Marshall spent the next day frantically scampering from class to class doing just about everything under the sun.
He spent all of his free period collecting nerd books from the library (Up until that point Marshall hadn't even known that their school had one), after which he was met by The Prince and his gang and asked (demanded) to tie each and every one of their shoelaces one by one. They were of course, all already tied, so it was a whole untie-retie sort of situation. Joy.
"This is nothing for him," one of them laughed, his eyebrows were practically growing over his eyes themselves, so Marshall had just taken to calling him Eyebrows, "I've heard that he's used to being on his knees."
Marshall grimaced, his hand slipped and he had press himself even closer to the ground to retrieve the runaway aglet as consequence. Although someone had meekly attempted to dispel the aroma with a dozen Clorox treatments, he could still smell the stench of each and every foot that had ever brandished the tile floor, and they seemed to date back to the early 1800's. He gripped his stomach with one hand, and resisted to urge to blow chunks all over each and every one of the pretty little shoes before him. Though doing so would probably have made for poetic justice.
"If I had known that your dad was such a snitch, I wouldn't have come over in the first place."
Eyebrows seemed to look down at him from underneath his thick bouquet of human fuzz. He likely had an angry sort of expression plastered across that red face of his, but it was awfully hard to be certain.
"What did you say?"
Marshall finished up his chore in silence. But for a split second he could've sworn he saw the Prince smile.
Marshall spent his lunch time gathering up all the trash that his fellow students had so generously left behind after downing their cold sandwiches and juicy boxes. All the crinkled bits of foil, all the sludgy stains of meatloaf surprise, the works. If any of the teachers currently on lunch duty found it suspicious that one particular student was doing the cleaning up for two-hundred, they certainly didn't feel it was a phenomenon worth addressing. Marshall could hardly blame them for their bystanding state, they had nothing to gain in sticking up for him, or any other kid without rich and powerful parents for that matter. He'd often wondered if in their situation, he would have become the same way.
Aside from the ache he was getting in his stomach from not eating, his first day of poor grade penance was becoming surprisingly manageable. Lee had gotten so ridiculously used to being a human chew toy anyways, and this was practically a whole level up from the original chew toy criteria. And the bonus lack of beatings? What was next, a party in his honor? If he had lost all remaining self-respect right then and there, he might have even skipped all the way to the bus lot that afternoon. Key-word might.
I might just come out of this completely unharmed, Lee thought to himself blissfully, securing the idea and savoring it sweetly as one might the last candy in the package, and with decent grades!
He was wrong.