This chapter is kind of AU only because I haven't seen the next episode yet and I'm sort of winging this right now. There's also some rampant profanity and a possibly over dramatic scene in here (but when is "Degrassi" not over dramatic?), just thought you'd like to know.

Chapter Six

"It took so long to remember just what happened, I was so young and vestal then. You know it hurt me, but I'm breathing so I guess I'm still alive even if signs seem to tell me otherwise."

The trick to office visits was to remain comatosely calm, to not show any kind or emotion or react in any way that could be interpreted as weakness. Just sit in the chair with a complacent expression, don't get frazzled. Yes, that was the key…until now. Now the key didn't fit, the lock had been changed.

There Jay stood, rattling the knob and practically kicking the door down and the slab of wood wouldn't budge.

Ms. Hatzilakos looked as though she wanted to hit him, reach across her desk and smack him across the face. Instead she straightened up in her chair, shuffled a small stack of papers in front of her to dispel some of her violent energy. "You've done a lot of things, Jason, but this by far takes the cake."

"Chocolate or vanilla? Oh, how about marble – that's my favorite."

"How can you joke about something like this?" Her face went an off shade of green: repulsion. She might have been pretty, but her poker face was absolutely terrible.

Jay replied indifferently to the stand-in principal's question. "Apparently quite easily."

Ms. Hatzilakos already had Jay's record out on the desk, resting beneath her steepled fingers. She leaned onto it now, an ineffective play at intimidation. "Jason, you know the school's policies."

"Yeah, but that doesn't mean I agree with them."

"You used to be a very good kid, do you know that? High grades, an excellent attendance record, you played on your Little League team."

Jay remained a brick when it came to his emotions. "Short Stop. I was really good, too, like a pint sized Derek Jeter only a lot more awkward looking."

"Why did you throw that all away? You were a talented kid, an intelligent one–"

"The real smart kids are the ones who get the worst grades. I didn't have that much of a brain."

Ms. Hatzilakos shook her head. "Granted, you were still very smart. It was like overnight you changed and your grades started slipping, you left the baseball team, you stopped going in before school to talk to your English teacher about your writing, you gave up participating in the fund raisers and middle school's annual student rummage sale. You let go of everything and that's not an exaggeration."

Jay shrugged one shoulder. "Is that all in my record? People change. What are you getting at?"

"Do you know why you're down here?"

"Certainly not to talk about tonight's evening gown competition. I was thinking about wearing a nice hunter green, you know, to bring out my eyes. I'm guessing that'll take the judges' attention away from my problem areas."

The blonde woman on the other side of the desk sighed and shut her eyes briefly. "Gavin Mason was just here, I assume he must have passed you on his way out."

"What of it? Get to the point."

For all the authority she tried to give off Ms. Hatzilakos wasn't the kind of person who could handle a job like this. She was too caring. Though her face became stern, though she went right for the throat, at the back of her eyes it was evident she didn't want to have to do what she had to do. "Gavin told me about what happened with Richard Murray, how he had been bullying him and about what happened to him with the paint and feathers incident. Gavin told me that you and he were up to that stunt, that you convinced Richard that Jimmy Brooks was the one behind it all. Am I missing anything?"

"No, you've pretty much got it all."

"You know that because of what happened Richard brought a gun to school and shot Jimmy for your lie, put him in a wheel chair for what very well might be the rest of his life? You know that when Richard then turned the gun on someone else a fight for that gun ensued and it went off, fatally wounding Richard?"

"You know, that if this school had metal detectors it never would have gotten that far?"

There was that look again. "This school never saw a need for metal detectors because the events leading up to a possible shooting had never happened – until you and Gavin rigged up that bucket and pulled the cord unless, and let me know, someone else had a hand in this as well?"

Alex was the one who pulled the rope, that's what Jay could have mentioned. "No, there was no one else. It was Spinner's idea, I just went along with it."

"You could have talked him out of it so why didn't you? Richard was a troubled boy, he did a very bad thing, but to punish him like that was uncalled for. You two are not the ones who should have been punishing that boy, not in that manner, not in any manner."

