by S. L. Naeole
I turned towards the door and squeaked. Standing before me was a rather tall, almost too tall woman, who held her head cocked to the side as she obviously took in my appearance while I took in her own. Her hair was a ferociously deep shade of burgundy, pulled so tightly back in a conservative bun, her bronze eyes tilted up in an unnatural angle.
“I asked you a question.”
Confused, I stared at her. She walked towards me and tapped my shoulder, but I was still unable to answer her.
“Not much for talking or are you afraid of what your answer is?” Her voice was deep, husky as she looked at my face with the same curiosity that I did hers. “What’s your name?”
“G-Grace,” I stuttered.
“Okay, Guh-Grace. Let’s try this again. Why are you in my classroom?”
“I came in here to think. I needed to get away from a meddling friend and the door was open.” My answer was honest and she knew it.
“Well, you’re an odd one to come to a classroom to get away. Most girls go to the bathroom or go for a long walk, Guh-Grace, not to an empty classroom.”
I snorted. “I haven’t had much luck with bathrooms, and I’m a little wary of long walks at the moment, so an empty classroom looks very appealing to me. And it’s Grace.”
“Excuse me?”
“My name; it’s Grace.”
She smiled, her teeth long and white. “Well, thank you for the clarification, Grace. If you don’t mind me asking, which class are you currently skipping in order to escape your meddlesome friend?”
It was impossible not to smile back at her; her face was so warm and inviting. “I’m not skipping class; I’ve got free period right now. I normally spend it in the library, but Stacy—my friend—she just wouldn’t leave things alone. I didn’t want to end up saying something to her that I’d end up regretting later, so I left.”
She nodded and waved her arm in a semi-circle, indicating the classroom as she spoke. “Well, welcome to my classroom, Grace. I’m the new Psychology teacher. I was hired to replace one of your teachers that no longer works here, a Mr. Oliver Frey I believe his name was.”
“Oh,” I managed to say as I looked away, suddenly flustered.
“Did you know him? Were you in any of his classes?”
I nodded, and continued to look elsewhere, unable to give her a verbal answer.
“I’ve heard some stories about him that aren’t all too flattering. He’s going to be a pretty difficult hurdle to overcome, but I think I’ll be alright. What do you think?”
I forced a smile onto my face and nodded once more before turning and heading to gather up my binder and bag. I shoved the folder into my backpack and then hurried towards the exit.
“Aren’t you forgetting something?”
Slowly, I turned to face her and grimaced when she held out a heavily wrinkled, yet un-crumpled sheet of paper. “It’s very beautiful. I don’t know who did this, but it must have taken a lot of time and effort to get such a message across. Who is he?”
I grabbed the drawing from her and shoved it into my backpack alongside the binder. “A meddler,” I replied before leaving.
I was four steps out of the doorway when I walked straight into a wall. I looked up to see my meddler standing directly in front of me, a very concerned look on his face.
“You’re in my way,” I seethed. I tried to step around him, but I knew that the moment I thought of it, he was there, blocking my way once more.
“I’m not going to let you put yourself in danger like this, Grace,” he said in a soft voice, one that caused an unnatural pain to burn through my chest.
“The only danger I was ever in was put there by you. Get out of my way, Robert.”
“No. I left you alone once, resulting in someone messing with your memories. I will not let that happen again, Grace, regardless of where you and I stand at the moment.”
“At the moment? Where we stand isn’t going to change, Robert, and I’m not in the mood to discuss my memories, or my safety with you or anyone right now. I simply want to be left alone.”
I tried to push past him, but he grabbed onto my arm and held firmly. I looked at his hand and then at him, quickly shutting my eyes to the hurt stare that came from those silver irises. “I will let you go, Grace, when I know you’re safe. I won’t bother you, but I’m not leaving your side. Your safety is paramount, not just to me, but to your friends and family as well. Think of how your father would feel, knowing that you were hurt again just as Janice is in the hospital. Think of what it would do to him if something happened to you.”
The truth in his words stung, and I couldn’t admit to it. “Fine,” was all I could say.
He nodded. I didn’t see it. I just felt it. It was a relieved, almost elated motion, and then the pressure from his hand was gone. I opened my eyes and saw that he was as well.
“Are you still here, Grace?”
The teacher from inside the classroom was standing in the doorway. She looked at me with a curious stare, her posture showing a slight annoyance that I was still there.
“Um. Yeah,” I replied. “What was your name again, Ms…?”
“Deovolente. Mrs. Deovolente.”
I quickly glanced to her left hand and felt my lips twitch when I saw the glint of silver on her ring finger. “You’re married then?”
She smiled and nodded, quickly hiding her hand behind her back. “Is there any particular reason you wanted to know this, Grace?
“Just…curious.”
“Well, curious or not, it seems rather forward for a student to ask such questions. However, quid pro quo, right? I asked you some questions that probably felt a little forward for your liking, and now you have done the same to me. Now, if you don’t mind, I think I’ll go to the cafeteria to get some lunch.”
She walked past me and stopped several feet away, her head turning from left to right.
