Dark Secrets

by A. M. Hudson

  “Don’t worry about it.” David gently grabbed my wrist and started walking, dragging me along behind him. “They’re not nice people. I’m just sorry that of all the girls you had to run into in there, it was those two.”

  “Well, thank you—” I stopped and pulled my arm from his grip, “—for standing up for me. No one’s…ever done that before.”

  “Really?” He looked amazed, or maybe mortified.

  “I never needed it.” I reached down and picked up my bag as an excuse to avoid eye contact. “Thick skin and quick wit were kind of a requirement at an all girls’ school. But…I guess I just lost my nerve.”

  “You shouldn’t have to stand up for yourself, Ara. People should mind their tongues.” David softened a bit then, quickly bending to grab our books off the floor by his feet. “And for the record, mon amie, despite what those girls just said—” He took a step closer, “—I think you are very pretty.”

  Yep, that did it. Cheeks hot; heart tumbling down the stairwell; lust-meter at fifty. “So, you—you speak French?”

  “Seulement quand je parle avec mon coeur.” David started walking, but I caught a glimpse of a smile as he turned, shouldering his bag.

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “Google it.”

  A second passed before I forced myself to run after him. “I will, you know—look it up.”

  He just stared ahead, his dimpled smile making my heart race as we walked in silence.

  Chapter Three

  The bell tolled before we even made it to the cafeteria. David smiled gently and jerked his head in the other direction. “Come on, your next class is this way.”

  “How do you know that?” I asked, running after him.

  “I read your schedule, remember?”

  “Yeah, but, how did you retain all that info? I can’t even remember what classes I actually signed up for.”

  David said nothing, just smiled—a kind of secret smile—as we headed back up the stairs, past a waving carrot-top girl.

  “Um, hi,” I muttered, returning the wave.

  “That’s Ellie.” David leaned in. “She’s in our music class.”

  “Oh, okay.” I looked back down the stairwell at her just as she glanced up to gush over David. “She likes you.”

  “No, she doesn't. She’s just…I don't know.” He shrugged once. “I think they all suffer from a ‘desire the unattainable’ disease around here.”

  “Oh, so you think you’re too good for them?” I challenged playfully.

  He fanned the collar of his shirt, humour lighting the smugness on his face. “I don't think I am. I know I am.”

  I laughed. “So…you’ve never dated any of the girls—ever?”

  “No. And I don’t plan to.”

  “Oh,” I said, falling suddenly through the earth.

  David’s head whipped up as he came to an abrupt halt. “Um—I, uh—I really didn’t mean it like that. I—”

  “Dave? Ditching class, man?” the same jock from earlier said, slapping David on the shoulder again.

  “Hey, you know the code, bro.” David grinned, pointing down the hall at him.

  “Ditch school; ditch life,” they both said, and laughed.

  As soon as the boy disappeared around the corner, so did David’s smile. “I—”

  “I need my books.” I pointed to them.

  He gently drew them from the stack and placed them in my waiting hand.

  “Thanks.”

  We stood looking at each other for a moment, surrounded by the sound of a teacher’s voice talking about today’s lesson in history.

  “So, this is your class,” David said.

  “I figured.” I smiled softly, but my heart was completely broken. “Well, thanks.”

  “Hey, Ara.” He grabbed my arm. I looked up from his hand to his lovely green eyes. He let go. “When I said I don’t plan to date, I wasn’t talking about y—”

  “It’s okay, David, you don’t owe me an explanation.” I tried to grin. “I only just met you, after all. And I hadn’t placed myself in that category, anyway.”

  David’s jaw set stiff, his eyes fixing on the ground.

  “So, I’ll see ya later?” I said, slowly backing in through the doorway.

  “Ah,” the teacher said. “Ladies and gentlemen, we finally have a new student.”

  I turned away from David, leaving our conversation before his response, but felt better suddenly seeing a familiar face in the room. “Hi, Dad,” I whispered so no one else would hear, then stole a quick glance at the now empty corridor.

