Prologue: 11:58 p.m-March 15th, 2008 (Present)
The booming call of the clock in town square signaled midnight. I hadn't realized it'd been an hour since curfew, and I nervously flicked my cigarette, stalling. I had forgotten to smoke as I dallied, and the cigarette had burned down to the filter while I stood shakily fingering it. The smoke took on a new acridity as I gave one last, futile puff, before flicking it into the bushes that regally abutted the entrance to Bullworth Academy.
The smoke curled idly from the bush to mingle with the fat, wet flakes of snow blustering around the lamp posts that illuminated the darkened street. Light, damnit. Come on.
The taste on my tongue was as bitter as the wind that whipped strands of hair into my mouth. I spat them out as I laughed. The bush wouldn't burn. The cosmos wouldn't be so merciful. It seemed that hoping for one, tiny, insignificant brush fire was useful to the extent of wishing for time to stop all together- not fucking very.
The ugly gargoyle perched atop the gates watched over the happenings at Bullworth academy, and was only as pleasant as the students it oversaw. It gaped drolly at me, forked tongue protruding from its mouth. I scowled back. The middle finger of my right hand sprang from the confines of the fist that I'd clenched around my carton of cigarettes. I hoped that the gargoyle could sense the intensity of my hatred for it, despite my gesturing hand being snugly tucked into the pockets of my borrowed sweater.
Something about it just wasn't as gratifying as it once was. The gargoyle sat, unaffected, its stupid face still pulled into a grotesque smirk. It's alright. No need to make an effort, asshole.
Despite my dislike of the thing, I knew as well as the gargoyle that I had little reason to be hanging around the front entrance. I already considered it reckless and stupid, and it began to seem downright ridiculous as the cold, searching beam of a prefect's flashlight was cut and thrown by the wrought iron bars of the gate.
I'd jumped instinctively into the ornamental bushes to the left of the gate as the beam of the prefect's flashlight swept across the lane in front of the entrance. I wasn't sure why I was so jumpy; if I was spotted, I'd have told him to rot in hell faster than he could have gotten off on his righteous sense of self importance. My usual indifference was useless, though, as frozen twigs jabbed into my knocking knees, which were clad only in a pair of questionably clean fishnets. A hole was torn through them in the back, and road rash made the back of my thigh sore and itchy as it healed. My ankles were spared from the assault by my oversized combat boots; though the hacked off shorts I wore did very little to shield me from the unseasonable snowfall.
I splayed my limbs against the cold brick of the wall, steadying myself as my heart rate slowed. My startled leap into the bushes had drawn the attention of one flashlight wielding prefect, and the accusatory beam wavered uncertainly on the pavement just outside of the gates. I muttered something about fascism under my breath, and leaned forward to figure out which prefect it was, assessing the danger level in the unlikely event that I was apprehended. "Damage control," I thought wryly. The snowfall had been steadily picking up, though, and it obscured the features of the hulking prefect. Not that any of that mattered much, anyway. They were all huge, and each of them was a psychopath. It provided them with a strange ambiguity- a threatening one, at that.
Suddenly, familiar car rattled around the bend. Its tires banged across a manhole cover that steamed in the sudden cold that had gripped the town. The conic rays emitted from the headlights missed me by inches, and I went mercifully unnoticed by the driver. I didn't know how I would've reacted if he'd seen me. Maybe he'd been searching for me, and maybe some part of me felt guilty- though honestly, the relief that he hadn't seen me was almost sweet. I had to resist pulling another cigarette out of the squashed carton that seemed to become even more compressed with my mounting stress.
As I watched the tail lights of the car shrink into the distance, the world became utterly silent. I could almost hear the soft plop of heavy snowflakes hitting the pavement. My breath swirled out of my lungs in bursts, and the area around my neck had grown warm with panic. It funneled updrafts of heated air from my torso to my face, and I caught strands of the scent from the pilfered sweatshirt I wore. I lifted my tobacco- stained fingers to my lips to chew a hangnail on my thumb, inhaling the smell on my hand to cover the scent coming from the fabric. The gargoyle looked knowingly down at me. I glared back at it, and stepped determinedly out of the bushes after scanning around once more for any observers.
