THE FIRST TIME

CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO - WRATHCHILD

"I'm a Wrathchild!

Wrathchild!

Wrathchild!

I'm coming to get you, oh yeah!"

IRON MAIDEN (From the album "Killers" (1981))

After a pair of nights, where she'd barely managed to find rest for a second, let alone managed to fall asleep, Abby returned to Capeside High for the third school day of the year with her mind set one thing: To find out who had vandalized Jen's grandmother's car and make them pay in blood, for what they'd done! She already knew from having talked to Melissa on the phone that morning, that her girlfriend would be staying home for the day, to still deal with the shock of knowing that someone was threatening her life. A thought that probably would have filled Abby's own head as well, if it wasn't for her having a sneaking suspicion, who could have been the mastermind behind not only what was done the evening before, but also that nasty hate-mail letter, that had been dropped into her locker.

"Abby, you don't have any evidence to indicate, that Belinda was even involved in it. I get that you're angry and I am too but starting a fight with a girl based on a loose hunch isn't the way to go about this, no matter how much of a total bitch, she is! Somewhere deep within that ready to explode head of yours, I think you know that too!" Jen implored her, while she was trying to keep up with Abby, whose mind was set on finding one particular girl and nothing else, at that specific moment.

"I'm not going to beat her up, Jen. I'm just going to tear her ugly and bigoted head straight off her shoulders, before I stick it right up her fat, judgmental ass, that's all!" Abby bluntly replied, in a very exaggerated way of course, although it was the arguably the one thing, she most wanted to do.

"Before you do something that will surely land you in jail for the rest of your life, can you at least take a second or two to think about, how much this will backfire and hurt yourself?" Jen pleaded with her, and although she didn't think that anything could have, her friend's words still got a little through to Abby.

"She should still pay for what she did, Jen!"

"If she did it, like we have nothing to indicate that she did, except for some paranoid delusion that you seem to have and won't let go of! Her past speaks against her, yes, and I thought of her first too, after it happened, but if you go off the rails and physically attack her again for the second time in less than half a year and with no logical reason to, Belinda's parents could apply for a restraining order against you and once they got it, you will get expelled. Expelled, as in never allowed to come back here again! Please, for the love of everything that's good in this world, tell me that I'm getting through to you!" Jen almost cryingly asked of her, and in spite of all of the rage that Abby had been building up over the past day and a half or so, the logic of what Jen was saying still made sense to her. Enough anyway, that it made her put any plans of savagely murdering the school's head cheerleader off, for now at least.

As she'd expected it to happen though, it wouldn't be long until she was called to the principal's office, to have what was bound to be an uncomfortable chat with their new principal, Mr. Green.

"Miss Morgan, welcome. Have a seat" he told her in a welcoming voice, as they sat down across from one another, with his large desk separating them.

"You can just call me Abby, like everyone else does. Whenever someone says the words "Miss Morgan", I always naturally start to think that they're referring to my mom" she answered him, trying to start this off in as pleasant of a way as possible.

"Abby, I had a rather unpleasant talk with the chief of police, and I want you to know off the bat, that you have my biggest sympathies. It goes without saying that we'll assist them in any way that we can, but sadly, this isn't the first time that I've seen something like this, when it comes to students like yourself, who choose to be open about their homosexuality. In my experience, it takes someone to suddenly grow a guilty conscience and start talking, before the truth comes out in the open" Mr. Green began, sounding like he cared, although she didn't know his facial mannerisms well enough yet, to be able to tell for sure.

"With all due respect, Mr. Green, I didn't choose to be a lesbian, it's how I was born" she slightly snapped back at the principal, who took her reply in stride though, it should be said.

"You have my apologies and I also read your student casefile. It's one of thickest that I can remember having seen. Sad, as it is to say, most of those in my job would have taken one look at it and written you off as a lost cause. Perhaps, the reason why I'm not ready to, is because I was a bit like you once, believe it or not" he began explaining, or tried his best to, at least.