  “Attention please.” Dad’s voice rose above the chatter. Everyone hushed. “This is Ara-Rose. I’m sure some of you have already met her—”

  “Actually—” I cringed. “It’s just Ara.”

  He looked sideways at me for a second. “Okay, this is just Ara.”

  “Nice to meet you, Just Ara,” someone called from the back of the room, and a low hum of laughter erupted over the entire class.

  “Settle down, Maverick,” Dad said sternly.

  “Thanks a lot, Dad,” I said under my breath.

  “Uh, Emily?” he called to a girl in the front row of the raised, auditorium-style seating.

  Without hesitation, the same girl I met this morning, with her swinging ponytail, bounded over. “Yes, Mr Thompson?”

  “You’ve met Ara?” Dad aimed his thumb at me.

  “Yes, sir.” She added a little too much ‘cutesy’ to that eyelash batting, and my mouth fell open. She totally had a crush on my dad.

  “Right. I want you to help—” he looked at me as he passed some papers to Emily. “Just Ara?”

  “Ara’s fine,” I said. Hint, hint.

  “Help Ara get up to date with our lessons, please?”

  “Sure thing, Mr Thompson.” Emily grabbed my hand and dragged me to sit next to her—right in the front—right where Dad would be able to see my every move.

  “Um, do you always sit here?” I asked, plonking down.

  “Yup. I can see the teacher better.” She watched Dad walk across the room and push the antique gramophone, normally in our attic, out of the way.

  “Why would that be a good thing?”

  “Are you kidding me?” She motioned her open palm to my dad. “Look at him.”

  Uh-oh. “Um, Emily—”

  “Isn’t he cute?” she continued. “Don’t you think he looks just like Harrison Ford—but, like, Indiana Jones Harrison Ford?”

  I glanced at my dad, my nose crinkling as I took notice of his greying, light-brown hair and the creases he’d get around his kind eyes when he smiled. I guess he did sort of look like Indiana Jones. “Emily,” I whispered again.

  “Yeah.” She sighed, dreamily gazing up at him.

  There was no easy way around it. I had to tell her before she embarrassed herself further. “He’s…my dad.”

  She spun around so quickly that I jumped. “You are kidding me. Oh my God, Ara. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I’m so sorry, I just, I didn’t realise you were—”

  “We are so having a sleepover at your house.” She practically jumped in her seat. “I’ve had a crush on Mr Thompson for, like—” she flipped her head to one side, “—two years.”

  My tongue pushed into the side of my cheek. I really did not expect that. I thought she might be a little humiliated at the least, but I guess it was better this way. “Two years, huh?”

  “Yup. It’s why I take History.”

  “That’s…disturbing.”

  “Not really.” She shrugged, gnawing the tip of her pen. “You could look at it as though your dad is inspiring my education.”

  I wondered if he’d feel the same way. Instead of rolling my eyes at her, I turned my head back to watch Dad writing the words ‘Religious History’ on the board.

  “Oh, come now, it’ll be fun and you know it,” he announced to the groaners around the room, then turned back to write on the board again.

&
nbsp; Emily leaned in. “He’s right,” she whispered. “He always makes boring topics fun.”

  “I know.” I smiled to myself. “He even used to do all the voices of characters when he’d read to me.”

  “He does that in class—” Emily laughed, “—when he reads direct from text books. Sometimes he puts on different accents.”

  As I went to laugh, my eyes darted quickly from my dad to a boy beside me, who jolted forward in his seat, a scrunched-up piece of paper bouncing off his desk, landing on his schoolbag a second later. He spun around, presenting his middle finger to the boys up the back, while my dad remained oblivious, glancing from a textbook to the whiteboard.

  “What a loser,” one of the boys said.

  I turned away and leaned closer to Emily. “Do they know that by making that L sign on their own heads, they’re technically making themselves look like losers?”

  She rolled her eyes. “They are losers.”

  I let out a small laugh.

  In the seat across from me, the boy scrunched up a sheet of paper, hiding it under his desk, keeping his eyes on my dad the whole time. I looked back at the jocks, who watched the kid with an amused kind of interest, until they broke formation suddenly, launching to their feet as he sent a paper cannon into enemy territory.