"It's a little late for that, don't you think? A lot of good that'll do, telling me all of this now."

Ms. Hatzilakos started to gather papers together, she looked at the forms and not at Jay. "Just let it all go, didn't you? Threw it all into the furnace?"

"It made a toasty fire, I must say, some of the best s'mores I've ever had."

"That's enough, Jason. You're fully aware about the school's zero tolerance policy regarding bullying. Not only that, after what's happened here and to learn that these tragedies – one sitting in a wheelchair and one complete with a headstone – could have been prevented the only choice I have is to expel you. Gavin has been expelled as well."

So much for acting like an emotionless asshole. "But it was Spinner's idea, he was the one who came up with it and he was the one who put the conviction in Rick's head that it was all Jimmy."

"Again, you did nothing to change Gavin's mind, you did nothing to stop him. You also bullied Richard as bad, if not worse, than the others and because of that alone you leave me no choice."

"This is bullshit!"

"Watch your language," Ms. Hatzilakos warned.

Jay felt like exploding up out of his chair, but he stayed put. "No. Why should I? It doesn't matter anymore. This is fucking bullshit and you know it. Walk down those halls and you'll hear enough verbal abuse to last you a life time and if not that then you'll see the looks people give others, you'll read the mother fucking notes they write behind people's backs. Everyone's bullying someone so why the fuck do you have to punish me for doing what everyone else did to that abusive bastard?"

"Tell me, Jason, did everyone publicly humiliate Richard to that extent? Did everyone pull that cord in unison to cause him to go over the edge?"

"Please, Rick practically shot himself. Okay, yeah, he needed a little help before the trigger was pulled and the gun went off, but in essence it's still suicide. He was going to break anyway, I don't see how the fuck what I did – which was nowhere near as much as that pissface Spinner did – did anything." So that was a lie, to go on top of all the others he made, but was Jay actually going to admit to anything?

Ms. Hatzilakos stood up, reached for the phone. "You're digging yourself a deeper hole here, Jason. Please get up and go clean out your locker, I'll notify your mother."

"Don't bother, she won't be home."

"Then I'll speak with your father."

Jay got out of the chair, started walking away. "Good for you."

Before Ms. Hatzilakos could say anything else, if she wanted to that is, Jay had left the office and began to his locker.

Gavin "Spinner" Mason. Jay had thought he was a decent enough kid, there was a lot he needed to learn, but he was decent. So much for that opinion. As if things couldn't have gotten worse after the Emma fiasco something like this had to happen. Why couldn't people learn to keep their mouths closed, it wasn't that hard.

Spinner had a long history, one of which Jay didn't really find all that amusing. He had dated the Terri girl Rick had been dating and put into a coma, who them recovered well enough to transfer schools. Whether because he had been dating his ex-girlfriend or whether because he genuinely hated the guy Spinner – long story short – had been the one to come up with the tar and feathering gag. Jay had liked it, though it was comic gold. The two of them had perfected the stunt and when it happened Jay had been the one who'd done most of the talking. Then Rick went on his rampage.

Jay and Spinner had hung out a couple of times, talked through a haze of Texas Highballs, and somewhere along the line Spinner had opened up his trap more than once. Jay had pushed it all to the back of his mind, hadn't really thought about it, because he had never thought he'd get expelled. So much for that.

Maybe Jay should have seen it coming instead of brooding about his past, instead of getting high and hooking-up. Spinner hadn't crossed Jay's mind once and because of that Jay had been thrown in the washing machine. Because Jay had thought that Spinner was such a low threat this happened. Expulsion, fucking Christ. That bastard.

Jay's facade as the hard working, perfect son was now blown to smithereens. Lies wouldn't help him explain himself to his parents, wouldn't help him get out of the pit he had gotten himself into. Sure, he'd have to explain why he would do such a thing to another student, but how the hell was Jay suppose to explain to his parents what had gotten him down to such a low point in the first place?

