In Darcy's experience, people drastically over-estimated the difficulty of lying.

Darcy forged his mother's signature on a note and brought it to the front office. The secretary exchanged his lined, cursive stationary excuse for a neon orange late slip and shooed him off. For the sake of his plans, Darcy chose to interpret that as 'go to the chemistry classroom'.

Darcy knocked his boot against the bottom corner of the classroom door. It stood silent, almost foreboding in its stillness. He yanked the knob and kicked it, shoving it open.

"Ms. Parker," Darcy whispered while surveying the room. The fluorescent beams had been shut off, casting a slight tint of the cloudy daylight's gray over her giant table of elements. He waited for an answer, yet only an echo called back. He took a step inside. "Can you never install security? Thanks."

Given the lack of reply, Darcy let himself in and over to Ms. Parker's desk. He took a picture of the clutter with his phone to reference later, compared it with the desk ahead, and started rummaging across the calendar. Soon enough, he spotted the stack of tests piled in neat, alphabetical order.

Darcy nudged the other set of documents to his right, scattering them just enough that, if someone were to approach, he could pretend he'd been searching for his homework. With that situated, he flipped through the stack, first for the name of someone smart, then for Alan's, and, finally, for a blank copy of the year 11 chemistry exam. Darcy forged Alan's name on it and got to work, copying about 95 percent of the presumed right answers off one of the top students' exams, and the occasional wrong one back off Alan's.

By the time he had two pages left, Darcy swore he heard talking down the hall. He reached for his day planner, slapped it down over the test he'd been copying and braced to give his defense at the door. "Ms. Parker?" he called quietly. The footsteps continued past the door.

Darcy's hands slid back from the page of what he should've been writing on to what he genuinely would. He pried out both the spare and the true test's staples to switch out their essay pages, pinched the new test's staple shut by hand and tucked the doctored test back into the pile.

Darcy double-checked his smart phone with the desk to ensure the mess was as he'd found it, and then deleted the picture. He noted the lesson plan on the board behind him, scrawled down the night's reading and left.

The hallways were as desolate as they'd been ten minutes ago. It took at least another three before he'd passed someone heading the opposite direction. To be specific, it was the floppy ponytail and garish tablecloth-evoking floral dress of the person he'd expected a while ago.

"Ms. Parker," Darcy called, "Just looking for you. I miss anything but the reading?"

"Not at all, I got your paper topic yesterday, so, we're set. Unless you'd count missing eating. Then, I'd suppose, missing a lot," Ms. Parker raised her paper bag of takeout back at him and rustled it in his general direction.

"Not part of chemistry." Darcy forced his slightest smile back at her all the same—not because he was anywhere remotely reminiscent of amused, but because she wouldn't question him.

Ms. Parker's smile shone back at him to such an extent, he imagined the sun felt exhausted on her beams' behalf. "Digestive enzymes might have something to argue with, then. Chemistry is everywhere!"

Darcy forced his smile for half a second longer. "Except between me and Paige Whitley."

"Great topic element, by the way. Never had anyone pick Francium! If you've got trouble finding research, tell me. I'll help!"

"Sure," he lied.

Her smile softened a bit with persistent contentment, and quite possibly from the promise of lunch. "And please, try to behave! Fight ideas, not people."

Darcy nodded shallowly and left before she could add something else. He had a client to reach.

In the dozens of months they'd spent in each other's school districts, Alan Barnard hadn't once changed his seating preference. Every day, he perched slightly to the left side of the center, as if the capacity to watch everyone made him lord of lunches. While woefully predictable, this made him easy to find.

Darcy walked himself and his stack of innocuous books to the left side of the lunch room. He waited and watched for a sign that, contrary to initial belief, eventually did come. Alan stepped up from the lunch table with his empty tray in hand.

At that cue, Darcy opened up his homework planner to find the discarded exam. He tucked his books under his arm, freeing his hands just enough that he could crumple and rustle Alan's stolen test papers up into a little ball. He paced towards the rubbish bin, matching Alan's steps.

