Author's Note: So as some of you may have noticed, I'm updating a lot today. There are two reasons: 1. I'm soooo bored and 2. I reread this story and I fell back in love with it. I had so many new ideas floating around in my head that I had to get out. This chapter is one of them. It was supposed to be a short snippet of another chapter but it got really long (longer than most of my chapters) so I just had to kind of shove it in somewhere as it's own chapter.
Exactly three people had found out about the Johnsons before Dr. Brennan and Agent Booth.
The first was his first grade teacher. Ms. Matthews had been fresh from her credential program, ready to make a difference in the lives of the young children who passed through her classroom. She adored Lance, who was quick to do whatever she asked in exchange for her telling him that he was a good kid.
He had been living with the Johnsons for a year at that time, and he was beginning to become adjusted, in the strange, destructive way that would ultimately allow him to survive the next decade of his life. He was accustomed to constantly being belittled, so to be given the little praises Ms. Matthews sent his way was a luxury and gift that Lance wold do anything to attain.
Ms. Matthews was not a dumb woman. She recognized a child in need when she saw one, and she hadn't gotten to become a teacher without taking a class on recognizing the signs of mistreatment. This was why she paid such special attention to Lance. It helped that the boy latched on to her at the first sign of affection. She let him remain in the classroom at lunch and recess, and he took this opportunity to talk her ear off about everything under the sun. He was withdrawn around the other children, but around her, he blossomed.
It wasn't until halfway through the year that Lance showed up with an obvious bruise on his shoulder. When he stayed in at recess and started to talk to her about the colony of ants he found in his backyard, she took her opportunity. "Lance, it looks like you have an ouchie there," she said.
Lance hurriedly straightened his shirt so the collar covered the bruise. He didn't respond, but he suddenly became very interested in the carpet.
"Can I take a look at it?" she asked, moving closer to him and setting her hand on his shoulder where, on the other side of his thin shirt, a purple bruise marred his skin.
Lance shook his head. "I just fell. It's fine. It's okay. You don't need to look," he responded, speaking so quickly that his words all jumbled together. He shrugged her hand away and started to walk over to his desk.
"Please, Lance?" Ms. Matthews pleaded. She went for the low blow. "Will you be a good boy and let me take a look?" She knew he was desperate to prove himself to her.
Lance came back over and resignedly stared at the floor while she pushed his shirt over. The bruise was in a very definitive shape of a hand. She had to fight back the urge to look visibly disgusted, knowing that Lance would think it was directed at him and not at the person who had done this.
While she was investigating the bruise, she noticed a few lines of raised skin that peered over his shoulder. She followed them and realized they ran several inches down his shoulder. It took her a second to recognize the marks for what they were, and when she did, she yanked her hand away and gasped.
Lance looked up at her with worry.
She choked back her horror and put her hand back on his shoulder, hoping the gesture was comforting. "Thank you, Lance. You did good."
Ms. Matthews did everything she was supposed to. She reported what she'd seen to the school nurse and the principal, who took the accusations to the proper higher authorities. Lance was pulled out of class the next day.
At the end of the day, Ms. Matthews received a call from the principal, asking her to come see him. When she entered his office, Mr. Thomas looked overwhelmed and exhausted. He motioned for her to sit across from him. "The foster mother came in," he began. "Lance is claiming that the… scars are from an old foster family. And there's not really anything we can do about a bruise unless Lance is willing to talk about it." He paused to look at her reaction. She tried not to react at all. "The foster mother is threatening to sue if we press on the scar issue, because it could be traumatic for the boy."
Ms. Matthews swallowed and allowed herself time to process what she heard. "So… we're not doing… anything?"
Mr. Thomas shrugged and tossed the pen he had been holding across his desk in no particular direction. "If we do anything regarding the scars and it does cause trauma, and we end up in a lawsuit, you could lose your job here. And a bruise is hardly any evidence unless somebody manages to get Lance to talk about it. But, like I said… lawsuit."
Maybe in a different life, Ms. Matthews was a little braver. Maybe she would have told herself 'to hell with a lawsuit', and she would have sat Lance down and shown him that he could talk about it, that he deserved better. Maybe she could have gotten him out of there. He could have found better foster parents, maybe even a permanent home.
But Ms. Matthews was not brave.
