Book of Dark #1: Always Stand Up

by Deepak Khanchandani

  Chapter 5

  The New Girl

  The wooden bench outside the Principal’s office was old, rickety, and one that Keane was only too familiar with.

  Keane sat on the wobbly furniture in silence, holding a bunch of blood-soaked tissues to his nose and staring dead ahead at the sign above the door, which read ‘MR. SMITH—PRINCIPAL’ in chipped, faux-gold letters.

  Since they’d started at John Atkins High, Keane and Brok had found themselves frequenting both the bench and the Principal’s office far too often for their liking. In fact, by now Keane knew the Principal well enough to recognize his office’s isolated location as the deliberate attempt that it really was to ensure the absence of pesky kids so that peace and quiet prevailed.

  Keane had also come to suspect that the Principal derived some sort of pleasure from knowing that wrongdoers sent to his office would have to endure a long, tedious walk, and in haunting silence at that, which would give them ample time to rethink the life choices that had brought them down these secluded corridors in the first place.

  Although Keane had his head pointed at the sign, he wasn’t really looking. What he was actually trying to do was block out Brok again.

  “That was crazy!” said Brok, hyperactively pacing the hallway while over-expressing with his hands. “I heard it all! He was like Bam! And you were like Boof!”

  Keane remained mute. He was not in the mood to relive the ordeal he’d just suffered. Already, his heart sank every time he remembered the lost newspaper cutting.

  Saving up for that article had meant skipping lunch almost every day for months, but Keane hadn’t minded one bit because if the article could have shed any light on his past—where he’d come from, or who his parents were and what had happened to them, or what his connection to the power plant was—it would all have been worth it. But now, it was gone, taking with it the last trace of his origins.

  “Uh, until he kicked your ass, that is,” said Brok, finally sensing Keane’s morose mood. “I mean, that bit su-hucked!” He shook the bench as he took a seat and offered up some fresh tissues. Without turning, Keane snatched these out of his hands and replaced the old wad pressed against his nose.

  He knew that taking his anger out on Brok was unfair. After all, not only had the boy come to his rescue against Grouchina, accepted her detention slip without complaint, sat with him throughout his visit to the nurse’s office, and distracted the nurse with jokes so that she wouldn’t ask too many questions, but he was now going to have to bear whatever ill-conceived disciplinary torture tickled Mr. Smith’s fancy as well.

  Yes, Keane was fully aware that he was merely projecting, but he couldn’t help it. He was frustrated. And not just with the Bullies, either. He was also sick of the system, which was clearly flawed since, yet again, it was him and Brok who found themselves sat outside Mr. Smith’s office waiting to be reprimanded instead of Randy and the Bullies. The injustice of it all was too much for Keane to bear.

  “This needs to stop,” he said darkly, in a way that made it clear he wasn’t just talking about his nosebleed.

  Brok shifted uneasily in his seat.

  “Come on, Keane,” he said. “We both know what we are. And, more importantly, what we’re not. We’re not big. We’re not strong. And we’re certainly not smart. We’re barely even average. For guys like us sometimes it’s better to just, you know… roll over.”

  Keane turned sharply and scowled at Brok and his easy surrender. When Brok saw the fury in his eyes, he seemed to pee his pants a little.

  “J-Just saying,” Brok muttered with a shrug.

  “Once again, Ms. Mehrzeen, welcome to John Atkins High.” The boys jumped as the Principal’s booming voice filled the corridor. They hadn’t heard the door open, and now the large, graying man was stood before them, speaking over his shoulder to someone inside his office.

  “I am certain your peers will make you quite welcome,” said Mr. Smith. Then he turned to the boys and his voice took on an entirely different tone. “Keane! Brok! Get in here!”

  Brok jumped to his feet.

  “On it like a bonnet!” He chuckled and slapped his knee, the inadvertent rhyme amusing him to no end. Seeing the decidedly opposite effect it had on Mr. Smith, though, he hastened to rein it in. “I mean, yes sir, Mr. Smith? Sir?”

  Mr. Smith just pointed him crossly toward the office. Brok instantly lurched forward, his short legs scampering across the corridor.

  Having satisfactorily dealt with Brok, the Principal turned impatiently to Keane.

  But Keane was frozen, wonderstruck, floating in sus­pended animation, lost in a haze of seemingly interminable mesmerization.

  Time had slowed down—right down—and joined him in holding its breath. And in that unpassing moment, there was no Mr. Smith. There was no bleeding nose. There was no Brok. And no dread.

  There was just… the new girl.

  The dusky teen glided out of the Principal’s office with her head lowered, timidly gnawing at her bottom lip. She looked up to smile warmly at Mr. Smith as she passed him, and Keane couldn’t help but wonder if she wasn’t just about the prettiest thing he’d ever seen.

  His gaze traveled from the glossy pink of her lips, to the dimples of her cheeks, and up to her dark smoky-eye makeup. She wore square-framed glasses, and half her face was covered by the dark cedar bangs that slanted right-to-left across her face.

  Most mesmerizing of all, though, were her vixen-like eyes—walnut brown pupils, surrounded by bright, golden caramel irises, floating in seas of white. So absorbed was he by them that it took him a few moments to register that the girl was looking straight back at him too.

  Instantly, his knees buckled. He grabbed the bench for support and tried to avert his gaze, but, for the life of him, found himself unable to. He noticed that the girl wasn’t looking away from him either. In fact, she was smiling at him instead.

  She shyly adjusted her glasses and tucked a few strands of stray hair behind her ear, which made Keane’s heart swell to such an extent that he thought it might just burst.

