The drive back from Dixon's house had offered Beth just enough time to pull herself together before arriving home. She tucked an unruly lock of hair behind her ear, pinched her cheeks so that she didn't look so deathly pale, and when her eyes met those of her reflection in the rear-view mirror she told herself that everything was going to be okay.
Beth found Erin where she had left her earlier that morning, fast asleep on the couch. She stirred Erin awake and saw to it that her friend was slipped into a pair of fresh sweatpants and a comfortable T-shirt. Once Erin's stomach was full of sweetened cereal she reluctantly agreed to let Beth drive her home.
The journey to Erin's house gave Beth ample opportunity to lecture her friend about sneaking into the bar and letting a stranger buy her a drink. Erin humored Beth's words and quietly listened, but Beth had a sneaking suspicion that her friend's silence had more to do with the fact that their sugary breakfast had left Erin half comatose.
Once they pulled onto Erin's street, something came out of Erin's mouth that sent Beth's foot accidentally stomping on the accelerator.
"What's going on between you and Mr. Dixon?" her friend asked quietly.
Beth could feel cold water inching up her skin. She'd never been a good actress, and so in lieu of acting dumb she decided honesty was her best route. Or, to be more exact, partial honesty.
"I have a crush on him," Beth admitted, trying to make her voice sound like it caught. As crush rolled off of her tongue, Beth felt impossibly silly. There was more depth to how she felt about Dixon and she didn't enjoy downplaying it, but the next few sentences between her and Erin were going to be crucial. If Erin caught on to what had happened with Dixon over the summer, it would be mere hours before the entirety of the town knew.
Ever since they were young, Erin had possessed an aggravating capability of reading people. Even in her sugared-up state Erin's wily ways were razor sharp. Her eyes narrowed in Beth's general direction. "I might have been mildly belligerent last night-"
"Mildly?" Beth scoffed, a feeble attempt to draw Erin away from the topic at hand.
"Yes, Beth, mildly," Erin shot back, easily evading Beth's tactic. "But I remember the way Dixon was acting towards you, and the way you two were talking. Strangely reminiscent of the way couples talk and act."
Beth realized that she had wildly underestimated Erin. It was ironic at the moment but this was why Beth was best friends with her; on the surface Erin was just another typical small-town girl living in a pleasantly unremarkable and boiling hot state. She existed firmly on the inner regions of popularity, in comparison to the outer fringes where Beth chose to hover. But beneath that lived an impossibly intelligent girl who noticed more than people gave her credit for.
"So I ask again," Erin continued after Beth's feathers had been significantly ruffled. "What is going on between you and Mr. Dixon?"
Beth's tires bit into the gravel path that led to Erin's little house. She drew to a stop in front of the chipped-paint garage. She was quietly weighing her options. She hadn't whispered a word of her relationship with Dixon to anyone, although relationship was a heavy word to describe the delicate balance that had existed between them since the summer.
Suddenly Beth found herself playing in Hershel's garden, soil stuck like gum between her toes as she ran through the flowers and vegetables. Hershel was grabbing weeds and ripping them from the earth. Beth informed him that just cutting the weeds down looked a whole lot easier.
"You see, Beth," Hershel had explained, drawing her onto his dirty pants-leg. "You rip the weed out from the bottom so that you take all of its roots with it. That way, it doesn't regrow."
Beth desperately wanted to tell Erin everything that had transpired ever since Dixon had traipsed into her life, but she couldn't fight the feeling that by doing so she'd just be watering the weeds. By shutting Dixon out completely she was ripping the weeds out, root and all.
"I just got carried away, I guess. I have a pretty big crush on him, and you know how he is, he's a friendly person. If you noticed it then he did too… that's kind of embarrassing. I'd better get it in check."
Beth's words were half-assed and they both knew it, but she couldn't tell Erin the truth. It was painful to keep things from her, and Beth wasn't surprised to see that pain reflected in Erin's eyes. She knew that Beth wasn't telling her everything and it hurt.
"Well, thank you for helping me out last night. I'll see you on Monday." Erin swept herself from Beth's car but paused before shutting the door, seeming to have second thoughts. She leaned down with her hand still curled around Beth's door, her eyes searching. "You can always come to me, Beth, if you ever need anything… You can trust me."
Beth's throat felt thick. "Thank you," she murmured.
Yet another drive home saw Beth's head full of swirling, heavy thoughts. Arriving home, she found a change in the landscape: Maggie's beat-up truck was sleeping in the drive way. It only took a few steps through the front door to find the company of her sister. Maggie had angled the box of cereal towards a glass bowl only for the box to sputter and choke, spitting out a few morsels of granola. Maggie slammed the box down in frustration.
"There's no damn food in this house," she lamented to no one in particular.
"It's because you come home from school and eat everything."
"Don't you have anything better to do than insult me?" Maggie scowled, rooting noisily through the cupboard until fishing out a crumpled box of granola bars. Pleased with her discovery she peeled open a chocolate-chip one and took a victorious bite.
"I have some homework to do, but I'd rather insult you."
