Delinquent

by M. F. Lorson

  Robyn has bipolar disorder. My sister was bipolar so I know what that's like. It’s why I was sympathetic toward Robyn. You might not know a lot about the disease. But it is a nightmare. It wrecks families, it wrecks lives. One minute a person is perfectly normal, not too high , not too low, and the next minute they are completely off their rocker and have no idea that the things they think are crazy by anyone else's standards. My sister once robbed my parents of 500.00 only to blow it on random yard sale finds. For a week she was out of her mind, manic, sweaty, crazed and confused. And then...and then a week later she was normal again trying to figure out why on earth she had done those things with very little memory of the experience. I wish I could say that Robyn spent money that didn’t belong to her, and that is how she ended up here. But that isn’t the case. Robyn’s mania, as you have likely caught onto by now, is far more destructive. When she’s manic there is no stopping her. She destroyed that barrack to find a necklace. She would destroy a person if they stopped her from getting something she wanted.

  Three months ago Robyn was in a fit of mania so severe that she lit her father’s yacht on fire. Her mother and siblings weren’t home at the time but her father was asleep on the boat. He died of smoke inhalation before the fire department arrived on the scene. When they did arrive Robyn was standing on the dock watching the place burn. When they asked her how the fire started she told them she started it herself because her family was a mess and they needed to start over. It was the first time anyone outside of her family had seen her sick and they couldn’t hide her illness anymore. A doctor diagnosed her with bipolar disorder and because of that diagnosis she was allowed to come to Huntley and Drake instead of prison. Her family could barely look at her, let alone get her the treatment she needed. As I’m sure you have figured out by now, the dean and Mrs Lewis have a soft spot for tough cases. They thought she could rehabilitate here but they underestimated her sickness. She may never be better. She will live with this disease the rest of her life. I’m writing to you now because you’ll want to abandon her. You’ll want to cut her out of your life and stick to the easy relationships that form around you without challenges. Maybe, you’ll want to hate her because thanks to her you now know some not great things about people you had previously decided were good. Maybe, you’ll want to hate her because her finding my list meant my expulsion and now you’re stuck with a cheerleading captain as a mentor. Maybe you’ll hate her because she talked you into breaking into that art closet (you think Jordan didn’t tell me about that one!). For whatever the reason, you’re going to want to hate her. Consider not. Consider that mental illness is a very real thing. Consider that her actions are a cry for help and that deep down beneath the mania she is still a person, still your friend. She’ll go back to Juvie now. There are still several years on her sentence and she has burned her bridge with the dean. When you have had time to calm down, maybe you could write to her?

  I’ve picked up on the fact that you care about people, even though you work extra hard at hiding that. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be okay. I’ll get my GED and a job. Worse things have happened in my life than being expelled from Huntley and Drake.

  You’ll make first cuts. I know it.

  Sydney.

  Chapter 22

  The following morning we attended class as usual. My testing schedule turned out to be less than ideal with math, bio and sociology all on tuesday and my skills assessment set for Monday morning. The only real blessing was that finals week meant no classes all week which gave us all ample time to study. It was funny, back at my old school I would have used finals week to binge watch netflix. Here at Huntley and Drake I had all but drug my cot into the library. I wanted things to be normal with Hayden. I needed things to be normal. He had gotten me through math and bio all term and I knew that finals week would be a nightmare without his help. Yet, I couldn’t be normal with him. Not until we talked about what happened at the assembly. We had been sitting in silence for twenty minutes him pouring over a bio book, the likes of which I would need a translator to understand and myself nervously tapping a pencil while re-reading the William Chambliss’s theory on deviance over and over again. As far as I knew he hadn’t talked to anyone to since yesterday afternoon. I couldn’t really blame him. Everyone was a little uneasy thanks to Robyn’s theatrics, but Hayden was easily the guy in the worst position. Suddenly, all those girls who followed him around like the twelve little french girls behind theirr nun, couldn’t so much as look his way. Even I was nervous around him and I knew better. At least I thought I did. He was the closest friend I had left but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I didn’t really know him. Just like I hadn’t really known Robyn.

  “I’d like to talk to you .” Hayden looked up from his bio book.

  “You don’t have to ask my permission.”

  “Privately.” Hayden took the books and papers strewn across the study table and packed them neatly into his backpack. I did the same.

  “I’m surprised you’re even talking to me. Aren’t you afraid of me?”

  “I’m not afraid of you.”

  “Maybe you should be. You heard what Robyn said. I’m a dangerous guy.” he rolled his eyes in exaggeration.

  “I’m trying to give you a chance to explain.”

  “What's there to explain? Attempted rape and battery. I’m the bad guy get it?”

  “So what, you attacked Robyn and Wanda and when Robyn found out about it she decided to expose you to the whole school?”

  “Of course not!”

  “Really? Because until you start talking no one has any reason to believe otherwise.” Hayden sighed. Whether he liked it or not. I made a pretty good point.