Just as Alan was tipping his lunch tray into the bin's mouth, Darcy tossed the paper up with his left hand, miming a basketball shot. One might presume he'd meant the paper to land in the bin. Instead, the soft wad of poor study habits squished lightly into Alan's bulging eyed, squashed-nosed face.

Considering the seemingly frustrated "dammit" and immediate twist to look away from Alan, Darcy decided to feign ignorance. He raised both of his hands palms-outward on each side of his head, miming surrender. "Sorry. My fault, entirely. Mind picking that up?"

Alan's back cracked audibly as he stood. He rolled his shoulders back, puffing out his chest in a manner somewhere between a gorilla and a factory-bred chicken. "Yes, I mind. It's your mess!"

Darcy let out a puff of his own, hiding an impatient sigh to accompany a reluctant "of course". He bent down, picked up the paper ball, mimed dropping it in the bin and retracted his hand sideways, shoving the crumpled pages at the top of Alan's shirt.

"What the hell're ya—" Alan's start at an argument faded out when he finally spotted the word inside the paper. With a quick glower, he shoved his empty lunch tray at Darcy's chest, pushing him back, and put the test into his pocket. "Grimy little bastard."

Darcy twirled the lunch tray between his hands. "Three days no interest. By the fourth… don't wait for the fourth."

Alan flung his now-open arm around Darcy's shoulder, reeling Darcy towards him and the lunch room doors. He was thankfully too preoccupied with speaking and spitting at the same time to notice Darcy flinching. "Really, man. How'd you do this shit?" he asked once they hit the hallway.

Darcy thrust his left hand back into the air again and shook it dramatically, rustling his planner's pages in the process. "Magic."

"Yeah. That's also shit."

Darcy smirked back. "Shouldn't shit comes to arseholes by nature?"

Alan came to a full stop. A flash of realization stretched his eyebrows to his forehead, as if this he'd just heard the most profound thing he'd ever know.

Darcy used this opportunity to grab Alan's wrist and pry the older student off of him. He tilted to the left to limbo under Alan's remaining arm and through to the drably tiled corridor. Darcy raised his hand one more time, pulling Alan's hand along in the gesture of pointing at Alan's torso. "Miracles have a cost. This one's cash only."

Alan pushed back. He took as broad of a step as he could muster, shoving his way into the hall. "Save the fregging lines for English class."

Darcy shook his head slightly and accepted the insult in a literal stride. As well as Darcy knew Alan's schedule, he doubted Alan had realized Darcy's next class was, indeed, English.

Mere seconds before the clock struck one, Darcy slid into his seat at the back right corner of Mr. Cromwell's English class. He flipped open a notebook, folded both arms along the ledge of his desk and slumped down in a drowsy stupor. Faintly, he recognized the rules of colorful essay writing their teacher meant to impart. Unfortunately for his teacher, no matter how enthusiastically they explained that definitively and definitely were definitively determined to definitely be two distinct words, the lecture couldn't compete against the post-caffeine slump.

Had he been left alone, Darcy may have stayed still through the entire lecture. However, like most conditional statements, it was phrased as such because the event referred to was far from what happened. Instead, after most of the class had long passed, someone kicked at his foot.

By reflex, Darcy's eyes flashed open. His head bobbed upwards and his shoulders pushed back with a moment of awareness, only to quickly drift back to the floor. Then, they kicked harder.

Darcy's head turned towards the source. In doing so, he forced himself to see the not particularly unwelcome sight of almond eyes and a black and crimson argyle baseball jersey. As soon as he spotted the girl to his right, she flipped her notebook to flash a drawing of an eye, a lump and a sheep in Darcy's direction. Strange as the combination was, his imagination could still one up even the most punk rock of doodling optometrist baseball playing bakers, so he let himself slump down once more.