  “Oh, crap.” Emily covered her head with her notepad, smiling. “He just started a war.”

  I went to duck too, but Dad started in with something about Greek gods, forcing a cease-fire; the jocks sat down, and the boy knocked the ammo into his open backpack.

  “Looks like they’ll live to fight another day,” I said.

  “No,” Emily whispered under my dad’s lecture. “It’ll just be a lunch-room continuation.”

  “Great. Food fight?”

  She shrugged. “Probably.”

  “Will David be in that?”

  It was a simple enough question, but my newfound affections rested too thickly in the undertone. She turned to me quickly, grinning, and before she could say Oh, my God, you like him, I said, “So, does my dad know you have a crush on him?”

  “No way.” She leaned back, her eyes wide. “I would be so humiliated.”

  I scratched my temple, wondering how admitting it to his daughter was any less humiliating.

  “So, how was the library, with David?” She kind of sung his name.

  I froze, wondering which parts of my amazing morning I should leave out. “It was okay. He seems nice.” I nodded casually, but Emily’s smile grew.

  “You like him.”

  I cleared my throat, repositioning my chair. “I think he’s...a nice...kid.”

  She scoffed in the back of her throat. And I knew, from the look on her face, exactly what she was about to say. “You so do like him.”

  “Nope.” I wore the face of denial, but the cheesy grin in my eyes must have changed the wording on my neon sign to ‘Oh my God. I totally do.’

  “I knew it.” She pointed at me. “I knew it.”

  I grabbed her finger and pushed it down. “I do not like him.”

  “Oh, I’ve seen that look before. You have Knight Fever.”

  “Knight what?”

  “It’s what we call it when all the girls swoon over David.”

  “I’m not swooning.” I turned my face away.

  “He’s charming, isn’t he?” She leaned on her hand, her thoughts a million miles away. “It’ll kill you, you know? Knight Fever. Have you heard the I don’t date speech yet?”

  I drew a tight breath.

  “Oh no. You have. Oh, I thought—” Her head moved slowly from side to side. “Well, now I’m sure he’s gay. I mean, I was sure you had to be his type. Us girls have pretty much got it down to a science.”

  “Got what down to a science?”

  “The girls David Knight will and will not scope.”

  “What’s scoping?”

  “Perving, you know…checking out.” She shrugged.

  Oh. “He scopes?”

  “He’s a hot-blooded male, Ara? Of course he does. Just, very subtly,” her tone dropped its certainty. “Like, he never actually looks, but he’s nicer to some than others. So, we’ve grouped together a sort of profiling on him.”

  “Okay, that’s just creepy,” I said, turning away.

  “It’s not—” she paused when my dad glared at us, “—it’s not like that. It’s just a bit of gossip. We don’t have, like, a file on him or anything.”

  “So, you thought I was his type?”

  “Well, I was sure, but…I guess not.” She shrugged, staring forward.

  And that was it. A shrug. That’s all I was? I really liked this guy, and I’d just been dusted off with a shrug?

  I drummed my fingers on the desk, trying really hard to focus on the legends of Zeus, but my stomach grumbled, making a fuss about my missed mid-morning snack, and nausea brought the taste of bile up to the back of my throat. “He seemed so genuine,” I turned and whispered to Emily, letting my temper get the better of me. “He walked me to every class. He was so nice, so sweet, and—” I told her about the bathroom gossip and the theatrical kiss.

  Her eyes rounded into her brow. “Are you serious?”

  “Yes. So what’s the deal then?”

  “He has. Never. Done. That before,” she exclaimed.

  “Okay? So why did he give me the speech?”

  She slowly looked away. “I can not figure that boy out.”

  The bell rang before I expected it to. I swallowed the last of my sentence and smiled at Emily; she was so easy to be around. At first, I thought she was a bit stuck up, but the last forty minutes suggested that might’ve just been a nasty first assumption.

  I jammed my books into my bag and frowned at the elbow in my rib. “What?”

