Fifteen minutes. She'd been sat there for fifteen whole minutes, bored out of her skull, not really paying attention as Mr Maloney rattled on and on.
Taking care to draw out the sound, Coraline drummed her fingernails along the plush underside of the chair in which she was sitting. Every now and then she'd bring her hand up to her mouth and rip segments of nail from her thumb, and spit them as far as she could across the desk. Ten points if it hit the stapler. Twenty if it got in the paper tray. Fifty if it hit Maloney.
That last fifty earned her a side order of resentful glare.
"Miss Jones, I do hope you're aware that this kind of behaviour will eventually result in your expulsion." He spoke slowly, with a whiny monotone twinging every word. Nervously, Mr Maloney clawed at his rock-solid comb-over. "Are you listening, Coraline?"
"Uh huh." She wasn't.
"Now, Mrs Jones," the incompetent little troll turned to Coraline's mother, who sat, rigid and agitated, next to her daughter. "I'm putting Coraline on in-school suspension for the next week. At the end of the semester we'll review her behaviour, and if she's reformed she'll be allowed to stay. But this has got to stop."
That was their cue to leave. Mel Jones stood up first, curtly nodding at the stout man perched behind his redwood fortress. Coraline hoisted herself out of the chair, limbs limp and gangly and she staggered towards the door. Her muddied combat boots dragged along the carpet, leaving sandy footprints on the ageing grey tessellations. Her mother wrenched the door open, allowing Coraline to leap into the deserted hallway.
"What do you think you're playing at?"
Already, it had started. They had sat in an unnerving silence for the first few miles of the drive back to the Pink Palace, but, inevitably, her mother had to begin a lesson. Coraline didn't dignify it with a response; instead, she waited for Mel's delayed follow-up statement. There was always a follow-up statement.
"That's the fourth time I've had to go see your principal since we moved here." there it was. "That's once every two months. Plus there's the letters and the phone calls, and they just keep on coming. The detention slips, too. You get one of those at least once a week. And none of it makes any difference to you, does it?"
"It's not my fault they're so up their own asses, mom," Coraline rebutted. "I can't exactly help it if they piss me off."
"You punched a girl in the jaw, Coraline!"
Coraline sniffed. "She deserved it."
Red light. Mel Jones took her eyes off the road to glare at her daughter in enraged disbelief. "Like hell she deserved it, Coraline! You knocked one of her teeth out!"
"Yeah, well," Coraline reclined in the car seat, and tucked a strand of fading blue hair behind her ear. "Maybe she shouldn't call my best friend a freak. Green means go, mom." She added.
Coraline's mother sighed, and put her foot on the accelerator. "This is inexcusable. I'm sick of the school calling me to tell me you stormed out of class and ran up and down the hallway with a pot of house paint. You need to pull your act together, Coraline. Starting right now."
Coraline ran her fingers against the car window, ripping through the condensation. The rain belted down on her mother's rusty old beetle, hammering like a machine gun tirade along the roof.
They turned off the main road and onto a longer, dirtier track where the lane dividers where whittled away, and other vehicles were scarce. A few more turns drew them out of suburbia and into the void, where a candy floss beacon loomed out of the grey. As soon as they'd parked, Coraline had hitched p her bag and bolted up the steps and onto the porch, impatiently jamming her keys in the lock and twisting them frantically. A sound clunk issued from somewhere within the door; Coraline shoved it open and leapt over the threshold, leaving the fading plank of wood banging against the frame.
She continued up the stairs, being careful to make as much noise as she was capable of.
Finally she reached the warm sanctuary of her bedroom; walls adorned with theatre posters, and concert fliers for bands she'd never listened to, and various books and video games tossed upon every surface. A small black phone stood on her dresser in its cradle; in a few hours she could pick it up, hit her number-one speed dial, and have a rant to her best friend of eight months, even though he lived moments away.
Those two hours passed in agony; Coraline's father had invited himself into her room, sat on the bed, and given her a timid parents' 'I'm not angry, just disappointed' lecture. After receiving a sub-zero cold shoulder, he'd given up and left Coraline to her previous engagement, staring into the rain listening to obscure folk music.
At about four in the afternoon she braved venturing out of her hovel in pursuit of a cup of tea; this desire was quickly extinguished when, as she entered the kitchen, her mother briefly ceased her furious typing to give her daughter a warning stare. Coraline promptly dropped her teabag on the counter and retreated.
Half an hour later Coraline heard Wybie roar up the driveway. She smiled to herself, and rolled slowly out of bed and onto the floor. From there, she crab-walked to the dresser and laid flat on her back, blindly groping across the above ledge with her bare feet until she obtained her prize. Tweezing it between her toes, Coraline hoisted the smooth plastic of the phone up out of its cradle, and released the claw above her lap. Nimbly, she caught the phone, and hit hash-one-hash, brought the receiver up to her ear, and hummed along to the dial tone.
Within seconds, the tone abruptly ceased; it was followed by a crackle, and some soft breathing.
"Hey, man!" Coraline said cheerily.
A playfully inquisitive voice met her own. "Where were you during math?"
"God, Wybourne, I don't even get a 'hello'?" As she said this, Coraline could practically hear him smiling.