  “It’s cold outside. We can talk in the stacks.” I followed him through the fiction and into the row where they stored the classics. Before that assembly I viewed Hayden himself as a bit of a classic. He was every boy you read about in great love stories. A hero, a friend, the someone special that makes the lengthy prose and difficult vocabulary worth slogging through. I didn’t want that image of him ruined. But I didn’t want to pretend to know him anymore either. If we were friends then he would tell me the truth. Wouldn’t he?

  “I know you didn’t do those things Hayden. I can’t make myself believe that you did. So tell me the truth.”

  “What truth?”

  “How you ended up at Huntley and Drake in the first place.”

  “Why do you think I’m so different from anybody else? I committed a crime. I messed up and there are consequences for that.”

  “All do respect, you are different from everyone else.”

  “How so?”

  “You’re loaded!” Hayden laughed.

  “So is Robyn and probably one fourth of the student body. The rich aren’t perfect and you can’t buy your way out of everything.”

  “Robyn set her father’s yacht on fire with him in it.” I hissed. Hayden raised an eyebrow.

  “I didn’t know that. Jesus, that date does not sound so hot now.”

  “Yeah, so unless you’ve cleverly disguised your emotional nutbaggery you are not the same.”

  “You rolled over on Robyn pretty quickly,” snickered Hayden “I’m not feeling terribly confident about letting you in on my secrets.” I could scream. I wasn’t asking him for much, just the truth and pointing out my less than stellar reaction to Robyn’s shortcomings was a low blow.

  “I didn’t abandon Robyn because of what she did in the past. Everyone here has a past, but not everyone's a sinking ship taking everyone they can down with them.” Hayden ran his hands through his perfect blonde hair. I couldn’t tell how he felt. Did he really believe she deserved another chance? After what she cost Sydney?

  “She hasn’t exactly had the easiest year.”

  “No one has had the easiest year!”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “What I know is Sydney voluntarily took two strikes for her and Robyn all but tossed her off the bow in an ef
fort to make everyone on this campus uncomfortable.” It took me a moment to realize I was both shouting and crying. Half a dozen sets of eyes stealing glances over the top of their homework told me I was the only one who hadn’t noticed. You weren’t supposed to show weakness here. Like in Juvie, weakness was how you let the wolves know you were prey. It was the weak ones that fed the beasts, the weak ones that made the other’s strong. Liz and Ariel knew that, Wanda had perfected it. The last thing I needed was to establish myself as the bottom of the food chain. Hayden reached down to grab my hand where it trembled at my side.

  “Come on. We’re not going to get any studying done tonight. Besides,” he lowered his voice. “The vultures are circling.” He led me out of the library, past the girls who pretended to scribble in their notebooks but were unmistakably staring at where our fingers intertwined, past Wanda who looked at me curiously but had learned that assumptions were generally wrong. I wanted to be angry but mostly I was just sad. What was it about me that I couldn’t keep my friends from hurting themselves? I wished I had pushed Robyn harder in the beginning. Maybe, if I had known her past I could have helped her. If I’d known she was unstable I might have seen the signs earlier. Maybe I couldn’t have protected her, but Sydney would still be here. Hayden and I took a seat on a bench under one of the campus’s tallest trees. The wind had robbed it of all of its leaves but it was still beautiful, the way the branches stretched above us, a blanket of stars peeking through the gaps. With my arm tucked inside the crook of his, I rested my head on his shoulder.

  “Tell me why you’re here.”

  “What if it changes how you think of me?”

  “Whatever you did, I wouldn’t know you if you hadn’t.”

  “The short of it is that I assaulted someone.” I raised one eyebrow.

  “I’m gonna need the long version”

  “There's a lot you don’t know Kate.”

  “That’s the point. I’m trying to find out. I don’t want to be in the dark anymore. I don’t want that with you. We’re friends, you’re my best friend here now. I don’t want to be the last one to really know you.” With his free Hand Hayden stroked my arm, leaning into me without caution. To a stranger I’m sure we looked like more than friends but each of us knew that what held us together wasn’t a physical connection. Not that my palms didn’t go sweaty just sitting beside him. I may have been just his friend but I was also human!

  “I’m not the person you think I am. I’m not a good person.”

  “There's nothing you could say that would convince me otherwise.”

  “You promise?” He asked.

  “Well,” I shrugged. “Almost anything. There are a few things..there’s obviously a few things.” For the first time all week Hayden laughed. He pulled away enough to look me in the eye. In the moonlight I could just make out the shape of his face and the glitter of his eyes as they reflected particles of star light.

  “ Well here goes nothing. I’m truly going to start at the beginning so you might as well get comfortable.”

  “Good,” I smiled, “screw the partial truths!”

  “screw them indeed! Here goes nothing. I never met my father. I’ve never seen a picture of him, or heard a story about what kind of man he was. He’s responsible for me biologically. Maybe I look like him, maybe we have the same sense of humor, maybe there's nothing that links him to me. I’ll never know because even my mother doesn’t know him.”