In response, a half-eaten granola bar smacked the doorframe a mere inch from Beth's head. Beth tossed it into the garbage can, ignoring Maggie's enduring threat that "next time she wouldn't be so kind towards her target."
When she returned to her homework Beth found a handful of problems she'd started but didn't get to finish Friday night, thanks to a hasty phone call from Dixon. She stared at those unfinished problems. They were like a weird time capsule to a different lifetime, before Dixon had to go and throw a wrench into everything again.
For the first time in recent memory, Beth threw herself into her calculus homework. She carefully solved each problem and went back multiple times to check her work for each problem. When she finished the homework that was due on Monday, she powered through a few more chapters. It wasn't until Beth came up for a gulp of air that she realized she'd done all of her math homework for the next week and a half.
As it turns out, Beth thought wryly to herself, pining after your English teacher happens to have a spectacular effect on your grades for every other class.
Daryl's dreams were a tangle of images and emotions that left him blinking blearily at the sharp red numbers of his alarm clock. His skin blossomed with goosebumps from the memory of Beth in his dreamscape, weaving her cold fingers through his. He could still feel Beth's ghost in the room, curled up next to him on his mattress.
He pulled himself into a sitting position, twisting the bones in his back until they uttered a chorus of cracks. Daryl had the distinct feeling that there was something heavy sitting on his chest.
Perhaps some of the great writers that he preached about on a daily basis would have described the weight as a stone, pressing down painfully into Daryl's chest cavity.
Or maybe a better way to describe it would be to say that Daryl's chest felt heavy because of the heart of stone that hung in his ribcage like an ugly Christmas ornament. He hadn't seen Beth since Saturday, but every detail from that day played in his mind like the battered film reel of an old drama.
What Daryl most clearly remembered was how he felt the moment that Beth had left his house. He'd almost forgotten what it felt like to alone with Beth. Simply standing in the same plane of existence as her kicked up the kind of emotions that Daryl knew were dangerous. It felt a little like how the sun existed in the same galaxy as the moon; both exerting so much gravitational pull and force that it became an intoxicating interaction.
Daryl could feel a pair of eyes boring into the back of his skull. He turned his head only to find Scout's muddy brown eyes studying him. Scout's downturned mouth and quiet demeanor gave him a morose appearance, which was out of character for the mutt. Daryl realized that Scout was simply feeding off of his owner's emotions.
Scout clicked towards him and plopped his muzzle into Daryl's lap, uttering a sigh so deep that it seemed to rattle his bones. Daryl gently ran his hands through Scout's fur, thinking that if his eyes reflected even a quarter of Scout's sadness he'd be unable to face his students today.
"Good boy," Daryl murmured, earning a lone tail wag from his companion.
Even though darkness still infected the outside world, it was time for Daryl to face the day. He put Scout outside and found Merle unconscious on the torn leather couch that they'd brought from their old house, one of the only things they had left from their childhood home. Although home was too warm a word to describe the pigsty they'd grown up in.
Their father had often slept on that couch, falling into the same drunken slumber that currently encumbered Merle. Daryl peeled a beer bottle from his brother's loose grip, hoping to avoid the bottle falling and giving Merle the kind of abrupt wake up that left him pissed off for hours.
There was still a mouthful of amber liquid swimming around at the bottom of the bottle. Daryl was tempted to wash it down but wryly decided that coming into class with alcohol in his bloodstream would be too much of a cliche.
He liked the shower water to be so hot that it threatened to set his skin on fire. Daryl imagined that the boiling hot water running down his body was washing his sins away and sweeping them down the drain until he was left squeaky clean.
After discovering that Beth was his student, it had taken Daryl months to carefully construct a mask that gave him the appearance of being fine. It wasn't until recently that Daryl reached the point of actually being okay and so the mask had hung quietly in his closet, no longer needed.
But after Friday- Jesus, it felt like a lifetime ago that he'd found Erin at the bar and knew who he had to call. After Friday, Daryl was not okay. His current state introduced the possibility that he'd never really been fine, he'd simply been lying to himself. But irregardless, there was no question that after Friday he needed to root around in his closet for that mask.
He tugged on a white collared shirt and a pair of dark, wrinkled pants. Looping the tie around his neck brought about a feeling of dread, probably not unlike the feeling that enveloped a condemned man shortly before he was hung.
Daryl stopped to look at his reflection. The mask felt a bit tight, but its smile was more than enough to hide his true feelings. To everyone he had to face today, they'd think that Mr. Dixon is doing just fine.
She'll be able to see through your mask, the winged demon on his shoulder snarled softly into his ear.
Standing opposite of the demon was a small creature who was also winged, but his voice was much gentler. Let her see, he whispered. Let her know.
A/N: A huge thank you to every person who favorited, followed, read, and reviewed the last chapter! I wasn't sure what kind of welcome I'd get, or if I would get a welcome at all. But I was taken aback by how positively the last chapter was met, considering that I really just wrote it on a "oh what the hell" kind of whim. So now it seems that I'm going to take this story and keep on building it for as long as you'll have me.