So sorry it's taken me this long to upload - Writer's Block is a cruel mistress!
A few days trailed by, and as the disaster continued to go unresolved, so my confidence grew. Perhaps it was possible I would remain undiscovered after all, and could continue an unobtrusive existence; already the regular flow of the day had been clogged to a trickle due to the story on everyone's lips. Lessons were practically non-existent, and those that were still running eventually gave up and became social events instead, spawning grounds for fresh gossip and breaking news, which were really just the same facts, only chewed up and regurgitated in a slightly different way.
I got bored, careless even, raising my head a little higher in the sudden absence of constant abuse. Deep down I knew the last thing I should be doing right now was drawing attention to myself, changing in a way that would surely attract my peers' concentration, and therefore their suspicions. On the outside, however, I didn't care. If anything, I revelled in my new found freedom. No one could prove a thing now that my mutation was tucked safely away again next to my heart, feathered wings folded away out of public view. And this time, I felt more in control than I ever had before; the wave of energy I had released meant the building pressure in my chest had lessened greatly, and I could breathe a little easier without worrying about what would happen if I 'overflowed'.
This feeling of being untouchable was quickly brought crashing down. A week had passed, and I'd settled back down, my panic slightly abated by the lack of evidence traced back to my name, and the lack of evidence full stop. None of those in hospital were in any state to speak, and the one or two who'd managed a statement were barely comprehensible. For once, I felt comfortable in my own skin. And then the news came that sent the whole school skewing to one side from the impact. One of the boys, in fact the very one who'd forced his tongue down my throat, had died suddenly in the night. No warning, nothing. Now that a reasonably simple attack had turned into a murder inquiry, the school was set blazing afresh with an unforeseen heat as students' hackles were raised that someone should dare harm one of their own. The amount of police traipsing regularly around the grounds were doubled. Any sort of solace I'd found was destroyed in a single blast, and I was on a higher alert than ever before.
The guilt was crippling. I'd never properly hurt anyone before, and to send five people into hospital had been a roundhouse kick to the system, but now I had killed someone, and it was like someone had cut my spinal cord in two with a pair of blunt scissors. I stumbled around like a broken marionette, my head buzzing with a numb sense of guilt, and anticipation for the justice that was sure to root me out. I may have hated the guy, but he sure as hell hadn't deserved to die. I never even knew his name. He was just... the guy. The bully. The watch-out-here-comes-trouble. The face on the end of a fist. It had never properly occurred to me that he might have a life as well that was worth protecting, a family, feelings even.
It's one of those funny phenomena where you think that you're the only intelligent life form on the planet; it doesn't register how complex and unfathomable every other human being around you is because you're too focused on your own thoughts and your own path to bother seeing anyone else. And my mutation seemed only to make this heightened isolation worse, perhaps subconsciously allowing me to see others as inferior because of this genetic glitch that they lacked. Because their minds were so simple and careless and open; they did not hide, they walked proud, and the only way not to feel unworthy was to pretend deep down that it was they who were at fault.
But this time it was my fault. I was the monster who killed a guy out of frustration, a pretty mean one at that, but that argument sank pretty quickly the moment I used it as a defence against my conscience. Over and over again, incessantly on a loop, all I could hear was It's your fault, it's your fault, it's your fault. Even my own brain was turning against me in its throes of guilt. It got so bad at times that I actually wanted them to find me out just so that I wasn't the only one fighting under this stifling burden of knowledge. At least then my mind might become blessedly quiet once more.
My unfortunate wish came true the next day, because that was the day that they finally found a witness.
Why she'd never come forward before remained an inexplicable mystery, but at the news of a death she'd finally managed to draw on some deep reserve of courage and knock timidly on the door of the headmaster's office, her story ready to spill from her lips at the slightest provocation. And not only could she describe the attacker down to what they'd been wearing, she also had photographic evidence.
You might therefore be able to understand why I was terrified.