Okay, I am supposed to be asleep right now, so this is going to be short.
Disclaimer: I do not own Degrassi. Seriously, I don't.
Okay, well I thought I wasn't going to have this chapter posted by Thursday, but then I got hit with this wave of inspiration so I just wrote and wrote and wrote and deleted and deleted and deleted and worked and worked and worked.
P.S.- Who saw the new promo? Fitz is back? Awww snap
Hey, Clare, wait up!"
Alli catches up with me before I even have a chance to turn around. She's smiling like nothing is wrong. Apparently she's over what I said to her before. Too bad I'm not.
"Do you want to eat lunch with me?" She waggles a brown plastic bag in front of my face, laughing. "My mom made raspberry bar cookies! I know you love them, and she always bakes enough for me that I'll end up gaining a hundred pounds if I eat them myself."
Somewhere beneath the happy and cheerful façade of her voice, I'm able to catch a glimpse of another emotion, one that's being beaten down so hard it's barely even recognizable anymore. I don't know quite what it is, but in the little amount I'm able to contain I guess it's some form of desperation. Like she's trying to pretend that life is all sunshine and rainbows in hope that I'll start to believe it too.
"No thanks," I can barely hear my own voice; the hallways are flooded with waves of students, one after another, a never-ending force of destruction. "I think I'll pass."
"Please, Clare!" She clutches her hands together as though she's praying to God, her eyes begging in sync with her voice. "I really don't want to sit with Dave and Connor and Wesley. Being the only girl sucks."
"What about Jenna?" I kick at a random pencil lying helplessly on the floor.
Alli smiles deviously, an instant signal of gossip. "You didn't hear, did you?"
Instinctively, I find myself being pulled into the engrossing wrath of juicy knowledge, and for a moment I feel a sense of the past floating up to touch the inner layer of my skin. But it fades away before I have a chance to know if it ever even existed at all.
"Clare," Alli looks around to make sure no one's listening, even though everyone probably knows about something big enough to cause such a glint in her eyes.
"She's pregnant."
My jaw drops.
Pregnant? Jenna Middle pregnant? The same Jenna who used to play her original songs in the cafeteria and fantasize about being a star one day and drooled over Taylor Lautner with me? The person who always seemed so innocent and naïve? The girl how always had everything going for her? How can things change so fast? How can people change so fast? It seems almost impossible that something this huge and life changing could have slipped right through me, but then I remember I hadn't paid much attention to things over the summer.
"K.C. Gunthrie's the father. You know, the guy who can't choose between basketball and football. I heard he left her when he found out, but apparently they're back together. It's kind of cute if you think about it," Alli puts the tip of her thumbnail into her mouth and twists it, "They could be a happy family. I mean, it will take a whole bunch of failures and obstacles, but that's what life's all about, right? Learning that everything is worth it?"
I hear her saying the words, but can't find enough energy to actually digest them. I'm still in shock that Jenna Middleton is pregnant. What did she feel like when she found out? Did her whole life shake as though she was in the middle of a nine point five ranked earthquake? Did the ground beneath her feet shatter and everything left inside of her begin to collapse?
Is getting pregnant at fifteen enough to make her want to die?
"I want to help her so bad," Alli goes on, "So many people are calling her a slut and a whore and all that crap, but the truth is she only had sex with one person. Her and K.C. were in a healthy relationship, and had been for a while. It's not like she gave it away to just anyone. God, people just piss me off so much. How would you feel if everyone just started judging and staring you?"
An awkward silence respires between us. Alli looks away from me and closes her eyes, somehow managing to walk blinded without crashing.
"Clare," she whispers, "I'm sorry."
"It's okay," I say, even though it isn't.
She shakes her head and releases a heavy breath. "I honestly didn't mean it like that. I just got so caught up with finally talking to you that I didn't watch what I was saying."
"Don't worry about it. I'm not angry."
"So is that a yes?"
I glance at her, confused. "Yes to what?"
"Eating lunch with me. Will you? Come on, there's so much stuff going on in this school you would never even think about."
My eyes slam shut on their own account. I don't want to know about what's going on in this school. I don't care. When I take a moment to open my eyes and look over at Alli, her glossy black hair is covering her face, and I wonder what it is that's going through her mind right now.
"No, sorry, I don't think I can."
Alli sighs, a mixture of frustration and hopelessness, and puts her hand on my arm to drag me over towards a row of abandoned lockers. "Come on," she whispers, and I struggle to catch her words through all the noise, "Just sit with me. You don't even have to talk. Just come."
"I can't, Alli."
"Please, Clare," This time when she says the words there is no cheerfulness or joy in them. "I don't want to lose my best friend."
"You're not," Saying the lie is like eating sour candy: a starving need to spit it out but knowing I'm not brave if I do.
"Yes, I am. You don't need to say anything. Just sulk and give me dirty looks and let me know how much you'd rather be somewhere else. At least sit with me, if only for five minutes."
"Come on, Clare."
I give her, what I hope to be, a cold look. "No."
She's still watching me when I walk away. Throughout the few hours I've been back at Degrassi, I've become an expert at knowing if someone is looking at me or not when I can't see them.
Even when I'm fully down the hallway and standing at the library door, I swear she's still looking.
Truth is, I am hungry. But students get in trouble for eating anywhere but in the cafeteria, and burnt pizza and sour milk isn't worth the torture of all those eyes and a nagging Alli. For the second time this day, I walk through the hallways on my own, but this time I actually have a destination.