The second person to find out was Michael. Michael and Lance had the kind of friendship that formed because one party decided they were going to be friends with no input from the other. No matter how much Lance fought to be alone, Michael continued to show up at his side to keep him company. It wasn't like Michael didn't already have plenty of friends already; he just liked Lance.
Michael and Lance had freshman PE together. Lance had never been very athletic; Michael was, but he was also very lazy. So they hung out together in the background of every sport they were forced to play for a grade.
When they were forced to do laps, Michael and Lance alternated between light jogging and just flat out walking. Michael took this time to talk about anything he could think of. Lance had developed into a very quiet boy, more content to observe than to talk or act.
"Do you think you could get out of the house to go see that new horror movie?" Michal asked. He squatted down to pick up a rock. He dusted it off on his PE shorts and aimed it at the head of the boy jogging in front of them.
Lance grabbed the rock from Michael's hand and tossed it to the side. "Maybe. It depends what kind of mood Melissa is in tonight."
Michael heaved a dramatically large sigh. "Just text me when you know then." He looked at Lance expectantly. "Unless you wanna just sneak out?" He grinned as if trying to win Lance over. And he was really; he was annoyed that his best friend was such a rule follower when Michael could walk out of his front door while grounded and nobody would even notice.
Lance rolled his eyes. He'd just spent a week being deprived of access to food at home, and he wasn't about to go there again for at least a little bit. "You know I can't," he said, pretending to be actually annoyed with his friend.
Michael accepted defeat, and they spent the rest of their walk in comfortable silence.
When they all filed into the locker room, Lance began to weigh the pros and cons of taking a shower. Taking a shower in the locker room was easier said than done for him. In an attempt to keep any of his peers from seeing his back, Lance either didn't shower at all or waited until everybody else had left and just accepted that he would be late for this next class.
It was a hot summer day, and Lance had a crush on a girl in his next class, so Lance settled down on a bench to wait for everyone to leave so he could shower. Michael was used to this and, assuming Lance was nervous being exposed because he didn't like his body, didn't question it. He showered and left with everybody else.
It would have been like every other day if Michael hadn't realized he had accidentally taken Lance's history book. He turned on his heel and walked back into the locker room, assuming Lance hadn't had time to hop into the shower yet. But he was wrong, and the first thing he saw upon reentering the locker room was the scar-riddled back of his best friend.
Michael stared in shock for a long few seconds. Lance was washing his hair and hadn't yet noticed that Michael had come in.
Eventually, Michael cleared his throat and watched as Lance spun around, throwing his arms around his stomach. His mouth dropped open, unsure of what to say, trying to think of a way to explain what Michael had seen. Michael just licked his lips and quietly said, "I accidentally took your book." He set it down on the bench where Lance's backpack was.
Lance stared at him for a long time. "Oh. Thanks."
Michael nodded and hurried out of the locker room. He spent the entirety of his next class trying desperately to block out the image of how destroyed Lance's back looked. Some of the scars were older and some looked fairly recent, but they all had come from the same source, and Michael was terrified to admit to himself that they looked like whip marks.
They looked so wrong on Lance's body. Michael had never seen whip marks anywhere other than on actors playing slaves in Civil War era movies. They were used to horrify the audience, to show the absolute cruelty of slavery, how dehumanized its victims were. And then there they were, in real life, right in front of him, on the back of his best friend.
Michael set his head down on his desk, tuning out the lecture of his math teacher. Normally he would at least pretend to be listening, but nothing felt important today except for the fact that someone had whipped Lance. Lance, who was so eager to please everyone around him, who only spoke out of turn when he was too excited about something to physically hold it in any longer. Teachers loved him, students turned to him for help, and someone had whipped him.
Michael hadn't cried since he was a little boy, but he suddenly felt like he might cry right here in math class.
The girl who sat next to him looked down at him. "Are you alright?"
"I'm fine," he snapped back, and she drew back, rolled her eyes, and turned back to the teacher.
When Michael and Lance sat down together for lunch that day, Michael wasn't the first to speak. He couldn't think of anything to say that didn't seem ridiculous after what he'd seen this morning.
"How do you think you did on that test in English?" Lance asked, picking the onions of his school issued sandwich. He looked wary, unsure if things were okay between him and Michael.