She turned around to face me, her mouth opening to ask the question I already knew the answer to. I pointed to the left and watched as she smiled and headed in that direction. I listened as the sound of her heels clicking on the ground faded away, and then sighed.
“She’s new to Heath.”
“Gaaah! Why are you still here?”
I threw my hands up in frustration as Robert looked on sadly. “I said you could follow me. I didn’t say you could hang around like nothing happened.”
“Grace, one day we will have to talk about what happened. We cannot leave things the way they are.”
I glowered at him and shook my head. “We don’t have to talk about anything. It’s over between us. It probably never should have begun but it did, and now we’re done. There’s nothing that you can say or do to change my mind.”
“You still love me, Grace.”
“Of course I do,” I said, swallowing the pain that accompanied the admission, yet unable to mask the crack in my voice. “That doesn’t just disappear because my heart’s dead, no matter how much I want it to. But it’ll go away or be replaced, one of the two.”
I saw it. A flicker of anger that darkened the silver in his eyes to a deep, antique pewter. He took a step towards me and then stopped. “Sometimes you can be so…so…”
“What? Human?”
He shoved his hands through his hair, the pitch strands gliding through easily and laying back perfectly, the image causing such an indelible pain to shoot through my chest, I nearly fell over. “So amazing.”
What could I say to that? What was there to say? I stood there, silent as he took a hold of my right hand and brought it to his face. I felt the coolness of his skin against mine and against my will, the electrical connection that had always existed between us lit ablaze. It was all consuming and the heat was beginning to overtake what little sense I might have possessed.
“Where is your ring?”
The question acted like a damper, and immediately the flames were gone. “What?”
He pointed to my bare finger, the look in his eyes accusatory.
“Your ring? Where is it? Did you get rid of it like you did everything else? Thrown in the trash like some meaningless piece of garbage?”
I stared at my finger and tried desperately to recall what it was that I had done with it, but I kept drawing a blank. I looked at him and saw that my inability to answer his question was only confirming what he believed.
“I don’t know. I honestly don’t know what happened to it. I can’t remember.”
He let go of my hand and stepped away from me. “You did throw it away. Clothing and pictures…I can understand that. Those are meaningless. But that ring—I gave you that ring as a pledge of myself. It was a promise to you that I would always be with you, always love you, and you just tossed it aside like it was worthless. Like what we were was worthless.”
Though I wanted to apologize, instead I grew angry.
“You mean like how worthless you viewed my trust? You were the only person I ever felt safe with, and you threw that away for ambition and who knows what else. I honestly don’t remember what happened to the ring, but at the moment, I wish I did throw it away because it obviously holds more value to you than I ever did.”
I stormed off, heading towards the cafeteria just as the bell rang. He didn’t follow me. He wouldn’t risk continuing this argument in front of the school. The little round table that had held such fond memories just a few weeks earlier now seemed like such a cold and lonely place.
I placed my backpack on the ground beside me and my head on the table’s surface. I listened as quickly, the noise level in the cafeteria grew to its normal state, a cacophony of laughter and chairs scraping against the ground, of forks clinking against dishes, and liquids being slurped through slim straws. I waited for the familiar sounds of the chairs beside me being pulled back, waited for the slamming of heavy, food filled trays against the table; I just…waited.
It felt like an eternity before I felt a familiar hand against my shoulder. I peeked up to look at warm and friendly green eyes and smiled. “Hi.”
“Hey yourself,” he said smiling back. He placed his fork into a mound of something unrecognizable and shoveled it into his mouth, chewing slightly before beginning to speak. “So Lark told me that you’ve agreed to let Robert follow you around. Are you going to be okay with that?”
I shook my head. “Do I have a choice, though? He’s going to do it whether I want him to or not, although I think he might not want to anymore.”
Graham’s fork was poised in the air at those last words. “What do you mean? What did you do?”
I showed him my hand, my bare finger showing evidence of a ring having once sat there. “Ouch. Did you throw it away?”
I shook my head. “I don’t remember what happened to it. I know that I didn’t throw it away, though. I wouldn’t have done that.”
He touched my finger with his thumb and rubbed the pale band the ring had left in my skin. “Of course you wouldn’t have. He’ll realize it soon enough.”
I didn’t know those why five words meant so much to me, especially when Robert’s feelings were the last things I should have been concerned with, but hearing them gave me a slight comfort. I rationalized it as me simply not wanting to be the bad guy in any way, to have that title belong wholly to him.
Stacy and Lark soon joined us, Stacy sitting next to me, while Lark sat beside Graham. Her face was exceptional, the smile on her lips one of genuine happiness and it was enough to cause most people who passed by to stop and stare for just a moment.
“You look like a loon,” Stacy quipped as she spooned some orange gelatin into her mouth.
“A happy, content loon I hope,” Lark replied. She turned her attention to Graham, who had suddenly forgotten the mountain of food he had in front of him. Instead, he had eyes only for her, and as the two of them stared at each other, their mouths not moving, I knew exactly why.
And I hated it.
I grabbed my backpack and stood up. “I’ve got to…go to the restroom.”
I heard another chair scrape against the floor and saw Stacy stand up beside me. “I’ll join you.”
I groaned in disappointment, but saw that she wasn’t going to take no for an answer. I sighed and nodded in defeat.
