"Flip flops, Miss Fray?"
Clary looked up automatically, very deer in the headlights and clutching her new textbook like it might save her somehow. Paper body shield.
"Umm…" Swallow. "I'm sorry! I didn't know they weren't allowed, and I didn't bring anything else."
"I'm not sure what kind of school you attended before, Miss Fray, but here, apologies and ignorance pleas are a waste of my time. You did sign the handbook, didn't you?"
Clary nodded slowly, face burning from the epic grilling she was in the process of receiving.
"So you've read the rules. And I'm sure like half the student body here, you've got an illegal cell phone on you. You could have made contingency plans to change your shoes."
Mr. Valentine paused for a moment, walking over to his desk to quickly scribble a note down on a pink pad. He finished with a flourish – apparently signing his name, and ripped a corner of it along a serrated edge.
He walked over to her desk in the second row, and held it out for her to take, an unamused, mocking smile looming over her.
"Now you'll have to call and let your parents know you'll be staying late after school."
Weakly, she took the slip of paper, her eyes wide and in the process of welling with stupid tears.
She'd never had detention. She'd never acted up at all, in school. The last thing she expected was to have her spotless record suddenly dragged through the mud because she wasn't warned that flip flops were forbidden. She was officially a problem student, over footwear!
The anger was brief; the embarrassment was worse. Clary had just been demoted from 'new girl' to 'loser' in ten seconds. Righteously shamed in front of twenty-odd students, who would probably be all talk as soon as the bell rang. The word would get out, and multiply. Not that anyone had bothered to ask her name. She expected to hear scandalized whispers of 'flip flop girl'.
It was the last harsh stroke to an evil, evil day. The students ignored her, the teachers treated her the same way they treated everyone else – like a delinquent, with no consideration for the fact that she was new. No one would show her around, no one wanted to talk her, much less introduce themselves. Or even ask how she'd ended up at this god-forsaken place to begin with.
Clary had sat alone at lunch for the first time since…probably elementary school, and it sucked. The few people who so much as looked at her, well, they might as well have been inspecting a bug. Without the girly screams. Just that look of 'ugh. What's that?'
She had no idea what she'd done to deserve ending up in this level of hell. Whose cat she must have run over, or person she must have pissed off.
The injustice of it all made her desperately want to remove her illegal cell and call Simon, tell him to get his ass out of class and come get her RIGHT NOW. Because being a truant was still better than being a pariah in this prison. He'd do it for her – he was her best friend. Her knight in navy and beige.
And she was the detention-bound damsel in flip-flops.
She heard two girls laughing behind her. Clary tried to cup her ears underneath her hair, scowling at Mr. Valentine's back as he returned to the blackboard, carrying on with the lesson.
She would probably have to call Luke. Just so he wouldn't start panicking when she didn't show up on time. Or call Simon and let him know, because Luke was bound to call him next, figuring they'd met up after school - as per usual.
They were supposed to go see mom after school. Clary swallowed, not sure how long after-school detention typically lasted. Hopefully not so terribly long, they'd miss out on visiting hours.
What would mom have said, if she knew Clary had gotten detention on the very first day?
She was going to tell her, of course. The doctors had said that they believed coma patients could hear people talking – or that, in some way they recognized the sounds of familiar voices and reacted to it. Clary wasn't sure if that was the case or not, since aside from involuntary actions like breathing and shivering, she hadn't seen her mom move in weeks. But she would hold her mom's oddly cool hand and tell her about her disastrous day – and her feeble hope that it could only get better from here.
God, it had to.
She buried her face beneath her arms on the desk, hosting her own pity party while the evil teacher's back was still turned.