It wasn't as if Darcy had no idea who was attempting to speak to him. Liv Hollender was a minor legend of the sophomore class. Between her garage band, drastically older boyfriends, and gigantic yet well sculpted eyebrows on an otherwise dainty face, she was one sudden illness away from the quirky female lead of a YA romance. She was also as persistent as unsalted slug guts. That being the case, he really should've expected she would start talking.

"Dare," she whispered while prodding his leg. "Dare-cy. Truth or. C'mon. I'll pay. Dare!"

The repetitive knocking of her doc martens on his leg sent a repeated twitch through his left eye. By the third knock, it was inevitable. He'd have to talk to her.

Darcy reached into his pocket for his smartphone. He typed a message into the notepad mode, waited for the teacher to start scrawling about another common set of misplaced words in essays ("they're wrong about their use of that word, right there!") and discreetly passed his phone under the desk.

Darcy could tell Liv had gotten the message he'd typed for her to 'make an offer', both because she'd snatched it from his hands, and she was clearly staring down at her lap. Thankfully, the teacher was too impassioned about the proper use of pronouns to notice Liv's concentrated yet fumbling typing back.

Ninety five seconds of slouching later, Darcy felt his phone brush through his jeans at his leg. He wrapped his palm around the phone, pulled it to the highest part of his thigh and read the message silently.

'You can't refuse? Steal for me. I'm playing the Wallington. My psycho ex is stalking my shows. With blackmail for good, horrible measure. I need help getting pics back and scaring him off. Pay 60 plus drinks. No touchy-feely.'

Darcy looked down at her message for maybe five seconds. He deleted the note, opened a new one and passed it right back. 'I could refuse'.

Liv picked his phone up a bit further, moving it from under the desk to directly on top of her textbook. She craned her neck to speak towards Darcy's ear. "How? In a million lightyears. Really, truly."

Liv pressed her hand directly over his mobile's screen. She eyed him expectantly, implying that he'd have to talk. If only to spite her, Darcy scrawled a message on one page of his notebook and slid it across his desk, tilting the page towards her so she could read 'I'm grounded and your music'll blow acoustic. Eighty.'

Liv lowered her hand to swat at Darcy under his seat, then pouted. "Oh my god. For a woman's safety? You cheap arse."

Darcy pulled the paper close just long enough to write back. 'Expensive arse.'

"No. Or. Eh, at least you know you're horrible…" Liv sighed. She rocked back in her seat and looked away from Darcy. "Fine. Sixty two. Which's all I've got until Christmas, so, there's nowhere to go but down or to pray to Santa," she relented.

"Won't work. Didn't you hear? Upon physical contact with me, Santa's presents immediately turn to coal."

"Nope. How can I hear someone who won't talk? But, to your credit, that's the worst mutant power I've ever heard."

"Should've see it in Victorian England. Better profit than Ms. Lovett's meat pies."

A tiny, soggy wad of paper splattered on Darcy's arm. He looked to Liv, who was sitting by innocuously. Liv's eyes drifted with her mind, up towards the ceiling. "I think my power'd be—"

Darcy pinched the spit ball between his fingers and dropped it to the floor. "Silence?" Another spitball smacked the back of his neck.

Liv failed to notice. "Nope, I'm talking—" at least, she had been until the bell rang.

The teacher shouted something at the rest of the class. Darcy supposed it was a pun. He mimicked a reluctant smirk and began to gather his things—starting with his phone on Liv's desk, which he snatched up as quickly as possible.

Liv's head tilted slightly to her right side, signaling her question before she got to verbalize it. Darcy pocketed his phone. "Send the address," he stated.

Liv snatched her messenger bag up by the strap and hoisted it overhead. She stepped backwards over her chair, backing away while still making eye contact. "Bye, Darling. You won't regret it!" she waved enthusiastically.

She had barely been out of the room for five seconds when she was already proven wrong.

While Darcy had pretended to busy himself gathering his things, one of the other inattentive students had lumbered from their seat towards the back of the room. His voice smashed through still air, placing every ounce of effort he could into projecting authority. "What d'you think you're doing, bothering my girl?" his upper lip sneered, yet the lower one managed to stay perfectly still, flashing his crooked teeth and the blue-studded braces struggling to fix them.