As we walked out of the cafeteria’s doors and headed towards the restroom a quick burst of pain in my head caused me to close my eyes. Behind my lids, I could see a blur of movement, a flash of gold wisps before it was swallowed up by the darkness of my shut eyes.
When I reopened them, we were still walking, as though nothing had happened. Stacy was rambling on about something one of her brothers had done to another, and she was laughing, obviously whatever it was being funny though I had completely missed the joke. I could see the sign on the ceiling with the little blue arrow pointing towards the bathroom just a few feet away, and I sighed in relief.
As we passed the stairwell that led to the basement classrooms, I heard an exaggerated hiss, followed by the pumping of feet against tile. A curtain of gold suddenly appeared, and I was jolted from the ground. People say that sometimes, when something happens to you that’s traumatic, things seem to pass by very slowly, as though to help you remember them better when questioned about it later.
This wasn’t the case with me as everything happened in real time. I saw the edge of the top stair move past me and saw the corner of a step further down come closer to my face before it made contact with my left cheek. I shut my eyes to the crunch of bone against concrete and reopened them to see my feet tumble above my head as I toppled downwards, landing awkwardly on my arm as a very loud and distinct pop could be heard in the empty stairwell.
Stacy’s angry shouts could be heard above me, but all I could see was the mismatched pattern in the tile beneath my face. I could see a slow trickle of blood flow past me. I knew it was pouring out from my mouth, following the natural pull of gravity downward, and I watched as it made its way through the gap between the stairs.
The commotion at the top of the steps was growing louder, but no one seemed to be coming to help. I tried to move my arms to push me up, but only one wanted to work, the other one stubbornly lying useless beneath me. I grunted as the pain shot through me, but finally managed to get myself to a sitting position, pushing myself back against the wall. It hurt to breathe, but I was grateful that I could do it.
My legs were fine but my left arm hung limply at my side. I reached up with my right hand and pulled myself to a standing position, groaning as a pain shot through my side. The groan, in turn, caused my face to sting, and I gingerly pressed my fingers to my left cheek, hissing as I did so.
“Grace? Are you okay?”
Stacy’s voice called out above me and I raised my head to see a crowd of onlookers standing at the top of the stairs, their curious gazes all aimed directly at me.
“I’m okay, Stacy. I think I’ve got a dislocated shoulder though, and a cracked rib,” I replied, wincing. “I also bit the inside of my cheek, but that’ll heal.”
I saw the crowd move and Graham came rushing down to greet me, his face stained with worry and anger. “Are you alright? Anything broken?”
“I’m alright, Graham. I probably won’t know about anything being broken until I get to the hospital, though,” I told him and allowed him to slowly pull me up the stairs. The gathering of students moved aside as we emerged from the stairway, and I glared at the struggling person who was being detained by a very irate Stacy.
Erica was fuming, her golden hair a wild array of tangles as she fought against Stacy’s grip. “Let me go, you freak!”
I walked up to her, my head ringing as I did so, and I looked at her. She stared at me with glassy eyes, and I frowned when I saw the emptiness in them. “Robert was right. There is nothing in there,” I whispered.
“Why can’t you just die, freak? Just die!” she screamed at me, her eyes growing wild, her hands clenching into tight fists.
I tried to shake my head, but it hurt just blinking. I turned slowly towards the fast footsteps that we
re approaching us from down the hall. Several teachers and Mr. Kenner, the vice-principal, were storming towards us with a steely determination. The only question was for what?
Stacy bent her head low to mine and whispered into my ear before we were interrupted. “Now do you see why you need bodyguards?”
I looked at Erica and nodded grimly. I had no doubt as I looked into her blank eyes that had she been left alone, she would have continued her assault on me. The only thing that had kept her from that was Stacy’s presence.
“You knew Robert wasn’t here. That’s why you came with me.”
It was her turn to nod now, and I shook my head at the strange turn my life had taken. As the teachers started to ask their questions, I feared that things were only going to get more complicated. I had been back in school for only half a day and I had already managed to piss off an angel and nearly get killed by my best friend’s ex-girlfriend. If this was how the rest of the year was going to be like, life was going to be very difficult indeed.
LIFE OR SOMETHING UNLIKE IT
The first time I could truly appreciate being eighteen was when I realized that the school didn’t have to call the hospital to inform Dad that I had been injured. It was a revelation of sorts that I could spare him—at least for a little while—the knowledge that once again, someone had tried to kill me.
Mr. Kenner, having heard the details of what had happened, seemed far more apologetic towards Stacy and I as he took Erica to his office to await the arrival of the police. It had been Stacy that demanded they were called as soon as a student could make it to the office to relay the message.
Graham and Stacy walked me to his car. He drove to the hospital while Stacy remained behind to give her account of what happened to the police. He parked crookedly in the emergency room lane, jumping out and nearly sliding across the roof of the car to get to my side. He opened the door and gingerly pulled me out, insisting on carrying me inside despite my protestations.
“Grace? Is that you?”
I turned my head to the familiar voice and smiled. “Dr. Ambrose! Yes, unfortunately, it is me. Again.”