"A bullied since childhood teenage lesbian, with an alcoholic mom in jail and a deadbeat dad, who couldn't care less about her, if he tried? Somehow, I doubt it!" she smartassed answered the man, who was only trying to help her. Something, she quickly began to regret, but by then it had already been said.

"Not exactly, but I did have the debatable pleasure of being one out of only three African American students in an otherwise all-Caucasian high school and I was constantly reminded, that I wasn't like everyone else at my school. Negative experiences like those build up inside of you, that's only natural, but the key is to focus it into something positive" Mr. Green said in words that all rang true, when Abby thought back to what life had been like, since she came out in the most public way possible, in front of a classroom full of her peers.

"I always try to ignore it. It's just easier that way" she faintly replied, in what for her was a very rare moment of opening up to an adult, she didn't know personally yet.

"I could see from your file, that you've had far more than your share of anger related incidents in the past. Now, where I've met you, it isn't hard to understand why you've been feeling the need to act out. I know that it's a slightly unusual suggestion, but have you tried taking self-defense classes?"

"Do you think that I should?" she asked Mr. Green, since she had actually thought about it a time or two before.

"It could be a positive way for you to get some of that aggression out of your system, in a way where you don't involuntarily hurt yourself, thanks to the consequences of your actions. In any case, it's one of those things that it can never hurt to learn, considering what sort of world we live in. As for what has been happening these past days, I want you to know that you can come to me, if there's anyone, and I mean anyone, who tries to bully you or your girlfriend. Behavior like that is totally unacceptable in my eyes, no matter what your beliefs are, and I can assure you that I won't hold back the slightest, when it comes to handing out detention slips. I understand that Melissa has called in sick today, so if you could let her know on my behalf, that would be much appreciated. We will get to the bottom of this, Abby. I give you my word as your principal on it, and when we do, you can be sure that I won't show any more mercy to these thugs, than you would have in my shoes" the principal decisively told her, putting an end to their little one on one talk.

Nikki had hoped that her first weeks at Capeside would be a time of calm, where she could slowly get to know some of her peers, find out what the teachers were like and more than anything, carefully avoiding the topic of her being the principal's daughter. While it wasn't like she wasn't proud of her father and what he'd achieved, what she'd come to find out in time was that whenever anyone did find out, they'd start distancing themselves from her, whether consciously or subconsciously. All that she could chuck it down to was how, if she'd been in their shoes, she wouldn't have wanted her principal to know anything aside from the most needed things about her, still it didn't make it feel any fairer to her and every time she'd had to switch schools, she'd also had to start the whole process of making friends all over again. Another thing that made having close friendships a hard thing to come by, if your name was Nikki Green and you happened to be the offspring of the principal of Capeside High.

This day especially, even if they only were a few days into the schoolyear, was one where she felt like the odd one out and it didn't have anything to do with her being one of the only African American girls at her school or being the new kid there. As a result of the death threat against a pair of lesbian girls in her grade, her father had ordered a thorough search of every locker belonging to sophomores and above and while she herself didn't have anything to hide, those who did were sweating so many bullets that a nearly blind person could have picked out who they were.

"Guess, who just became the laughingstock of the school for the day, not to mention landed herself two days of detention?" an annoyed Jen quietly groaned, after she'd come back from the search of her locker. A search, that Nikki could now easily guess had yielded some kind of result. With them having study hall this period, it made perfect sense to use this time for the locker searches, plus it was only the second class of the day, giving those with something to hide less chance to cover their tracks.

"What did they find?" Joey, who had (to Nikki's luck) pretty much volunteered to make her feel at home there, asked a scowling and very annoyed looking Jen, as she slumped down in a chair across from her.

"I'll give you three clues. It's something that comes in many types and shapes, some of which run on batteries" Jen began, apparently deciding to make a guessing game out of this situation.

"I'll need more info than that, if I'm going to guess it" Joey answered her, while Nikki just nodded along in agreement.

