Chapter 17

William, who was taller than her, didn't suffer too much from this blow, but he still stumbled back from the surprise. She hadn't hit as hard as she would have but he still held his bleeding nose. Nothing was broken though.

"How dare you come here?!" She screamed at him, after making sure the door was closed behind her.

"I needed to talk to you!" He explained, leaning his head back and pinching his nose.

Mara wanted to tell him that it would only make the blood flow more intense but she bit her tongue. He could damn well bleed out of the porch.

"Yeah well thanks, I know that, I think we got it from your first text, and the hundred others that followed!" She snickered in conceit. "Are you this dense, Will? If we wanted to speak to you, don't you think we would have picked up our phone?!"

"That's irrelevant, there is something I need to tell you," he said, pushing her argument aside with a gesture of the hand as though it was of no importance at all.

"I'm way past caring what you have to say or what you do! Just leave us alone!" Mara screamed, feeling angry tears blur her vision but quickly blinking them back.

"You care enough to talk about me with Noora though," William pointed out, a confident smirk growing on his lips.

"Ditto brother, apparently you still feel entitled to monitor what I do even when you're too stubborn to even talk to me face to face for a week straight," Mara scoffed.

If he imagined for so much as a second that he could show up at Chris' door and crack a joke and that it would be enough to forgive and forget everything, he had to think again.

"What's the miserable excuse you've come up with to justify your behaviour, huh? I'm curious tell me," Mara laughed a bitter laugh, making herself cringe. "No actually I don't want to know, just get the fuck away from me! I can't believe you have the nerve to show yourself after what you did yesterday!"

"Mara, I-" he started but she cut him off.

"I don't give a fuck, Will! I've been trying to talk to you for days and you've ignored me, now you'll just have to suck it up and listen to me, because I am not listening to you," she articulated exaggeratedly slowly. "It was beneath you to drag Chris into a fight after what happened last week. He's still hurt. When I came home from school, I saw him curled up on the floor, bleeding – do you have the slightest idea how frightened I was? Of course you don't, because you don't give a shit anymore! About me or you best friend!"

"It's not-" he tried to talk to her yet again, but Mara's hands flew up to her hair in an irritated gesture and she had to look away from him.

She couldn't stand the way he looked at her, it was too close to the affectionate Will she was used to. He overstepped his boundaries and needed to face the consequences of his actions, Mara couldn't give in just because she was weak and wanted her brother back.

"If you want to talk to Chris, you'll have to wait for Monday to come around," she finally said when she settled down. "I'm not letting you anywhere near him until he feels better."

She saw the way his lips parted to say something, but nothing ever came out.

"You know, soon it'll be too late to mend the broken pieces of our relationships. If you don't get your shit together, it'll all go to waste," she told him in a final attempt to make him realised he was a huge dick head for the entire past week. "You have some serious apologizing to do, but today's not the right day."

With that said, Mara turned around and left a speech William standing on the porch as she went back inside, and as soon as the door was closed, she let out the worst, most pathetic whimper. With a hand covering her mouth, she began to cry, allowing herself a moment of weakness and sliding down the door until she hit the cold tiles of the floor.

That was the position in which Chris found her when he heard her muffled weeps.

000

Monday rolled around sooner than either of them would have expected. At first Chris was enraged that William came to his house and made Mara cry, he even planned on going to his apartment to give him a piece of his mind, but then Mara told him she had punched him and he agreed that it was enough punishment for a day.

But if there was one thing he agreed on even more than that, it was that there had been way too much punching going on for the last weeks. It was inadmissible and it had to stop immediately.

Mara took Noora at face value and asked her if she could keep her updated about what was going on at Nissen, and she also asked one of her classmates to send Mara the homework to do for next week. Apparently the Penetrators had won a battle that day when Mara found Chris bloodied, because the rumours was that the Yakuza gave up on trying to become the dominant Russ crew – thus putting an end to this idiotic pissing contest that had been going on for about as long as the two groups existed.