"Shitty," Michael responded. "I should've let you help me study."
They continued to talk like nothing happened, and when Lance texted him that night to say he couldn't get out to go see a movie, Michael forwent his usual guilt trip and just replied, "That's fine."
The third person was a girl named May. She was in the chess club, and she was pretty in the sort of way that people only noticed after knowing her a long time. She was smart, not as smart as Lance, but smart enough to help him keep his mind occupied and provide mildly interesting chess games.
She and Lance had hung out a few times, and she had tagged along for lunch with him and Michael a lot, before Michael smacked Lance on the arm and said, "Dude. She's into you."
Lance gave him an incredulous look and glanced across the cafeteria at where May had dashed off to say hi to her older, senior sister. "You think?" he asked. He had never imagined the possibility that a girl would have crush on him.
Michael rolled his eyes. "Duh. She doesn't hang out with us because she loves my mean humor and burping."
So Lance asked May to go on a date with him. Michael had an early birthday and he was able to drive already, so he dropped them off at the movie theater with a warning to "not get too crazy, you kids". May let Lance kiss her halfway through the movie, and Lance ended up making out with a girl for the first time in his life. When the movie was over, they both barely noticed until people starting getting up and walking past them.
They continued to go on dates, and Lance texted her constantly. Any random thought he had reminded him of her. And she did the same thing. They never made it official, but Lance was beginning to suspect he was in a relationship.
And it was just when they were getting to the best part that it all came crashing down.
May's parents weren't home often, and she was mostly under the supervision of her older sister, who hardly counted as supervision. Because of this, May and Lance got to spend a lot of time alone in her room, under the pretenses that they were watching movies. It took a few months of this for them to get to the point of May sticking her hands under Lance's shirt and attempted to pull it off.
They'd talked a couple times about going all the way, but it hadn't happened yet. Lance was a teenage boy who was more than willing to have sex with May, and she seemed pretty enthusiastic, but in the face of it actually happening, Lance freaked out.
He grabbed her arms to pull her hands away from him and backed away, nearly falling off May's bed.
She looked hurt and wrapped her arms around herself. "What's wrong?" she asked, licking her lips.
Lance swallowed heavily. "I'm sorry. I just… I don't… I mean, I do. Want to, I mean." May was watching him in confusion. The hurt on her face was transforming into confusion. "I want to do it"—stop mumbling, idiot, he told himself—"I just." He looked at her in desperation, unsure of how to explain. She gave him no help, continuing to look expectant of answers. "I don't want to take my shirt off."
May crinkled her nose. The look she gave him wasn't exactly what he had hoped for, but it was better than completely turning away from him. "I guess that's fine."
So they had sex, and Lance kept his shirt on. When he left afterward, he didn't feel quite as triumphant as he thought he would have.
The next time, May stuck her hands under his shirt again, and again he stopped her. "Come on," she whined. "If I'm gonna get completely naked, you should too. It's not easy for me." She huffed.
Lance hesitated. He wondered how she would react to seeing the mess that was his back. Michael had seen last year, and he'd gone on like nothing had happened. Maybe May would be the same way. Maybe he could show her his scars without the fear that he constantly harbored about them being seen.
So he gave in, and he didn't resist while her hands made another attempt at removing his shirt. When she had gotten it off, her hands settled on his shoulder blades. He tensed and waited for her to notice how uneven the skin was. He knew when she realized because she yanked her hands away, looking shocked and disgusted. She moved on her bed so she could see his back, and he heard her take in a deep breath. "Lance."
He closed his eyes, but all he could see behind his eyelids was her disgusted expression. He would have taken any reaction except that.
"Lance. What…?" She seemed unable to articulate what she really wanted to say about his scars. Her hand settled on his back then drew away quickly, as if the blemishes had burned her. He turned to look at her and she still had that same expression on her face.
"I should go," Lance said, unable to handle the scrutiny of his back. He grabbed his shirt and pulled it over his head. May made no attempt to stop him leaving, so he hurried down the stairs and out the front door. He walked home, fighting back tears.
She didn't text him at all that night, and he didn't text her. What would he say to her anyway? "Sorry I'm disgusting"? At school the next day, she didn't come over to talk to him when he walked into their homeroom, so he didn't make an attempt to repair their connection. He could take a hint.