"Two, it's a thing that many girls have, but only very rarely tell their parents about owning" Jen continued.

"Tampons?" Nikki guessed, although it wasn't a guess, that she had much hope in.

"No, but you're in the right general region of a girl's body, that it's used in!" Jen headshaking said and although, it took a few moments for Nikki to put everything together, when she did, it became a tough fight not to burst out laughing, then and there.

"It wasn't a ..." Nikki began asking, before Joey also solved Jen's little riddle and found it just as hard as Nikki had (no pun intended) to keep herself from having a laughing fit, that would have called the attention of everyone in the library towards them.

"Toy for your girl parts?" Joey finished Nikki's sentence for her, with eyes as big as saucers to match.

"They claimed that it was, and I quote, "Highly Unsanitary" of me to keep it my locker, can you believe that?" Jen exclaimed, making it clear how unfair the whole situation seemed to her.

"Why didn't you keep it hidden away in your room, like any normal masturbation loving teenage girl would have?" Joey asked Jen, bringing up a very logical question.

"Can you imagine the look on Grams' face, if she'd found it in my room or what would have been much, much worse, caught me using it for what it was made for? Of course, the policewoman just had to pull it out of my locker, right in front of Andie and her brother, who now both must think that I'm some kind of uncontrollable nympho, so thanks fate, for that incredible piece of luck!" Jen sarcastically and eye-rolling sighed, as Nikki tried her best to look sympathetic with what was the first girl from New York, she'd ever become anything close to friends with.

"How big is your ... "Girl's Best Friend"? Sorry, I know that it's none of my beeswax!" Joey asked, before quickly correcting herself. In any case, she only got roll of the eyes in return from Jen, so an answer likely wasn't coming in the immediate future.

"Sorry, Jen. If there's one thing that my dad has always been a huge fan of it, it's doing random locker searches, I'm afraid" Nikki apologized to Jen, quietly enough that only those she was currently talking to, would be able to hear it.

"It's fine, Nikki. There's no need to apologize. We had them routinely every few months or so, back at my old school. I just never pictured any situation, that would end in half of the school knowing that my "Replacement Boyfriend" needs a regular replacement of four triple A batteries to do his business, but I'll have to deal with that as it comes, I guess! Did they find anything in your lockers?" Jen asked, clearly wanting to change the subject away from one, that had just led to major embarrassment for her.

"Only the books that the school themselves have lent me over the past few days" Nikki quickly answered, just as a way to show the other girls, that she wasn't afraid to talk about things like that.

"Nothing, that I need to be ashamed of" Joey shortly replied, and her answer wasn't a surprise in any sort of way to Nikki. From what she could tell so far, Joey was the sort of girl that they would say "Had the World at Her Feet", in great part thanks to her playing by the rules and accepting, that even if the world isn't always a fair place, you still have to learn to work within the system, if you want to make it all the way to the top. Something, that Nikki had to admit to still being in the learning phase of, if you want to put it lightly.

By the end of study hall, so were the locker searches and from what Nikki was told by her dad, all that had been found in the way of "contraband" were an honestly alarming amount of porn magazines, an uninflated and punctured sex doll, an untouched apple that was so old, that it looked more like a science project than a former piece of fruit and in the two worst cases, a switchblade and a set of brass knuckles.

In any case, once in was over, Nikki felt like she could finally breathe a sigh of relief and as if, she was just like all of the other students at her school. For a handful of hours, at least.

Dawson's day had definitely been one to forget about, by the time the school day came to an end. Most of his classes were going in one ear and out the other, while his thoughts were preoccupied with dealing with the shock of what had happened over the last couple of days, while he at the same time couldn't stop thinking about Mary-Beth and wondering to himself, if she was thinking of him too. In one way, he couldn't blame her, if she felt like a fresh start was what she needed, after his infidelity had led to their relationship ending. She hadn't said so in so many words, when she'd told him over the phone, that she would be staying with her family in Arizona for at least the next year, but his sixth sense was telling him that if he hadn't messed up, then she never would have considered it.