When she told Chris, he complained about not being there to hear it himself. But he also rejoiced in being home for a while, despite the vehement protesting at the beginning of his forced vacation. Mara would go as far as to say he apprehended going back when the alarm clock rang Monday morning.

"Fuck!" He swore, slamming his hand on the beeping machine to shut it up. "Back to hell."

Mara answered with an unintelligible groan and rolled back around to bury her face in the pillow. No she really wasn't a morning person. Her black eye was gone now, and she looked as fine as ever – although she was running out of clothes and will probably have to make a detour by the apartment tonight.

The cold hit her body and Mara's head flew up, only to see that the sheets had been torn off her.

"Hey!"

"No time to fall back asleep," Chris told her. "Get your cute little ass out of my bed!"

"That's not what you said last night," she flirted through her sleepiness.

Chris rolled his eyes at her and told her to hurry as she stretched her tired limbs. Her body went on autopilot and she stood up, showered and got dressed in a state of half-sleep, like a robot. She met Chris downstairs and he placed a steaming cup of coffee on the counter for her. Everybody who spent a little time with Mara knew there was nothing to get out of her before her cup of coffee.

"Al right, I'm awake," she declared proudly, smiling giddily as she gulped down half her coffee.

"You're a fippin' mess," Chris teased her, handing over the box of cereals.

Mara grabbed a bowl and a spoon and poured herself some cereals. Will and Chris always made fun of her because she didn't put milk in her cereals, but she liked them extra crunchy not at all pasty. Under her boyfriend's judgemental scrutiny, she ate her breakfast, provokingly glancing his way every now and then as if to challenge him to say anything, but he kept quiet and simply smiled in his cup of coffee.

She was so exhausted she could sleep standing up. During the last few days she didn't sleep much, or well. Her mind was constantly busy replaying the scene between William and her, and she made sure Chris was sleeping because he was the one who needed most a good night sleep, not her.

"Hey! Mara!" Chris snapped his fingers before hers eyes. "Don't fall asleep on me like that."

"I'm awake" she told him as she shoved his hand away from her face. "I was thinking."

"Well stop." He shrugged.

"You don't even know what I was thinking about!"

"Whatever it was, it must be some brain melting thing you've been over-thinking, so stop anyway," he insisted. "It's hot when a girl has the brains and the good looks, but don't push it too far."

"How do you manage to turn a compliment into something akin to an insult so easily?" She frowned in concentration as if she was really putting some thought in it.

"Years of practice, and I'm a natural born irritating person."

"No truer words have ever been spoken," Mara sassed him before leaning in for a kiss. "Have you seen the time? We have have to go or we'll be late," she said when she noticed the microwave clock.

Mara downed her cup of coffee and ran to Chris' room to get her bag, threw on her coat and grabbed her shoes on her way out. Chris, ever the charmer, held the front door open until she entered the hallway, and then closed it right to her nose, earning a string of profanities and threats that she would never put into action. He seemed very pleased with himself and barely managed to suppress his smile when Mara opened the passenger door of his car and hopped in, her shoes still in her hands.

000

"No offence, but you look like a mess."

That was how she was greeted by Sana, who harboured a soft but teasing smile on her red painted lips.

"So I've been told," Mara sighed dramatically and shut her locker close.

"Noora and Eva haven't stopped asking around if anyone knew what happened to you and Chris, they were worried beyond reason and you come back looking like you haven't had any shut eye in a week," she said, her tone clearly full of reproach and slightly scolding.

"I'm sorry, why are you here telling me I look like shit?" Mara frowned.

Sana wasn't with the girls, she came straight for her and dragged her. Mara respected that but didn't enjoy being on the wrong end of the dragging.

"I thought I should tell you now, before the girls come." She was awfully serious all of a sudden. "While you were gone there was some drama going on. P-Chris' ex, the second year girl-" she trailed off, waiting for Mara to fill in the blank.

