1. First Impressions
"I heard he killed someone," a girl behind Cissnei whispered, loud enough to reach the ears of half the class.
Cissnei sat at her desk, nodding and smiling at her neighbor on the right like an attentive friend should, but it was the group behind her that she was tuned in to.
"Uh huh. I'll bet it was his own family, too." Cissnei could hear the eye-roll in the second girl's voice.
"I'm serious! They said that's how he got that scar."
The new boy was sitting at the end of her row. As she pretended to listen to her chattering neighbor, Cissnei studied his profile with surreptitious glances over the girl's shoulder. The first thing she had noticed was the scruffy hair, bright red and sticking out every which way. The second was the jagged scar on his face. It wasn't very large – it began near the corner of his eye and curved down about an inch – but the dark pink of scar tissue stuck out against his pasty skin like spattered blood on snow.
"No, that's not it," said a third girl from the group behind her. "I heard he got transferred here because he stabbed a teacher!"
"Transferred from where?" a fourth asked amidst the chorus of theatrical gasps and hushed declarations of "no!"
"The slums, I guess."
"They have high schools in the slums?"
It was possible, Cissnei thought. He wore the same short-sleeved shirt, bright blue sweater vest and beige trousers as the other boys, but the school uniform hung loose on his body and his hollow cheeks contrasted sharply with his pronounced cheekbones. She didn't know much about the slum city underneath the plate of Midgar, but when people talked about it, they always insisted how bad it was down there. Everyone was hungry and poor and miserable, and would probably kill you for the small change in your pockets.
The girls' home matron had been especially fond of repeating it. How lucky Cissnei was, to have Shinra look after her. How lucky she was to have had a dad who'd made sure she would have an education even if he never came back from the war. Otherwise, she might have ended up down below with all the thieves and murderers.
Lucky, lucky her.
"He's a slum rat?" girl number four wondered, disappointment coloring her voice. "But slum rats smell, don't they?"
The others broke out in a fit of giggles.
"Gods, Trinny! You've already sniffed him?"
"No! Ew, don't be disgusting! I just... walked past him on my way here, and didn't smell anything."
Cissnei wondered if he could hear them. Their coy glances and stage whispers were far from subtle, but he kept his face blank, his half-lidded eyes aimed forward. Now that she was getting used to the scar, her furtive peeks picked up on other details. A hoop pierced the lobe of his ear. His eyebrow was a straight line, slanted down toward a nose with a slightly upturned tip. His mouth formed another line – an indifferent one, curving neither up nor down.
He didn't strike her as a murderer. Maybe he was a thief, then.
Not that she would know what murderers looked like. She knew they were sent to prison, though, and not to a Shinra-owned high school in Sector 1.
"What I want to know is why he's in our class," said the second girl. "He's too old. He looks more like a senior, right?"
"Well, duh. He's from the slums."
Before the other girl could explain what she meant by that, Mr. Nesbitt opened the door and the room filled with a flurry of shuffling feet and scraping chairs.
"Good morning, everyone," the teacher said as he lifted books out of a cardboard box and piled them on his desk. "You know the drill. No scribbling, no doodling, no folding. I want these back after class in perfect condition."
Cissnei timed her approach so that she arrived at the desk at the same time as the new guy. He was half a head taller than most of the boys, and she herself only reached his shoulder. As they both reached for their books, she inhaled deeply. The girl behind her had been right. He didn't smell.
Mr. Nesbitt gave him a long stare, she noticed. The boy noticed it too, and responded with a fleeting smile. It wasn't a friendly one. He strolled back and dropped the book on his desk, then slumped down in his seat and tilted his chair back, swaying on its back legs. Mr. Nesbitt's eyes narrowed.
"We'll continue where we left off last time," he said once everyone was back at their desks. "Page forty-five. Mr. Reno. You may begin."
A hush descended on the classroom. The red-haired boy went still and looked up.
"Huh? Ya talkin' to me?"
"Chapter four, page forty-five. From the top."
Reno raised his eyebrows and looked down at the book, then up again. He snorted.
"Forget it. I ain't readin' shit."
"Language!" the teacher barked, dropping his breezy lilt for a second. "And why would that be, Mr. Reno?"
The boy shrugged. "This story sucks, yo."
If anyone else had made that comment, everyone would have chortled with glee. Now the air simmered with stifled laughter and bated breath.
"While I'm glad to hear you have an opinion on the book," Mr. Nesbitt said, "the discussion comes after the text has been read out loud. Read the chapter, or explain your refusal to the principal."
"The hell's your problem?"
The teacher sighed and nodded at the door.
"You're dismissed, Mr. Reno. Enjoy your chat with Principal Hart."
Grinning, the boy rose to his feet and strolled over to the door without the slightest sign of hurry. The classroom erupted in whispers and hushed giggles, but Cissnei watched him in silence. He didn't appear to care at all. As if he didn't feel. She was intrigued.
"All right, everyone, settle down! Ms. Rui. Chapter four, page forty-five. Begin, please."
