It’s… not anything big. Just him being a creep like usual.”
“Should I come over and smash his fucking head in?”
Para giggled a little, like she thought it was just me trash-talking to cheer her up, but I was fucking serious. If I’d known exactly where she lived, I don’t think I could have contained myself. It pissed me off that someone like Para’s dad acted like he was such a good guy in public, pillar of his fucking community and all, and then once he closed the front door on the rest of the world he treated his daughter like a doll he could move around and rearrange. I fucking hate two-faced people. At least I can say for myself I’ve never pretended to be a good guy just because the whole world was looking at me. What you see in public is what you get in private.
Honestly I didn’t know why Para stayed at home. She was eighteen now, she could walk any time and there wasn’t a damn thing her dad could do about it. But her life was her business, I couldn’t go thinking I had the right to burst in and tell her what would be better for her. I could think of lots of reasons she might want to stay—not setting her mother up to become the target of her dad’s sliminess a big one—and I just had to hope if she got to a point where she really needed to get out, she would get out. And that she knew I would help her if she needed that, not that there was much I could do in my situation.
If Para knew what had happened with Julia, she probably wouldn’t even want to have me helping her. But that was not something I’d needed to worry about yet, so… I wasn’t worrying about it yet.
“I had a shit day too,” I told her. “Nothing like yours probably, but people having a go at me at school like always, and I’m sick of it honestly. So… how about we do a run together, take out some enemy defenses?”
I could almost hear her grin. “I’m here, aren’t I, Badman? Do you think I’ve showed up to be a spectator?”
“I would never assume you were a spectator in any part of your life,” I told her, not entirely honestly. I felt really fucking bad about it too, even though there was no way she needed to hear me tell her she was helpless in the face of her father’s bullshit. Even I believe that lies are necessary sometimes… but I hate it. “So. We killing some fucking scum tonight?”
“Hell yeah,” said Para, in that soft little-kid voice of hers she’d had since she was fifteen.
It was a good session. Potatoes showed up about an hour later, probably just getting up or some crazy other-side-of-the-world deal, and he must have had a shitty day too, because with our combined energy we boosted our ranking on the server by about fifty spots. At some point after five Dad banged on the door to let me know he was putting some chicken in the oven, and he’d leave a plate outside my door if I didn’t come down. I really appreciated that. Dad really got it, how futile it was us getting together pretending to be some tight family unit when we really just wanted to all do our own thing.
I’d kind of thought a Wild Duty session would cool me off a little. Like, I’d stop feeling so infuriated about what had happened with Tamara and she could go back to being some nobody whose face I saw in between classes now and then.
But when I was finally done for the night and had gone off to bed, I was having trouble getting wound down from the adrenaline, and all I could think about was Tamara. The way she had just interfered like that, and then acted like she was in the right, still had me completely fired up. Callie was no fucking baby; it was bullshit that she needed a friend to hover around looking out for her just because she was female. Nobody had ever done that for me, that was certain.
Her outraged panic when I’d been holding her arm. The way her eyes shuttered over a little, like she was trying to hide whatever she was feeling from me. It itched at me… truth be told, thinking about having hold of her like that got me hard. And I wasn’t going to fucking do anything about it because that was too messed-up even for me, so it took me a long fucking time to even start to feel sleepy.
I’d decided something, by the time I was really properly drowsy. I was going to be keeping a special eye on Tamara Hills from now on. It felt like my sanity depended on being ready for her.
Chapter Four: Tamara
I went to school the next day with a genuine intention to leave Callie and Lucas and Steven alone and focus on my own personal life.
The first problem was that Aileen was shitty with me. She’d found some other occasional-friends to hang out with before Ryan dropped me off at school, and I felt too awkward to approach the group so I lurked in the library again until homeroom started, just pretending I had a reason to be there.
Then, my first class had Callie and Aileen in it… and Steven. I noticed Steven’s presence for the first time, because Steven was making a point of noticing me.
It was hard to describe exactly what he was doing that made me so edgy. He only looked at me after I looked over at him, but every time I felt like I’d missed something he’d been doing just before I turned my head. And everyone else certainly seemed to be noticing. I caught plenty of my classmates staring at me, their eyes sliding away when I looked at them. Then there was a lot of giggling and muttering I didn’t believe for a second was just everyone having an extra good time that day.
Callie and Aileen were probably in on the joke, on some level, but of course neither of them was giving me any time right now. I was completely on my own in figuring this out.
And nobody gave me any help until we were all rising to leave, when the chaos and noise provided the perfect cover for the vaguely familiar male voice that got up in my ear and spoke low and soft, tickling me in a way I didn’t like. “Are you next, then?”
I spun to face Tyrell, who was already moving away like he didn’t expect me to have anything to say to him. Well he would learn the same way Steven had learned: I may be quiet most of the time, but I’m not going to just take that kind of crap.
“Am I next?” I repeated his words back to him, several times louder. “Is that supposed to be some sort of threat?”
“It’s not a fucking threat,” said Tyrell, puffing up so he seemed twice his usual size. A jolt of the scene from yesterday with myself and Steven made me recoil, but I made myself step forward again.
“Well what is it then, huh? What’s got you needing to do that sleazy breathing in my ear?”
To one side of him, in the distance, I could see Steven. He seemed to have paused halfway out the door and was staring, much to the annoyance of everyone trying to get out through the door.
“Just wondering if you’re going to be hooking up with Steven next for clout, since that’s how it seems to go around here.”
The rush of adrenaline his words sent through me nearly knocked me flat. Hooking up with Steven?
Rage was next. “What clout do you think I need that I would do something like that?”
“I have no idea,” said Tyrell, “I literally didn
’t know you existed before today.”
He probably thought he was dealing me some crushing blow, too. But I knew damn well that being noticed by boys like him—men, now—wasn’t healthy for me. “And that’s how I like it. I have no interest in whatever clout you think my getting into a relationship might offer. My goal here is to get an education and stay out of trouble.”
Tyrell smirked. “Trouble is exactly what you’re finding here, you mouthy bitch.”
Suddenly Steven was next to us. Pushing Tyrell away from me. “How about you calm the fuck down?”
“Oh, here we go,” someone said. There was a crowd gathering around the three of us now, then pushing me aside as Tyrell and Steven got a better grip on one another and started pushing like a pair of warring goats. I didn’t offer much resistance. I didn’t want to be in the middle of that mess, and actually I was a bit in shock that Steven had come back to defend me. It didn’t have anything to do with me though, really. I was just an excuse for him to pick a fight with someone a little more fun to take on.
Suddenly Callie was by my side, touching my shoulder. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I told her. At least it was nice that she’d bothered to look out for me.
Then Lucas Starling stepped into the fray, coming between Steven and Tyrell like a wedge.
“Ty,” he said, “are you so fucking short on pussy yourself these days you’ve got to harass someone else’s?”
“Excuse me,” I spoke up, “I am not ‘someone else’s pussy’. That is far more insulting than anything he said to me.”
And I should have known Callie was only there because she was trailing her new boyfriend.
“I don’t want this fucking drama,” Steven said. “I’m out of here.”
I pulled away from Callie. “Not before me.”
And we actually crashed into one another in the doorway. Steven flinched at the brush of my arm on his and pushed me aside so my shoulder collided painfully with the opposite side of the doorframe. I used that momentum to push myself ahead and scramble out in front of him. I was going to be well clear of him and on my way to the library before I got caught up in any more trouble.