  She nodded across the room. “Look.”

  At the end of my gaze, David came into focus, hands wedged in pockets, shoulder on the doorframe and a very sexy grin across his lips.

  “Hi,” I mouthed, looking down at my bag before he could see my cheeks change colour.

  “Mm-mm.” Emily shook her head, hugging her books.

  “What’s mm-mm?”

  “Hm, he likes you, Ara—he’s just trying not to show you.”

  “You think?” I looked back at David, now talking to my dad.

  “Come on, girl. Even Mr Thompson noticed the way he was staring at you.”

  “Oh no.” I hid behind my hand. “It’s the touch-my-daughter-and-you-die speech.” I wanted to melt—hide under my desk or slink away.

  Emily hummed, smiling. “They’re both so gorgeous.”

  “No, Emily,” I said flatly. “Only one of them is gorgeous.”

  “I agree,” she said. “Your dad is so much better.”

  We both laughed, but mine ended in a sigh. “I hope Dad doesn’t give David the creeps. I only just met the poor guy.”

  “Nah, he’s just making the lines clear. Can you blame him?”

  “Yes. He’s breaking all the rules I set out before I came here.”

  “You gave your dad rules?”

  I nodded.

  “Okay?” Dad said loudly, patting David on the shoulder.

  “I had no intentions of that, Mr Thompson,” David said, looking him right in the eye.

  I watched on in horror. “Oh God, just hide me now.”

  Emily laughed. “Let’s just hope you don't receive the tail-end of that lecture.”

  “Exactly what I was just thinking.” She must’ve known my dad pretty well. It felt kind of strange then to know I shared him with so many other kids. I always knew that, but never experienced it firsthand before.

  Dad sat back at his desk, and I chose the opportune moment, as he reached for something on the floor, to slink quietly past—sinking my neck into my shoulders.

  Emily, however, shamelessly stopped in front of the desk just to tell Dad how great his lecture was today. Never mind that she wasn’t even listening. I really quite liked Emily.

  “Hi, Dav
id,” I said.

  He just smiled and took my bag as we walked into the corridor.

  “Look, I’m so sorry. What was my dad saying to you?”

  He laughed once. “You know, it’s okay, Ara. If I was your father and I saw some punk kid look at you the way I’m sure I was, I wouldn't have used words.”

  We stopped walking, and I groaned, slamming my back against a row of lockers as I tried to rub the ache of mortification from my temples.

  “Of course,” David continued after a short breath, “if I’d known he was your dad, I might’ve thought twice about—”

  “Hanging out with me?” I dropped my hands to my sides. “I’m sorry. I should’ve told you.” And so, I lost my first friend. I was in no way offended, though. I knew going to the same school as my dad would have its pitfalls. I’d accepted that.

  “No—” He stepped closer to me, shaking his head. “No, Ara, I would have thought twice about staring at you that way—in front of him.” His words softened on the end.

  “Oh. Okay. Well, uh, I’m sorry I didn’t mention it earlier.”

  “Well, a heads-up would’ve been nice,” he said.

  “Touché.” I smiled, surprised he remembered me saying that in music class.

  “So?” We both said at the same time, then laughed.

  “You go.”

  “No, ladies first.” He bowed his head.

  “Um, about before—”

  “Okay, wait.” His hand came up like a stop sign; I snapped my mouth shut. “What I said before about dating?” He paused. “It was a mistake. I’m so used to having to give that speech, it just came out on auto. But I didn’t mean it for you. I was just illustrating how I don’t—I mean—I’m just not that kinda guy.” David’s fists clenched beside him. “What I meant was that I’d never date any of them—I didn’t mean that to include yo—I mean, what I'm trying to say is—” He looked directly into my eyes, and all the students in the hall seemed to disappear. “You’re not just any girl, Ara, I—” he swallowed, “—I…like you.”

  Uh? What? My lungs went tight, like a softball just got lodged in my chest. I looked around, waiting for a group of kids to jump out from behind the lockers and laugh at me, screaming April Fools. Despite it not being April.