  He felt his hands begin to shake and tingle once more. Afraid that they’d start glowing again, he swiftly retracted them behind his back, but this was a bad idea as it left the dried blood caked around his nose unchecked.

  Only when red flakes fell from his nostrils and lodged themselves into his favorite T-shirt did it dawn on him that the girl could just be staring because of the truly inexcusable state he was in—clothes stained with blood and dirt, face covered with fresh bruises.

  It also struck him that he’d just been standing there, grinning at her like an utter moron.

  He tried to subdue the ghastly grin, which he just knew he had plastered on his face, while simultaneously attempting to move forward, but his legs were still jelly from the fight. It took all his strength just to put one foot in front of the other.

  Then he imagined how he probably looked right about now—with his hands behind his back, his elbows flapping like wings, and his knees wobbling thanks to the jelly legs. There was no escaping it: he looked like a demented chicken. And that was before the blood and the bruises and the hideous grin which, despite his best efforts, was just not going away anytime soon.

  She was still looking at him, though, and still smiling, somehow unperturbed by his appearance. He took this as a good sign and thought that he should probably talk to her. But before he knew it, she was walking past him.

  He had to say something. Anything. Now!

  “Know you… I…? Do I… you…? I know?”

  He smacked his face with instant regret and decided that he would never speak again, at least not to girls, and then he winced in pain as he’d just hit his own nose.

  The fail was all the more excruciating because he really hadn’t intended for it to sound like he was spouting pickup lines, but, once again, his ineptitude with girls had sealed the embarrassing outcome.

  The girl giggled. “Hi, Keane.”

  Keane’s jaw dr
opped. She knew his name? How did she know his name? Had she just heard Mr. Smith call him? Possibly, but that didn’t explain the smiling or the staring.

  Keane was so perplexed that he hadn’t noticed his own hand rise to wave in response to the girl’s greeting. He turned to it curiously, regarding it as though it were under the control of an alien intelligence. Distracted by this unexpected sentience, he missed the protruding belly looming toward him and proceeded to crash face-first into it.

  As he bounced off the surprisingly sturdy tummy, it took Keane a few moments to register exactly what had happened.

  The first thing he recognized was his own blood which, freshly unleashed by the impact, was now trickling down the Principal’s tie with gay abandon, spreading to the pristine, white shirt, and generally making him lose the will to live.

  Next, he recognized the look on Mr. Smith’s reddening face. It basically meant that the old man was about to multiply whatever punishment he’d previously had in store for the boys.

  Keane’s train of thought was interrupted by another bout of dread, one not stemming from Mr. Smith’s impending sentencing, but from the fact that the girl with the square glasses and the caramel eyes, the one who somehow knew his name, was getting away.

  “What the devil is wrong with you, Mr. Davies?” yelled Mr. Smith, frantically wiping his tie down with the handkerchief he’d produced from his pocket.

  “I-I was…” Keane mumbled, only half paying attention as he desperately hunted for the new girl. But the corridor was empty. She was gone.

  “You know, Mr. Davies,” said Mr. Smith, “kids like you had better watch where they were going. Unpopular students with poor grades tend to end up short on life options.”

  Keane turned to Mr. Smith and seethed. The Principal was wrong about him. So wrong. But now was hardly the time for self-righteousness, so Keane stifled his rebuttal and tried to look as meek as he could instead.

  “Yes, Mr. Smith,” he said through gritted teeth, “Sorry, Mr. Smith.”

  “Oh, just get in!” said Mr. Smith, irately motioning Keane into his office.

  “Sir.” Keane nodded and started toward the open door.

  “Besides…” added the old man, as Keane passed him. “She’s way out of your league.”

  “Wait, what?”

  Keane frowned and looked up, but Mr. Smith was already jostling him into the office. And as they entered the stuffy little room, Keane nearly choked at the sight that greeted him.

  Brok was perched atop the Principal’s desk, jovially swinging his legs back and forth. When he spotted them, he lit up with unchecked glee and began to rub his hands together as if about to tuck into a long anticipated meal.

  “Let’s do this,” he said.

  “Get off my table, Mr. Jacobs!” bellowed Mr. Smith.

  Brok’s smile vanished and he jumped off the table.

  “Sir! Off the table, Mr. Smith, Sir!” he yelled, standing as erect as he could, with a hand thrust to his temple in an awkward salute.

  The old man shook his head and muttered something indistinct under his breath as he slammed the door shut and made his way to his large, creaky leather chair behind his flimsy, wooden desk.

  As Brok took a seat on the opposite side and made himself comfortable, Keane slumped down on the chair next to him with a heavy sigh, bracing for whatever punishment was about to be levied.

  Brok grinned and flashed him an upturned thumb for luck. Keane turned away, deciding that the boy was in far too cheery a mood given the situation. But even as Keane shook his head, he couldn’t deny that the kid had been right about absolutely everything, from his constantly backfiring powers to the fact that they were nowhere near strong, or smart, or even average enough to take on the likes of Randy. Who were they, really, to square up to a boy who even most teachers feared?

  Lesson learned, Keane vowed to stick to the ol’ ‘run and hide’ routine going forward, article or no article.

  The Principal cracked open a large ledger, which Keane knew to be records of all the detentions the man had personally dished out, records which he no doubt delighted in thumbing through on quiet afternoons alone in his office.

  But Keane didn’t quite catch Mr. Smith’s next words because, just then, a vision flashed into his mind, after which a quiet serenity overcame him.

  It was peculiar how everything that seemed so important moments ago—from the Bullies and the unfairness, to Mr. Smith and his punishment, to even the article—all seemed so trivial now, their importance dwindling beside the vision…

  Beside the image of the girl with golden caramel eyes…