The grades hadn't been that much of a problem since he did always pass and the skipping classes thing was only slightly harder to answer to, but this?

"Yeah, Pops, I got expelled because I tarred and feathered a kid because he had put this girl into a coma, right? And I only got this violent and this pissed off and this fucked in the head because Mom's little homo fuck buddy Mark Jacobs had to rape me when I was seven and the only reason why that ever happened is because I didn't bitch long enough about not wanting to go into my room hours before normal. So I've stopped being a star athlete and a good student to beat people up, cause school shootings, have sex, get drunk, and snort heroin because I need to forget about ever being raped in the first place."

Oh yes, that would go over well, smooth as a baby's ass.

Spinner was still shoveling the contents of his locker into his backpack and black trash bags, no friends around him because since he came clean to Jimmy he didn't have any. Only a few people actually were around him, but they were getting things from their own lockers and weren't paying Spinner any mind.

Seeing as how there weren't very many people around it was easy for Jay to shove Spinner against his open locker door without much trouble, the metal door clanging against the ones behind it as Jay pinned Spinner there by a hand pressing down on the kid's thick neck. Jay's other hand was balled into a fist, just itching to pummel Spinner who was more like a limp noodle than someone who had to take medication for ADD.

"Are you happy now, you sonofabitch? Are you fucking happy? Got your conscious clean? Look, you rat bastard–"

"What?" Spinner hissed, some of his Flock of Seagulls haircut in his swollen eyes. The freak had been crying. "You wanna hit me? Go ahead, what more harm can it possibly do?"

Jay's eyes glistened and he sneered. He wanted something good to say, but nothing came. "A beating's too good for a crying pussy like you."

"Really?" Spinner pushed Jay off of him, causing the dishwasher blonde to back into someone who sounded familiar when she, unless it was a male with an extremely feminine voice, protested angrily.

When Spinner's fist came flying toward his face Jay quickly moved out of the way, to the right, and turned back to watch the punch meant for him collide with Ilse. She had been the girl Jay had bumped into and he almost laughed because the fight about to erupt in the hallway was palpable.

Eyes molten with anger Ilse didn't listen long to Spinner's sputtering apology before hitting him back. "If you ever touch me again I'll break your nose, do you understand?"

It might have gotten farther but Mr. Armstrong had rushed out of his classroom and grabbed Ilse by the crook of the arm. "That's quite enough, Miss Miller," he said as he tried to pull her away from the fight. He eventually let her go because she was swatting lightly at him, telling him that she disliked being touched with great intensity.

"He's the one who hit me first," Ilse then protested. "What was I suppose to do, let him get away with it?"

"More violence isn't the answer to violence. To the office now."

"Oh, come on. He smacked me right on the side of my jaw, I wasn't just going to stand there like an idiot and not do something about it."

Mr. Armstrong wasn't amused. "Go talk it out with Ms. Hatzilakos, I don't want to hear it."

Ilse looked toward Jay, met his eyes to finally prove his existence like he had onced needed her to do. "You're barbaric. This is your fault. If you hadn't marched over here and slammed him against his locker this wouldn't have happened. You're a nosey barbarian, I hate you." The pain in her jaw must've been finally acting up, for she touched the left side of her face with her hand.

"You only say that because you're lacking a few strong words, doll face. Besides, I love you," he said that last part extra sweet, like a character in a kid's show.

"Don't make me gag."

Mr. Armstrong was still there, arms crossed. "The office, Miss Miller. Now."

Ilse left the way Jay had come, heels clicking against the floor.

"Hey," Jay called after her, "maybe if you're suspended we can hang out sometime, Hell knows I'm going to be free for a long time."

"Screw you!"

"Fuck. I think you mean fuck you, and gladly," Jay yelled back. He looked at Spinner one last time before taking the long way back to his locker, sort of happy that he was expelled because Mr. Armstrong nor any other teacher couldn't do anything about him anymore.

That slight happiness faded when Jay thought about the explanation his parents would want for all of this.