Broken (11 page)

I let go as soon as we reached the fringe of
the crowd, and prayed it was only my imagination that made me think
Brandon was just the slightest bit relieved. Luckily there was
plenty to distract me.

It looked like there'd been some kind of war
behind the school. The flagpole had a massive dent in one side, and
actually looked like it was leaning slightly to one side. The
straggly grass, kept just barely alive by the nearly non-existent
rain and irregular watering by some anonymous grounds keeper, had
been torn up. Large patches of reddish dirt had been exposed and
the ground was scarred by gouges that looked like they'd been made
by some kind of farm machinery except for being so irregular.

My eyes were momentarily pulled back to the
ground. Something about the gouges was tickling the back of my
mind. Had I seen something like that before? Hiking maybe? Only I
could count the number of hikes I'd actually participated in on one
hand. Surely something like that would've stayed with me.

Someone gasped as the crowd shifted around,
distracting me from my half-formed suspicions. I looked over at the
exterior wall of the school and felt my jaw drop. Maybe mom had
read the story about the three little pigs a few too many times to
me when I was growing up, but I'd always thought of brick as the
strongest possible building material. I didn't have any idea if it
really was, but it seemed incredible that anything could've wreaked
such damage.

The bricks on the wall next to the door were
cracked and set back in the wall, almost like they'd been hit with
some kind of wrecking ball, and the concrete of the sidewalk had
gouges criss-crossing its surface like some kind of abstract
painting.

"There's nothing to see here kids. I want you
to all disperse and go to your home rooms."

The short, mostly bald man who'd ordered us
all to leave, was just visible through a gap in the crowd. He
walked like an administrator, but I hadn't ever seen him
before.

"Who's that?"

Brandon started just a little, like he'd been
thinking of something else. "Mr. Rindell, the assistant
principal."

Now that my complete attention wasn't on the
various destroyed bits of school property, I noticed how much
whispering was going on. Most of it was too quiet to catch more
than bits and pieces, but I heard more than one 'completely jacked
up', and a few people wondering what could have caused that kind of
destruction. Mr. Rindell apparently heard much of the same snippets
of conversation.

"You would think by now you'd all be old
enough to figure some of this out on your own. The flag pole was
obviously hit by some kind of vehicle, probably one of those big
4x4's that you kids seem to love so much down here. The damage to
the brickwork was no doubt the work of those stupid potato guns.
Now get out of here before I start handing out detention
assignments."

Brandon was tugging on my arm now, not hard
enough for anyone to think he'd been driven off by a mere school
administrator, urgently enough I allowed myself to be guided away.
We hadn't gone more than a step or two before his grip on my arm
grew painful.

I hissed in discomfort and he released me,
but not before I noticed that his other hand was white knuckled and
his jaw was clenched.

"Sorry, I just don't like to see that kind of
needless destruction. It makes everyone look bad and costs the town
a lot of money."

Brandon's smile was back, but it didn't have
his trademark easy carelessness.

"Now you sound like my mom."

We rounded a corner before Brandon could say
anything else and nearly ran into Britney.

"Guys! Did you see the back door?"

I could almost see the wheels turning in
Britney's head. First she went red as she remembered she'd stranded
me at school, then her eyes got a little wider as she realized it
was still about five minutes too early for me to have arrived on
the bus.

Brandon's normal smile was back. "Yeah,
Adriana noticed it almost as soon as we pulled up to the
school."

Her suspicions that Brandon had given me a
ride into school satisfied, Britney managed a sickly smile and
mumbled something about seeing us later as she disappeared around
the corner.

I managed to make it another twenty feet
before I couldn't restrain my laughter anymore. Brandon joined in
with a chuckle that was more restrained, but no less heartfelt. We
both wound down about the same time, and I wiped a tear off of the
corner of each eye.

"I should feel bad for laughing at her, but
she's so transparent. It's nice to see her served with a little
justice."

Brandon nodded with a smile. "It's a little
ironic. She threw you overboard because she was worried you'd limit
her upward mobility, and then the next day you arrive with the guy
she's had a crush on since the day she moved into Sanctuary."

I punched him on the shoulder, "You knew all
this time?"

Another laugh, and a smile at the way I was
trying to conceal how much the punch had hurt my hand. "Of course I
knew. It isn't like I could do anything about that. I've never led
her on, but I've always been aware she liked me."

There didn't seem to be much else to be said,
so I thanked Brandon again for the ride into school, and headed off
to my home room.

Everyone had pretty much just pretended like
I didn't exist before. Now, with Brandon having taken an interest
in me I got everything from simple acknowledgment of my presence to
obvious dislike, and even a couple of people who looked like they
wanted to take Britney's place.

I suppose some people would have been
thrilled by the chance to join the top of the social food chain,
but it mostly just disgusted me. I politely rebuffed the
scavengers, ignored the haters, and carefully acknowledged the rest
without giving them anything else to go on.

It was a rather depressing exercise. By the
time Mrs. Sorenson had fired a couple of ridiculously obscure
questions at me, I found the good feelings I'd managed to carry
away from the mayor's visit the night before had pretty much
evaporated.

English should have been better. Wuthering
Heights wasn't ever going to be my favorite book, but Mr. Whethers
had made the characters more real in the last few days and I was
actually excited to see what he had in store next.

Unfortunately, Mr. Whethers wasn't there. The
substitute teacher sitting at his desk didn't even take roll; he
just shut the door, told us to keep it down, and flipped open a
magazine. While I was sitting at my desk wondering what to do with
the next hour of my life, something I'd read in the physics book
suddenly clicked.

In a perfect world I would've been left in
peace to finish reasoning out the answer. Instead, Britney leaned
over and smiled.

"So I was really surprised to see you with
Brandon. I thought for sure he'd be pissed after you made Cassie
back down like that."