"Hello, C-Coraline. Where were you during math?" Wybie's voice was breaking; every now and then he'd squeak or scratch like an old record, and Coraline would seize the opportunity to remark on his impending manliness. She let it slide just this once in favour of a reply.
"I was down in Maloney's den," she said, rising from the floor like a zombie from its grave. Slowly, she got to her feet, and shuffled towards the window. "I'm on a week's in-school suspension."
Wybie snorted. "Nice going, Chuck Norris."
"Hey, shut up!" Coraline retorted, curling up against the glass. "I went in there defending your honour. If anything, you should be thanking me."
"Okay, I apologise. Th-thank you for making me out to be a wimp who can't fight his own f-fights."
"Oh please!" the girl sung. "It's not like you could sort that nosy cow out anyway. It's not cool if guys hit girls. However, it is attractive if girls hit other girls."
"Since when?"
"Since I knocked one of her teeth out."
Wybie gasped. For a long time there was silence. And then, "So that's true, then?"
"Perfectly true."
"Did you keep it? You could put it on a necklace."
Coraline cackled. "Just another notch on the old belt."
"Anyway," Wybie continued, "This in-school suspension thing. How does it work?"
"Eh, we'll have to find out tomorrow." Coraline stared out into the garden, and scanned the area for something, anything interesting. A flicker of shadow caught her eye. The cat, black and withered, scampered out of the rain. She opened up her window to let it in, and waited. "But yeah, my mom's not too happy. She's gone all, 'clean up your act, Coraline Jones!'"
"I'm n-not surprised! You're on the brink of expulsion."
"Ugh, don't remind me."
From the kitchen, Coraline heard her mother bellowing. "Hey, listen," she said to Wybie. "I gotta go. I'll see you tomorrow morning." She didn't wait for a reply before she ended the call, and placed the phone back where it came from. By the time she'd wheeled around to heed her mother's calls, the cat had slunk into the room and was sitting, cleaning his sodden fur, on the worn wooden floors. Coraline smiled at the cat, and, as she drifted past him, lightly tousled the dur behind his ears. "Please don't sit on my bed until you're dry," she whispered to the animal, before lightly jogging down the stairs to the kitchen.
Coraline laughed inwardly as she opened her locker that morning. Her algebra and history books, stacked precariously on the top shelf, would remain where they were another week. Smirking, she emptied her lunch and various trinkets into the scarce free crevices in the little tin box, and slammed the door shut. Absent-mindedly fiddling with a loose thread on her blazer, the lanky girl waited for her friend to arrive.
In a few minutes he did, awkwardly sidling up to her through the growing crowds. He smiled at her, and she saluted him lazily. He stopped in front of her, and dumped his bag at her feet.
"While I may be stuck in administration all day," said Coraline in her most smarmy, smug tone, "All I have to do is fill in worksheets. Even then I will be playing Donkey Kong. Whereas, you…" she kicked his bag; the books inside collapsed, and planted across her boot. "… You have to carry around that. All day. For the next week. Sucker."
Wybie rolled his eyes and pushed past Coraline to get to his own locker. He threw a couple of books in there, and dropped a couple of pellets into his locker menagerie (mainly consisting of ants). "I'm not the one who's imprisoned throughout l-lunchtime. Personally I'd rather sit through six lectures a day than be s-stuck by m-myself under constant surveillance."
"Hey, suit yourself," Coraline replied, picking up Wybie's bag and dumping it on his shoulder.
"Will do."
The two of them strolled down the corridor towards student services. As people caught sight of Coraline, they began to part like the Red Sea for fear of being punched in the jaw. Coraline had built up quite a reputation in the last eight months. She wasn't popular, not by any stretch of the imagination. But everyone knew her name, even the seniors. That was infamy, and she relished it.
Finally, Wybie and Coraline reached the administration wing, and they paused outside the big glass doors. The bell rang, and the dizzying scarper of students heading to class began.
"I'll call you tonight," Coraline said, and lightly punched Wybie on the arm. He smiled, and continued up the corridor slowly. Coraline sighed, and flopped against the frosted glass. She really didn't want to go in there. Instead, she sat cross-legged in a nook between the lockers and the door, and waited until the crowd dispersed.
Three minutes.
Eight minutes.
Seventeen minutes late. It was probably time to go inside.
As the thin, sprightly girl stood up and yanked at the door handle, something caught her eye. Slowly, she turned around, and stared blankly at the cork board littered with fliers and notices. She drew towards it.
Right there, right in the middle, was a big white poster, with raised red and blue lettering exploding across the bulletin board: 'Student Body President: have you got what it takes?'
Coraline eyed the poster, her brain ticking furiously. She needed to clean up her act, make a good example of herself. God knows her mother would kill her if she got expelled, but holding her tongue (and her fist) was never easy. She needed to do something drastic to show that she could be a model student. And this election might just be her saving grace.
Slowly, very slowly, Coraline reached into her bag and pulled out a purple ballpoint pen. Yanking off the lid with her teeth, she pressed the nib against the blank sign-up sheet, and, with a steady hand, printed her name in big, bold letters.