All of this had put him in a rather down feeling sort of mood and he wouldn't even have his friends around to cheer him up that evening, with Joey and Pacey having a study date (not that each and every one of their friends didn't know what that was code for!), Jack and Andie having a family evening (with some relatives of theirs coming to visit, from what Jack had told him) and Abby and Jen suddenly getting the idea, that they should take a self-defense class down at the rec center. Something, that in their situations right now made all sorts of sense, yet for himself this gave him little to do after having done what little homework, he had been given and eating dinner with his parents.

With nothing else that came to mind, he decided to take a trip down to his former place of employment, even if it had a new name now, looked like any other chain store and whereas "Screen Time" had been known for its wide selection, you would now be lucky to find any movie there, that wasn't a hot, new movie or had been established as a mainstream hit already. There was one thing that he had to give them however, and it was the main reason why he'd already rented movies there eleven times already, since he'd returned from Philadelphia a few weeks earlier. An incredibly sexy, college-aged blonde girl with short hair, who worked behind the counter and drove the innards of both him and what he was sure were many other teenage boys in town wild, every time she scanned in a video for them and wished them a nice evening. Like everyone else at the store, she had to wear one of those "Hello, I'm ..." nametags and from what he could tell, her name was Eve.

"Need some help choosing?" a very welcome girl's voice asked him, while he was trying to choose which one of John Carpenter's movies, that he hadn't seen several times already, would serve as his entertainment for the evening.

"It's just that you've been staring at that shelf for ten minutes now" Eve continued and as her he turned his head to look at her, it was greeted with a pretty smile from a just as pretty girl.

"I guess, I was lost in my thoughts. Which movie is your favorite?" he asked Eve, who looked a little surprised at his question.

"You actually care what I think? You know, just because I work in a video store, doesn't mean that I know anything about movies!" Eve nervously replied, although the way she did it only made her more attractive. In his eyes, anyway.

"Everyone has at least one movie, that they can watch over and over again and never get tired of it. Mine is, and I know how uncool this will make me sound, even before I've said it, E.T." he confided in Eve, before she smiled to herself at his candor with her.

"Mine is "Beetlejuice". I used to daydream all the time, that I was Wynona Ryder in it, when I was younger. Have you seen it?"

"Once, when I was around ten, I think. I remember watching it my friends Joey and Pacey and Pacey thinking that it was the greatest thing, he'd ever seen by that point in his life ..."

"Pacey and Joey, as in my half little sister's friends?" Eve interrupted him, and now that she'd said it, all of a sudden, the little similarities between her and Jen became all the more obvious to him.

"You're that Eve, aren't you? I don't know why I hadn't put two and together yet, now that I know. I'm Dawson and I've been friends with both of them, for almost as long as I can remember" he introduced himself to what had to be the objectively hottest girl, who'd ever given him this much of their time. Not that the other girls in his life didn't have plenty of individual charms too, mind you, but in the looks department Eve was a perfect ten in his book, a very seldom rarity in Capeside even during the tourist season.

"I've heard Jen talk about you. She tells me that you're a nice guy" Eve just got to tell him, before her manager (a heavy-set guy in his late 40's/early 50's, with a haircut that was a definite contender for worst comb-over of the year) noticed that she wasn't working and walked over to them, looking not that pleased with his employee.

"Eve, I thought that we'd already had this talk! I don't pay you to stand around and hit on boys, no matter how cute they are in your eyes!" he told Eve off, and from the look on her face, it looked pretty clear that it wasn't the first time, where someone of the opposite sex had taken Eve's mind off work for a minute or two.

"Actually, I was only planning on renting one movie, but thanks to her recommendations, I'll be renting at least one more. She was only doing her job, nothing else, I assure you" Dawson lied to the manager, while Eve tried her best to keep a straight face.