Darcy kept his expression as blasé as the threat. "Speaking in English?"

"Then shut up. Don't do it again, or you'll know why you shouldn't have." The classmate jabbed their finger into Darcy's shoulder, prodding him back.

Darcy swatted at the finger on principle, but with a distinct lack of enthusiasm, making his gesture more of a limp flop. "Listen. She talked to me. And unless you're her undercover parole officer? Not your business."

"Yeah. It is. She's mine. So I make sure she doesn't deal with dipshits like you. So back off." He poked Darcy again, as if pressing an invisible button.

"I, do love to tell you, deeds for people stopped working in the eighteen hundreds."

The classmate cracked his knuckles towards Darcy's face, swaying his shadow further over him. "Swear to God, freak, one more word at her, I'll kill you."

"Really?" Darcy asked, pretending to be genuinely incredulous. He wasn't, of course, but it sounded like a good distraction.

For about ten seconds, it was. His classmate had started to explain "yeah, really," while making an effort to stare him down. Darcy took those few speaking seconds to take one long stride to his right and step around him.

By the eleventh second, the guy had caught on. He lengthened his stride to make up for Darcy's head start, following him out into the hallway. "Get back here! We're not done."

"Of course we're not," Darcy made a point of not slowing down. He clutched the strap of his messenger bag tight to his chest, holding it in place so he could search for something to defend himself with. He let his mouth sprint ahead of him, spurting out the first distracting threats to come to mind. "You'll keep heckling me over talking at a girl who wants nothing to do with you, tomorrow night in dissociated rage, I'll break into your room and water-board you with Coca-Cola, then—"

In all of Darcy's impassioned storytelling, he'd failed to notice the classmate lob a hardcover class copy of Crime and Punishment straight at his face. The cover smacked him at the side of the cheek, stinging considerably.

Darcy fumbled to grab the book and pivoted towards its source just in time to notice the lunging fist following it. "Stay the hell away from her!"

Darcy rushed to side-step the punch and narrowly succeeded. The book fell from his grasp, plopping to the floor.

With his right hand, Darcy grabbed for the classmate's shoulder, seeming to shove him away. The classmate grabbed that hand and pinned it to the wall. He pressed closer still, hoisting Darcy up with a rattling clank against locker doors.

As the classmate reeled his fist back for another punch, Darcy snaked his left hand under the classmate's lunging arm. The lower palm of Darcy's hand shoved upwards across the classmate's face and straight under his nose, smashing the bridge of it so far, he practically shook from the accompanying hybrid of a shriek and growl.

Darcy unfurled the strap of his messenger bag from around his shoulder. He hoisted the flat, book-filled bag over both of their heads and smashed it against his classmate's head repeatedly. Crouching and leaning against the wall in pain, the classmate reached a flailing hand for Darcy's throat. Instead, he grabbed Darcy's right arm and yanked Darcy down.

Darcy fell with the grace of a boulder in a swimming pool and landed straight on his back. The classmate hunched over Darcy's body. He stomped his foot straight on Darcy's chest and ground the sole of his shoe in. "Goddamn cockroach."

While the classmate was busy enjoying his assumed victory, Darcy picked up the fallen textbook and smashed it into the classmate's ankle. The classmate wobbled, leaning into the wall. From the terrible angle, Darcy would've sworn he could see straight up the guy's bloodied nose. He also would've sworn in general had he not seen Mr. Cromwell bursting out of his classroom doors.

"Travis! Darcy! Main office!" Mr. Cromwell yelled at the both of them. He called out at the other passing students for anyone unimportant enough to reply. "Can someone fetch the nurse?"

The classmate, presumably Travis, stomped one extra footprint to Darcy's face. Darcy grabbed the bottom of Travis' boot and pulled straight down, holding him, or at the very least, the shoe, at the most awkward angle possible.