The red-haired boy was in her Biology class, too, and Algebra. He didn't speak with anyone, and no one made the attempt to speak with him. He slouched through the classes with an air of nonchalance, so deep in his chair and his eyelids so heavy that at first glance he appeared to be napping. He wasn't, though. By the third class, she was convinced of it. He never closed his eyes, not fully, and at times she caught them moving beneath his lids, scanning his surroundings.
Cissnei's curiosity grew. As the day went on, she watched and listened, unnoticed by others. She was very good at that, yet she learned nothing about this new boy. No one knew who he was. No one had heard where he came from.
There were rumors, of course. Lots and lots of rumors. Cissnei had listened to enough gossip to know not to pay it much mind. Usually it said more about the people spreading the rumors than the one they were gossiping about.
In this case, the gossip told her that Reno made people nervous. Afraid, even. She wasn't sure why. He wasn't the only student from the slums. They were shunned, too, and kept to their own group, but not even they wanted to go near Reno. He sauntered down the hallways, untouched and unbothered, like a shark coasting past schools of fry.
Sharks never slept, her dad had told her once, and they never closed their eyes. Sharks never stopped gliding through the seas, hunting and feeding, and they never felt fear. They didn't feel anything. That's why people feared them, he'd said. People needed to sleep and close their eyes and feel, but sharks didn't.
Cissnei lost track of him after the day's classes. She didn't see him at dinner either, though he had to be one of the boarders if he was from the slums. He was probably assigned to the second group, with the older teens like himself.
After dinner she sat down at her desk with her biology book, but try as she might to focus on the text, her mind kept drifting. After the fifth failed attempt at reading the first page, she stuffed the book in her bag.
"I'll go study at the library," Cissnei told the dorm supervisor on her way out. It wasn't strictly necessary to announce her comings and goings like that, but she knew the supervisor expected good students to have a reason to leave in the middle of prep time.
The school yard was quiet. The staff disapproved of loitering during prep time and directed wayward students to their rooms or the library. Cissnei knew how to avoid them though. By the foot of the library stairs, she turned left and skipped down the stairs between the school house and the gym.
The quadrangle at the top of the hill was as strict as the dorm supervisor, all ruler-straight paths and rectangular benches, but it was as if the back alleys and lower yards had been handed to a different architect. Here the lines flowed in curves and circles, and intersected in unexpected ways that just begged to be captured on fine-grained, high-contrast film in black and white. Cissnei dug out her camera from her bag and began the hunt.
She had just snapped her fifth shot when she heard a voice calling out nearby.
"Hey, you. Wait up!"
She looked around, but no one was in sight.
"What's the big hurry, huh? I'm talking to you!"
"Yeah? Well, I ain't talkin' to you."
The lazy drawl was unmistakable. The other teens from the slums always tried to tone it down. Cissnei lowered her camera and hurried toward the speakers.
"Don't have much in the way of manners, do you?"
She reached the end of the gym and took a wary peek around the corner in time to see three guys cut in front of the red-haired boy from her class, forcing him to a halt. He took his hands from his pockets, and gave each of them a hard stare, but he stayed silent.
"So, got a name?" one of them asked.
When he didn't reply, another spoke up.
"It's 'Reno', isn't it?"
The first guy chuckled. "Yeah, that works. Reno the Rat."
The redhead lowered his chin and shot him a glare.
"Fuck off and die, will ya?"
When he tried to leave, the trio moved like chess pieces to block his way, trapping him between them and the concrete wall that surrounded the school grounds. Cissnei finally got a glimpse of their faces. She knew one of them, thanks to the wistful sighing of half the girls in her class whenever he walked past. Troy Domino, the mayor's grandson and captain of the swim team. The two others were likely his friends from the team, judging by their broad shoulders and toned arms. Reno was as tall as them, perhaps even taller, but his hunched shoulders and baggy clothes made him seem like a runt by comparison.
"Hey now, no need to be like that," Troy purred. "We just thought we'd introduce ourselves to the new guy. Give you a proper welcome, like the upstanding members of society that we are. Not that you'd know anything about that, of course."
She'd had him pegged as something of a shithead. Her roommate had seen him kissing Ellie Winter behind the library last week, despite the fact that he was dating one of the seniors.
Reno's lip curled into a sneer.
"I sure know a herd of assholes when I see 'em."
Cissnei lifted the camera to her eye.
"You're a funny guy, huh?" Troy said, smiling like a zenene. "Well, funny guy, since you're new and all, we figured you might need to learn a thing or two about the rules around here."
"That right? We've got rules down below too, y'know. Wanna hear my favorite? 'Don't fuck with me, and I ain't gonna fuck with you'."
Reno's smile showed too much of his teeth, too. They'd be pearly white in the photo. As she pressed down the shutter release, she wondered which shade of gray the scar by his eye would be.
"You're out of the slums now, rat. That's not how it works around here."
Cissnei wound the film forward slowly to minimize the noise. It was habit, not necessity. Their voices were loud enough to hide the quiet whir.
"Look, you got a problem with me?" Reno spat. "Then stop wastin' my time and fuckin' say it already."
She peered through the viewfinder again and zoomed in on the two of them. The tension in the air was close to the snapping point. She had to be ready when it happened, and she had to be fast. No more caution.