"Iben?" She asked.

What did Iben have to do with this? She wasn't the most mature person Mara knew but she was friendly enough and she wasn't bitter about her breakup with Chris. Though Mara hadn't talked to her since Chris and her became public. Sana had her full attention.

"Yes, Iben, when she saw that the Penetrators were all hurt and Chris was nowhere to be seen, she flipped. There was a nasty cat fight between her, another girl who slept with Chris at a party and Eva who overheard them talk about you and Chris and tried to defend you."

"Wait, wait, what exactly are you trying to tell me?" Mara tried to sort out all the information Sana threw at her.

"Iben was a little too concerned about a boy who wasn't her boyfriend anymore, and she was going on about how she made a mistake, that she never should have dumped him and that she'd get him back," Sana said with an apologetic wince. "Eva told her that she would regret it all of her life if she did this to you, but she said you weren't her friend, and that Chris clearly didn't like you at all since he hid you all this time."

"I'm going to rip-" Mara began to profess a threat but the girls walked round the corner and walked toward them. "Thanks for telling me. I'll deal with it."

"Wait, it's not over," Sana grabbed her by the elbow when she was going to meet the girls halfway. "The person who put an end to the fight- it was William."

"Wil- what?" Mara asked in confusion.

Sana simply shrugged, showing her that it was all the information she could gather. Then the girls greeted each other and soon Noora and Eva were standing each side of Mara, asking her questions and showing concern like no one had before.

Mara spent the whole morning worrying about Iben, looking at her in class instead of concentrating – although it was maths and she was already too chapters ahead of the program. Sana's words played over again in her again like a distant echo haunting her every thought. She wasn't actually worried about Chris turning on her and going back to Iben, but since she heard what Sana told her "she said you weren't her friend", Mara felt her heart clench in her chest and she was feeling a little sick. It shouldn't have been a surprise to her, but it still hurt to know that she was categorized as a mere classmate, an acquaintance Iben didn't owe anything.

And that last part about William putting an end to their cat fight. What did he do exactly? Maybe he saw a bunch of girls showing their teeth and stepped in to avoid further drama? Or – she barely allowed herself to think about this – did he hear her talk about stealing his sister's boyfriend and defend her? That was the kind of thing she would have expected William to do before all of this. That was the most plausible explanation, since he usually didn't care about girls' drama, he stayed out of it when he could. The whirlpool of thoughts in her head made her dizzy and confused.

Lunch break couldn't come any slower. She counted every damn minute until the clock hit the big twelve and practically flew off her chair and out of the room to go to the cafeteria. Chris had told her he would keep her a seat since he didn't have class the hour before, but ten minutes in, Mara was still pointlessly looking around and finding no one. She eventually gave up and sat with the girls who waved at her to come over.

Mara swore they had fun but she only paid half a mind the conversation, and twenty more minutes passed before the obvious hit her in the face. It wasn't just Chris missing. It was all the Penetrators. Suddenly worried out of her mind, she got up, leaving her trail of untouched food behind and went out. She ran around the entire school until she found them, all gathered around behind the school. She vaguely saw William stand out of the crowd since he was taller than the rest, and the familiar undercut of her boyfriend who aggressively pushed her brother back with two hands. The others seemed ready to intervene if things got out of hand, but Mara wanted to scream nonetheless.

Not even a day could pass by without a fight. And she was fucking done with it. It made her sick. Sick to the stomach, and her vision- her vision got blurry. Was she crying? Her hand rose to her cheek and wiped it but she felt no tears. What- what was? Her head was spinning a bit and all she could hear where Chris' shouts and then her knees turned into jelly and it felt like the whole of her energy was sucked out of her body.

Mara felt her eyes close, and body limply fall to the ground, she wanted to say something but her body didn't obey anymore and everything happened so quickly. When her head hit the ground, she was out.