  “I’m sorry and also, you weren’t kidding. This is like...the beginning, beginning.” Hayden nodded and continued on.

  “Thanks to him my mother hates me. The man who raised me hates me. Aside from teenage girs I’m not so sure anyone likes me.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Really? Hows your friend Jordan feel about me?” He had a point.

  “I think you just got off on the wrong foot.”

  “Yeah, maybe so but do you ever consider why? Why in a school filled with delinquents it took Jordan roughly thirty seconds to decide I was scum?” The truth was I hadn’t considered why. Not until that assembly anyway. Thus far Jordan had never steered me wrong. He was the one who told me about Sydney, defended Wanda and warned me about Robyn. Whatever reason he had for disliking Hayden, it was likely a good one. Even so, everyone deserves a chance to explain.

  “Give me a chance to decide for myself. Why don’t you know your father? What did he do that your mother couldn’t forgive?” Hayden let go of my arm, sitting up straight and clasping his hands in front of him he began to tell me the story that had shaped his entire life.

  Chapter 23

  Later that night while lying in bed I reflected on everything Hayden had told me. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t change my perspective of him. It did. But not in the way he thought. I loved him a little more, because clearly no one else in his life had bothered to. Hayden’s mother was engaged to his step-father Patrick. They had been engaged for eleven months when Sheila was brutally raped under the bleachers after a college football game. Whether she’d been drugged or coerced under their Hayden would never know. It wasn’t the sort of story his mother told him before bedtime. Sheila was raped and Hayden was the result. He always knew there was something different about his family, but up until age eight he assumed it was only his overactive imagination that dreamed it really had something to do with him. But his family had money, and with money came parties, with parties came rumors, and the combination of the both led to one sloppy drunk uncle revealing that there was a reason he looked nothing like his father. The rest he discovered on his own over time. Once he knew he couldn’t unknow and every moment with his parents became strained. Sometimes he would catch his mother staring at him. Not in the warm way that mothers observe their little boys, no when Sheila actually took the time to look at him it was in search of his father. She seemed to search endlessly for him in Hayden’s face. He could almost feel her dissecting the parts of him that resembled her in search of what was left.

  So when a boy at school put two and two together that Hayden wasn’t Patrick’s, all it took was one taunt to send Hayden flying off the handle. He’d spent the better part of his life pretending not to know what people really thought of him. Hearing it out loud was too much. He jumped on the kid. Right there in the school yard with everyone watching. He didn’t hit him once. He hit him till the kid was unconscious, even then the principal had to drag him off. Had there been no principal Hayden might not have been so fortunate as to be sent to Huntley and Drake. He was pretty sure nothing would have stopped him. And that is what terrified him, the fact that his rage had come so quickly from nowhere. That he could be lit like a stick of dynamite, violent, like his father. Jordan had seen that in him, just like his mother, and numerous other people in his life. Once you knew something like that about a person you couldn’t not see it. He was his father’s son. Who would believe otherwise when he didn’t know for certain himself? He hated his father for what he had done but he wished he’d known him. If only to learn how to be nothing like him.

  The rape charge? It wasn’t a charge it was an accusation, and one that had been dropped at that. The kid he beat senseless wasn’t too keen on having his face pummeled in front of the student body. He got his girlfriend to say Hayden had assaulted her. It might have stuck if his legal council hadn’t been the best that money can buy. It didn’t take too long in the interrogation room for the girl to crack and admit her claim was nothing more than a revenge tactic. Hayden had a theory that someone at Huntley and Drake knew about that charge and was using to his advantage. There weren’t that many people on campus that knew what the newbies were in for.

  I couldn’t allow myself to think about the people on that list. Not before cuts, I had to get my head together and that meant focusing on my sociology presentation. The only good thing to come out of Robyn’s expose was that it made it abundantly clear what the real meaning of deviance was. I finally knew what I would say and it felt sorta good. For the first time in my life I w
as actually excited about a school project. Maybe Dean Humphries was right to believe in me. Maybe I belonged here. Maybe it was time to move on and let go of the man in the big blue house. The problem was, letting go of him meant letting go of Chelsea and every time I imagined that, it felt like betrayal.

  Chapter 24

  It was cruel, the way the universe let me crawl into bed content and wake up as confused and angry as the day he took her. Why is it I always dreamt the things I wanted to forget? We were back at the fence of course, crouched low to avoid being spotted even though it was winter and dark enough to hide in plain sight. It had been a week since we saw the face in the window. We had to prove to ourselves she was real. That it wasn’t just our imagination shifted into overdrive. We moved swiftly over the fence, careful not to make any noise, careful not to give ourselves away. We crouched below the window, our bodies pressed against the shed. Even in the dark I could see that Chelsea was afraid. What had we seen? What were we about to see? Who would we tell and who would believe us? The words of children are useless when matched up against an adult. With her hand in mine we slowly rose so that our chins met the window sill. It was pitch black inside, just like the time before.