"There's a problem, all right. That attitude right there is the problem."
Cissnei snapped another photo as Troy reached for Reno's vest.
"Don't fuckin' touch me!" The redhead jerked back in time with her thumb on the film lever, and shoved Troy in the chest just as she hit the shutter release again. "Try that again and I'm gonna break your fuckin' face!"
Troy lunged. Reno leapt back and crashed into one of the others, who was too slow to grab him. Reno smashed his foot down on the guy's toes and was about to follow it up with a kick to the knee, when the other two got hold of him from behind. He roared and thrashed, but they were too strong for him. Once the third one joined the fray, they managed to shove him into the wall. His head hit the concrete with a nasty thud, but he didn't react at all. Instead he writhed and lashed out with his foot, missing Troy's knee by a fraction. He even tried to bite, but one of the guys grabbed his hair and yanked his head back.
Reno went rigid. He stopped yelling, too. Cissnei flinched as the one whose foot he'd stomped punched him hard in the stomach, but the boy himself only gave a strange sort of wheeze.
"Fucking slum trash!" Troy shouted in his face. "Are you gonna listen now? Huh?" He grabbed Reno's chin and yanked the boy's face toward him, in a tug-of-war with the fist in Reno's hair. "Do you fucking hear me?"
"No," Reno panted. "No. No."
His eyes were wild, but he didn't seem to be seeing them at all. He just stared beyond Troy's shoulder. It was like he wasn't even there anymore, but the others kept taunting him, yelling questions that went unheard.
This wasn't just boys mouthing off anymore. It wasn't even a fight. This was something else, something wrong, and she couldn't just wait and watch. Cissnei straightened to her full height, took a deep breath, and adopted a knowing smile. Then, she stepped into view.
One of Troy's cronies saw her first and warned the others. The three of them traded looks, then Troy slipped his hands into his pockets and took a few steps forward.
"Keep walking, little girl," he called, his voice casual. "You didn't see anything."
Cissnei stopped far enough from them to get a decent head start if she needed to run, but close enough to talk without shouting.
"What if I did?" she asked.
Troy's smug smile grew stiff, and when he spoke again, his voice held something darker.
"You're about to make a really bad decision. Don't. Keep moving."
"Maybe I saw you the other day. Maybe I saw you with Ellie Winter."
That wiped the smile off his face completely. Her roommate had been right, then.
"You've been spying on me?" he growled.
"Maybe I have. Maybe I'll tell your girlfriend what I saw."
His mask dropped for an instant, showing his face contorted in a flash of anger. He was quick to hide it again, though.
"Who the hell do you think you are?" he asked with a mocking laugh. "Think she'll believe you? Think anyone will believe you? I don't know you. You're nobody. Just some random little girl with a big mouth."
His words did not touch her. They sank into the gray without so much as a ripple.
"They won't need to just take my word for it, you know." She smiled and raised her camera.
Troy's eyes went wide. He took a step forward, but Cissnei skipped back, keeping the distance between them.
"Leave, now," she said and waved her camera in the air, "or I'll run straight to the nearest photo place and get these printed on paper."
He didn't bother to hide the fury anymore. His eyes bore into her, conveying all manner of dark promise, but Cissnei wasn't afraid. Her pulse had gone wild and her mouth dry, but that was just her body, not her soul. She didn't feel fear.
"Large prints," she said. "Full color. Just to make sure everyone can tell it's you sucking face with Ellie Winter."
A peal of laughter made them both look around. Nobody was in view yet, but the chattering and giggling of a group of girls grew louder by the second.
"You... have made a big mistake," Troy ground out between clenched teeth, pointing at her, then spun on his heel. "Let's get out of here!"
His friends gave the red-haired boy one last shove against the wall, then let go. He grunted on impact, but didn't move. He didn't even look up. He just slid down the wall in slow motion until his butt hit the ground.
Cissnei stood still, keeping an eye on the retreating trio, until they rounded a corner. Only then did she approach the boy, who was still sitting on the ground. His head was bent and his hair hung in his face, making it impossible to see his expression, but his body was heaving with labored breaths.
"Hey. Are you okay?"
He didn't answer. When Cissnei bent down and held out a hand, he burst back to life and scrambled away from her.
"Get the fuck away from me!"
"It's okay," she said, her voice calm. "I'm just trying to help."
"I don't need no fuckin' help," he snarled.
Cissnei froze in place, completely at a loss for how to handle this. This wasn't at all what she had expected. She had no idea what role to play.
"The hell you want, a medal or somethin'?" he spat, baring his teeth in a sneer of rage. "Think I want the help of some stuck-up lil' upper-plate bitch? Well think again, and fuck off already!"
She wet her lips, shifting her weight from one foot to the other.
"I... I just thought..."
"The hell's wrong with ya? Dontcha got ears in your head? I fuckin' told ya, I don't want ya here and I don't want your fuckin' help! Fuck off!"
The gray rippled. She swallowed to rid herself of the sudden tightness in her throat, but that just made the tightness spread down into her chest, sending a swell across the gray. Then wetness began to trickle down her cheeks. With a gasp, Cissnei turned on her heel and ran.