"Surprise, surprise, maybe he isn't as
shallow and vindictive as you thought." The words were mean, but
they felt good. There were a lot of other, even worse things on the
tip of my tongue, things I really wanted to say. For a moment, my
anger warred with the fear of being completely friendless.

I'd always thought I didn't need any friends,
that I was fine making my own way. I was starting to realize I'd
never really been alone before now. I'd always had the best friend
a girl could've wanted. I'd just never recognized how much I'd
depended on her.

Even that oblique thought was almost too
much. I felt my pulse quicken a little as the air seemed to
vibrate.

"Look, I'm sorry about how I reacted
yesterday. I shouldn't have left you here like that."

Britney's voice was coated with sincerity,
but it was the thinnest of layers, one which poorly disguised all
kinds of nasty little feelings. On the other hand, it distracted my
mind from the string of thoughts I'd otherwise have followed all
the way down to a full-blown panic attack. It was a small thing in
the grand scheme of the universe, but it was just enough to tilt
the balance in her favor.

I still didn't like her any more than she
really liked me, but I was willing to tolerate her. To pretend we
were friends so that neither of us had to face the scary world
entirely on our own.

"Ok, apology accepted. It wasn't very nice,
but I suppose everyone makes mistakes."

Britney's eyes grew bright, even after such a
short acquaintance, I knew she was about to launch into a blow by
blow account of the last twelve or so hours.

"Listen, I don't mean to be rude, but I've
got to finish up my physics homework. Can we catch up during
lunch?"

Britney looked a little crestfallen, but her
eyes quickly lit back up, and before I could get my notebook out
and start writing, she'd already switched seats to one closer to a
gaggle of cheerleaders.

It was amazing that I hadn't made the
connection between light, the fact that light acted like a wave,
and the rainbows on the parking lot puddles, but it was all making
sense now. By the time the bell finally rang to release the circus
back into the halls, I'd finished up a reasonable outline, and was
feeling pretty smart.

Alec probably expected me to have been
totally stumped, but I'd figured out the exact answer to the
assignment, and I was so going to show him. The glow of
satisfaction more than made up for the fact that Britney chattered
non-stop on our way to Algebra. I felt like I should feel guilty
for not liking her, but I was starting to notice how much of her
conversation revolved around nasty gossip that made everyone else
in the school sound like rejects or sluts.

When we finally made it to Mrs. Campbell's
class, I slid into my seat with a sigh of relief. This was the one
class all day where I could virtually guarantee I wouldn't be
talking to anyone. Mrs. Campbell wasn't ever really mean, but she
gave off an air that made you absolutely sure she wouldn't put up
with any crap.

We were still working on statistics, which
was nice in that I could follow what was being said and wasn't
falling any further behind, but kind of a bummer because it meant I
couldn't do a bunch of makeup work during class. It was a relief
when Mrs. Campbell finally capped her marker and turned us loose to
work on the homework assignment.

I was midway through the first assignment
when one of the aids slipped into the room and whispered into Mrs.
Campbell's ear. There was a kind of muted, collective gasp that
made me look up just in time to see the color drain out of her
face. Before the aid had even finished whispering, Mrs. Campbell
was out of her chair and headed towards the door. Thirty seconds
later we were all still looking around and wondering what had
happened.

It was a testament to our respect for, or in
some cases fear of, Mrs. Campbell that nobody spoke in anything
above a whisper for an entire five minutes. Every terrible thing
that could possibly happen to a person seemed to flow through my
mind, and all I could do was hope I was overreacting. Mrs. Campbell
had scared me a little that first day, but she'd been pretty nice
since, and she'd always been fair.

"So what do you think happened?"

"Britney, what are you doing?"

"What, you finished up your homework already
and she left. We can totally talk right now. What do you think
happened? I'll bet she just got some really, really bad news."

I felt a dull ache starting behind my eyes.
"Just because I finished my Physics doesn't mean I don't have other
stuff I need to do, and I don't even want to guess at what would
make her go that white. I just hope whatever it was turns out not
to be as bad as she thought it was."

Britney rolled her eyes, "Please, like you
don't have just as much reason to hate her as me. Besides, what
other homework could you possibly have? You're like the most anal
person I know when it comes to doing your homework. Therefore you
finished it all last night, and have nothing that could possibly be
more important than talking to me."

Her logic sucked, but that didn't bother me
even half as bad as how sure of herself she was. I held up my math
book with a look that I hoped conveyed how ridiculous she was
being.

"Oh, that's perfect. I don't understand any
of this junk, so you can explain it to me now and then we won't
have to spend as much time in that stupid tutoring lab."

The old me would have told Britney she was a
self-centered wench, but the new me, the one that was all too aware
of how much it would suck to go through the next two years of
school without a single friend, just forced my face into something
approximating a smile and tried to explain why drawing something at
random from a bag with replacement was different than drawing
something from a bag without replacement.

It was a fairly straightforward concept that
we'd seen twice now. I was pretty sure Britney was capable of
understanding, she just didn't care, which was the one thing
virtually guaranteed to make me mad. Stupidity is bad enough;
laziness is a hundred times worse.

Still, by the second time through I'd
clarified a couple of points I'd been a little fuzzy on, and was
almost ready to believe Britney might actually apply herself to
listening. I was so caught up in what I was doing, and the
ever-so-slowly growing light of interest in Britney's eyes, that
the rest of the class had fallen silent for a full twenty seconds
before the drop in noise registered for me.

"I want everyone back to their regular desks
and hard at work on their assignments."

Mrs. Campbell wasn't as pale as she'd been
when she'd left, but she still looked unsettled and more than a
little unhappy, presumably with both whatever had caused her to
leave so quickly, and the fact that she'd come back to a class
where almost nobody had been doing anything productive.