Given how obviously terrible a fight in the hallway was, Darcy opted not to speak. Travis, alternatively, didn't.

"You don't get it! This psycho, he's a—" Travis stuttered to mask nearly cursing at a teacher, and brushed his hand under his blood-strewn, swelling nose. He retracted with a pained wince. "He'll kill someone. He told me, straight up, I swear!"

"You can give your excuses to the head teacher."

"But, he—"

"Don't start your sentence with a conjunction!"

One long chat with the head teacher later, Darcy and Travis had both been suspended. The head teacher gave the obligatory lecture about the school's no-tolerance policies and how violence was never acceptable. They then sent the pair back to the bench outside to wait for their parents.

Darcy pressed the progressively squishier paper-towel-wrapped ice pack against the back of his head. He slumped back against the wall, angling himself so that the mush was sandwiched between plaster and his skull. A second, wet cloth was balancing on his swelling eye. With his hands free, he plucked Travis' copy of Crime and Punishment from his messenger bag and pretended to read.

For a particularly terrible twenty seconds, Travis had been seated on the opposite bench, staring Darcy down with an escalating rage. In the one small act of mercy the universe would grant him, Travis' parents hadn't taken long to get to school. Hardly three minutes had passed before they gathered Travis and headed back to the head teacher. A dull roar of arguments trickled through the door frame. Shortly thereafter, Travis and his immediate ancestors wandered back out, no less frustrated. Travis' parents busied themselves scolding him. Travis, who clearly wasn't listening, spared one last second to furrow his eyebrows threateningly at Darcy. Of all the body parts to threaten others with, eyebrows weren't especially adept at this, so Darcy opted to ignore him.

It took over two hours for the broad, blocky shadow of Darcy's father to arrive outside the main office. By that point, the cold against Darcy's head felt more like a hat made from the goopy part of a lava lamp, and his attention was firmly on the book he was now genuinely reading.

"They want to talk to you," Darcy stated glumly.

Dudley put his hand on top of the book, pulling it aside. Darcy swayed towards the pages, standing crookedly from the bench while reaching for it.

"They hear of phones?" Dudley asked, sounding snippy and a twinge impatient, but not necessarily angry.

"Supposedly."

"Come on. We're leaving." Dudley raised the book further from Darcy's reach, crumpling a few of the pages with his crooked grip. He yanked the shoulder of Darcy's jacket, pulling him towards the way out.

Darcy stumbled to stand even halfway upright. He grit his teeth through the sudden rush to his head. He'd meant to keep his head down, but stopped when he heard his dad rustling the book's pages.

"What're you doing with this? Ignoring everyone?" he'd asked, just as much insinuating scorn for anti-social behavior as he was befuddlement at someone wanting to read.

"I smashed someone in the ankle with it."

A rumbling laugh spurted from Dudley, straight towards the back of the book. "You mean that?"

"From the swelling, fifty percent chance I broke his nose."

"You hit first?"

As tempting as it was to make a Han Solo and Greedo joke, Darcy knew his dad wouldn't get it, so he settled for boring honesty. "No."

"Use the stick next time. It'd have made your grandad proud." Dudley lowered the book-holding arm to smack it and the hand around Darcy's shoulder. As usual, Dudley failed to notice that Darcy flinched back on the first thwack. "If there's a next time. Try not to. Better not to."

"We don't carry sticks at school."

"Feh. Teachers." Dudley shoved the door open. He pushed the book back to Darcy's chest on their way out of the building. "Your mum asks, you're grounded. We'll get ice cream."

The moment the school doors smacked shut behind them, Dudley grabbed Darcy's other shoulder, pulling him to a forceful, startled stop. "Broke his nose! Didn't think you had it in you."

Darcy did his best to turn his queasy, glum uncertainty into a smile. He could barely get the right of his mouth to curl up at all, and his eyes drifted across the pavement with a stifled sigh. As weirdly accepting of violence as his dad might be, his mum would want to kill him.

In spite of that, the ice cream was delicious.