"I'll still be keeping an eye on you!" the manager sternly told Eve, before going back to minding his own work.

When he did, Eve breathed a deep sigh of relief.

"Thanks a lot for saving my butt and my job, Dawson. It looks like I owe you one" she sweetly told him, looking and sounding like she meant it too.

"It isn't okay that he talks to you like that. Can't you find a different job around here, where they don't treat you like a glorified servant?"

"If I could, then I would have taken it days ago. You know, I get off work in less than an hour, if you feel like watching a movie together?" she "invited" him and considering both his lack of other options and the attractiveness of the girl question, it wasn't hard to say yes to her.

All of a sudden, Dawson's day was starting to look brighter by the second.

After principal Green had suggested to Abby that she should look into taking self-defense classes, it hadn't taken her long to A: Find out that there was weekly beginner's course down at their local rec center that same evening, and B: Convince Jen to come to it with herself. They'd even tried to convince Grams to come with them, but with the hard no that they'd been given, it would have been easier to persuade the most stubborn mule in the world! Grams had thought though, that it was one of Abby's better ideas and had wished them luck with it, which was how they found themselves dressed in loose fitting clothing that made it easy to maneuver, as they waited with a random bunch of around a dozen other Capesidians, who'd had the same idea. Their teacher was a guy in his thirties, whom she'd seen around town many times and if there was one thing you could say for him, it was that he looked like just about the last guy, you would want to pick a fight with. He was just about to introduce himself to the class, when one final attendee joined them. A girl, she already knew from school.

"I'm not too late, am I?" a heavy breathing Nikki asked the teacher, who (to what looked like was her relief) told her that she wasn't and could join the rest of the class.

If there was one thing that Abby had never cared about up to this moment, it was the idea of staying in shape. Her excuse (or rather the main one, since she always had a handful of them in reserve for any situation, just in case the first one didn't work with whoever, she was selling it to) was that thanks to her high body metabolism, she seemingly couldn't put on any weight, no matter what she ate or how little, she did to work off those calories. It was one of the few things that she'd inherited from her mom, that didn't have any negative undertones to it, in one way or the other, although with her small size height-wise, even she had to admit that she came off as a bit scrawny and pretty much the complete opposite, to how someone like their teacher was perceived. Jen, on the other hand, looked like a natural at it, using those few extra pounds (not that it was many, to be honest) to great effect, when she had to throw "The Attacker" off her shoulders. Nikki, if Abby had to be fair, fell somewhere in the middle, but at the same time it looked like it wasn't the first time, she'd tried something like this. One thing that you could say for her, however, was that her enthusiasm for learning this stuff was clearly at a peak.

"It looks like someone has some aggressions to work off?" Nikki teasingly asked Jen, while they were getting ready to leave after an evening, that Abby was all too sure that she'd be feeling the severely muscle aching aftereffects of in the morning.

"If you'd ever met my parents or been told about my history, when it comes to dating, then you'd know why!" Jen dryly quipped in return, drawing a rather pretty smile from Nikki in return. A smile, that suddenly sent some tingling waves shooting up through Abby's body, for reasons that she couldn't quite explain.

"It can't have been worse than my dating history. Or rather, what little there is of it" Nikki replied.

"What happened, if you don't mind me asking?" Abby asked, feeling for some reason a need to find out more about this girl, who while she was gorgeous as hell, there was no denying that, was also in essence just another girl at her school, at this point in time.

"He was nice when we started out and it took me too long to realize, that he was actually a complete scumbag. Basically, your classic teenage love story gone horribly wrong" Nikki briefly explained to them and while it shouldn't have affected her this way, Abby couldn't help feeling a ton of sympathy for her.

After they got back to Grams' house and each took a much-needed shower, Abby called up Melissa, only to find out that she'd already gone to bed but was planning on returning to school the day after. Or at least, that was what Melissa's mom told her.

What kind of a school would she have to come back to, though? And, just as importantly, why couldn't Abby get the image of Nikki's cute smile out of her head?