J.T. York died only a few years ago. I've never met him before, never even knew who he was, until Darcy came home one day in utter shock that a former student had been killed the night before. And suddenly it was as though his ever presence burst into energy. His picture popped up every time I turned on the news, a new face telling the same story, how a seventeen-year-old boy had been stabbed in the back at a birthday party for his ex-girlfriend. "It was an accident no one saw coming", they would always say. "There was a rivalry between the two young men, but nothing serious enough to have caused such a disaster." You couldn't go to the grocery store without hearing the quiet whispers of his name, followed by a line of "such a terrible, terrible, tragedy." And every now and then, when I would visit the high school so my mom could pick up Darcy from Power Squad practice, I would see a teenager walking through the front doors, wiping their eyes, sobbing. In a small town, death is never easy. But when it comes to someone so young and promising, it hits us in a way we never thought was possible. Our worlds become flipped upside down. Is your child safe? Who really are the kids at their schools? How can the lead-up to these events become more visible? Or more importantly, how can they be dodged? All of these questions lurked around the town like mice in someone's attic, none of them ever actually answered.
The school created a memorial on his behalf. Three benches surrounded by glass walls with a door on each side. There's a plaque with his name carved into it, a picture of a handsome boy with a smiling face perched on top of it, sealed with a graduation cap. I wonder, for a moment, if they'll make a memorial for Darcy. Or maybe they only make them for people who have been stabbed, like J.T., not someone who decided to kick the bucket themselves.
I sit down on one of the benches and pull out a copy of Nineteen Minutes. It's my fourth time reading it, and I can recite practically every phrase of all 455 pages. Yet somehow the story of a school shooting brought on by a million different perspectives never seems to get old.
It takes me a moment to realize that someone else is sitting at the memorial, too. I glance up, trying to be subtle, and find myself face to face with a boy wearing all black. He's leaning against the glass wall with his legs perched up underneath him, an apple in his hand. He doesn't notice me at first, but eventually he does, and a smirk brushes its way across his face.
I drop my head into my book, so far down that the words go blurry, and act as though I'm not distracted by the person sitting across from me.
It's silent for a while. Eventually I'm able to go back to reading, but every once in a while I unconsciously look up at the guy, who is now shuffling through his ipod tranquilly. In the deafening stillness his music is audible. Muffled, but audible. And every now and then I would be hit with a screaming guitar and bashing drums, cooling down to its regular volume in a matter of seconds.
"Have you ever heard of The Dead Hands?"
He speaks so suddenly I question if I'm going insane. But I realize, when one of his earplugs is hanging loosely out of his ear and his eyes are focused on my face, that he had spoken.
"No," I say quietly, scratching at the back of my head and trying to fix a piece of hair I know is standing up, "I haven't heard of them."
He nods his head, as though he was expecting such an answer. He begins twirling the loose plug around his forefinger. "They're really good," he smiles, "I bet you'd like them a lot."
"Okay…" I go back to reading my book and he goes back to listening to my ipod.
"In the end, you're more of a liar than I could be, but I guess that's my fault, for letting you get the best of me."
He sings the words so nonchalantly and carelessly and calmly that I can't help but close my eyes sway my head back and forth at the lyrics. It's hard to tell what kind of music this actually is, considering all I have is some guy singing them to himself with no music, but from what I hear it seems to be the kind of song that fits with the tone of his voice. Raw. Maybe with a slight country edge to it.
He stops singing suddenly, and when I look at him he's wearing this proud grin. "See," he chuckles, "I told you you'd like their music."
He stands up and walks away. I wonder for a moment if this were the whole purpose of him coming in here. Just to gain a new fan of a band he happens to like. Or maybe in the hope or scoring one with a girl. I flinch at the latter, realizing how bad of an appearance I made of myself. Not that I cared, or anything. It's just no one wants to feel like they made someone think they're stupid or something.
The bell goes off like sirens in the middle of the night. Somehow I managed to lose track of time, during the time I was reading or listening to that guy sing or even after he left. I crack both my knees before standing up, which always makes me feel refreshed, and swing myself through the door and into the flooded hallway once again. Fortunately, I got assigned the second to last lunch period, which means I only have one class left until school is over.
Peter Stone is walking with a group of guys whom I recognize only from their band, Studz, which would play at every school dance and major event. They are all laughing at something Sav Bhandari said, clapping their hands together, giving each other play punches in the shoulder. Peter is going along for the ride, seeming to follow every footstep they take, smiling, laughing, goofing off. But somewhere in his actions I catch a glimpse of the Peter I witnessed at the funeral. The Peter who refused to speak, who refused to cry or show any emotion other than pure numbness. I think back to his eyes that day, which were so dead and emotionless I couldn't look at them without drowning in my own tears, and wish that he would have broken down and cried hysterically until his cheeks were flushed red and his lips were dry. At least then I won't have to guess what he's thinking, whether or not he's truly over it or still being dragged back into the past. I wish I have the guts to go up and speak to him. But that would be awkward anyway. We never really did have a friendship. We were friendly enough to each other, acknowledging each other's presence and getting along, but it was always borderline acquaintances. I know that if it weren't for Darcy I would have never even spoken to him at all.
I watch him until he's fully down the hallway, being painted over by all the other students passing by.
He might have looked back at me, but I honestly can't be sure.
You guys know the drill. Review. Don't review. It's all good. And for the next chapter, I'll probably be introducing Clare's home life. That's a very shaky thing to write about, so it may take a little while. Wish me luck!
-JENNA