They'd padlocked the gates hours ago. By now, they'd learned to stop calling for Melanie Spinos at bed check. The first few incidents had been a necessary precaution, and so born was the vague, unspoken agreement between Mrs. Peabody and I; if I showed up to class often enough that Crabblesnitch didn't catch on to my tendency toward wandering "god knows where, at all hours of the night," she had no reason- or want, it seemed- to bother with me at all. Most of the time I counted it among the few silver linings to be had in this cesspool, but tonight, (the ides of March, in fact,) it meant little more than having to take the long way around to the girl's dormitory.
And somehow, I couldn't make myself move. My heavy sweater was soaked at the shoulders, and I reasoned that, if I kept moving, I'd dry off. With this dwindling determination fueling me, I geared myself up to start my second hike of the night. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
I watched the prefect's beam, counting the seconds in between his paces, and bolted across the gate and down the opposite sidewalk, on my way to the back parking lot. I'd managed to go unseen. Relief made me a little giddy.
I pondered my idiocy as I struggled through the darkness. At first I'd stopped in front of the gate only to catch my breath, and then I lingered. I told myself I'd have a smoke and continue on, though there I stood, and still, I'd been lingering. That led to gesturing obscenely at the gargoyle. I laughed sourly again. I'm an idiot.
Why, why had I come back? Or rather, why had I left? My logic failed me. Each of my evasive excuses seemed paltrier than the last, and stupid. Goddamned stupid.
"You'll get caught," I'd wheedled. "Are you hungry? Not now, but you don't have money and you know you will be later. Just go back. Just go. This'll be the big one if you get nailed, Spinos. Go back."
The truth poked pinholes through all of my increasingly weak excuses. All of the bullshitting in the world couldn't make me care about another detention, or one missed breakfast. The explanations I'd been running through in my mind were the very excuses I'd be providing Gary.
Gary. I'd almost managed to let him slip my mind. But he was always there, always at the back, no matter how I tried to ignore him.
I tucked my face into the sweater in spite of myself, breathing deeply. It smelled musky and sweet; like and sweat and dirt and grass. It was a scent I found that I intensely enjoyed. It smelled like its owner. I knew I'd have to get rid of it before morning, but for now, I wrapped the overly- long sleeves around myself like a straitjacket. The scent overwhelmed me. It blocked out the cold, and I closed my eyes as I trudged the familiar path on autopilot, tried to ignore the sting of the scrape on the back of my leg, and remembered my first journey- and perhaps the most important. The one that had brought me to Bullworth.
A/N: I've had this idea floating around for a while. I'm fully aware that this fic is a little more of this as a disclaimer, because I didn't stick entirely to the canon of the game (which, while wonderful, didn't fit the story in my head.) I grew up loving the game, and being fascinated by the world of Bully and the characters in it. Although I tried to incorporate some of the angsty-teen-drama-and-tongue-in-cheek-Rockstar-goodness that you'd expect from Bully fan fiction, it's got a bit of an edge to it.
As for the technicalities of this story: I jump around a lot. There are a lot of flashbacks, and things happen out of order. Melanie might be best friends with someone in one chapter, and have never met them in the next. The story happens in the space of one school year, and I'm adding dates, times and locations. Hopefully it'll make it a little easier to understand. If you have questions as to the chronology of the story; it'll probably be explained if you backtrack a little. I think most of the story is pretty straightforward and easily understood; but this is my first time writing in this style, so there may be a few hang ups along the way.
Lastly: I know that 2/3 of Bully OC's are new girls (or boys) who end up with Gary. He's definitely a bicycle- a lovely, sociopathic one, but a bicycle nonetheless. I tried to write Melanie as being an actually human being, instead of the Mary-Sues you usually get in this sect of Bully fandom, but the plot of this story is such a cliche for this fandom that it kind of hurts to think about it. It's also a "slow building" romance, so there's like, um, plot before the graphic stuff. Gimme a chance, here.
Thanks for reading this whole stupidly long thing, if you did. I could probably subsist solely on reviews if I tried, so keep that in mind if humanitarianism is your bag.
Disclaimer: The title of this chapter is a lyric to the song, "When I'm Small" by Phantogram. I don't own it. I own absolutely no part of Bully, but I do own my OC. I write for my personal enjoyment.