Usually, when Nikki had something after school, that she wanted to do, it required her to come up with a believable lie to her over-protective dad. This time though, she'd (for once) been doing something that he approved of, which was probably also why she was greeted with a smile, when she came home.

"How was the self-defense class?" he asked her, while she was still busy getting her shoes off.

"I didn't have a terrible time, if that's what you're asking. There were a pair of girls there, that I already knew from school, so that made it a lot easier to fit in than I'd feared" she explained to her old man, who in return looked glad for her.

"Potential friends, perhaps?"

"I hope so. Is there anything interesting in the fridge? This workout tonight has my belly rumbling, like you wouldn't believe" she casually asked her dad, but before she could head off to the kitchen, he blocked her path.

"Who are these girls, then? Not troublemakers, I assume?" he asked her, in a way that made it clear what he thought of some of the girls, she'd called her friends in the past.

"They don't look like it, if you ask me. Look, dad. I know that I've messed up in the past, but you have to give me the chance to fit in here and make friends, at least! Being lonely all the time wasn't good for me either, in case you don't remember" she implored her father, who looked like he was taking her words to heart, if nothing else.

"I'm only trying to keep you safe, Nikki. It's a dangerous world out there, especially for a very sensitive girl like you" he tried to explain to her, for what had to have been the ten thousandth time, since she'd become old enough to understand it. Something, that had happened more or less instantly, when her mother had brutally been taken from her in a hail of bullets.

"That's only how you see me, dad. I can be tougher than you think, I can be!" she tried convincing her dad, although all it did was get a loving smile out of him.

"I'll have to see it, before I believe it. Just make sure that these new friends of yours are real friends this time, okay?" her dad asked of her and if there was one thing that Nikki didn't mind at this moment, it was for this conversation to come to an end.

Afterwards, she went straight for their fridge, where all of the ingredients for a quickly prepared, but still tasty enough sandwich awaited her. As she sat at the kitchen table and chewed down on it, with a glass of water on the side, she began thinking back to her conversation with her dad and just as much, everything that had happened and led her to this point.

Dawson's evening had taken a turn from being just another evening, to being one that he knew he would still remember for a long time to come. As it turned out (and to his utter joy) Eve's invitation to watch a movie had come up with the added bonus of tightly spooning with her on his bed, while they watched Tim Burton's 1986 classic with Michael Keaton in one of the wildest roles, anyone had ever come up with. Not that it was where all of his attention laid though, seeing as stopping himself from getting too aroused by what this girl was doing to him, was an infinitely more pressing situation at that moment. It didn't help in any way either, that her sexy little bubble butt would rub tightly up against his junk, whenever she switched position a little. With only a few and thin layers of fabric between them, it didn't make it hard to imagine what it would be like to do this with Eve, where their shorts weren't on.

Eve, for her part, was playing it rather cool, although he couldn't help getting the suspicion that at least part of her was getting off, on what she had to know that she was doing to his love-starved innards.

"I should get home soon. Not that I haven't enjoyed your company to bits, but I don't want my dad to worry about me, plus I've borrowed his car, so ..." Eve began saying, right after the movie was over and as she laid on her back on his bed, looking him as deeply in the eyes, as he was with her.

"It was my pleasure, even if I'll have to answer about a hundred questions tomorrow morning from my mom, about who the pretty girl, I had over here last night was!" he joked to Eve, who let out an adorable sounding giggle.

"Do you really think that I'm pretty?" she asked him, and before he knew what he was happening, what had been an intimate moment had suddenly been turned into more, when they shared a long and passionate kiss. Right after it was over, and while he was still trying to comprehend what had just happened, she got up off his bed and made her way to his bedroom door.

"Thanks, Dawson. For turning what had been a really bad day into one, that didn't suck nearly as much by the end of it" she flirtingly told him, before blowing him a kiss and leaving him to each and all of those dirty thoughts, she'd just put into his head.

END OF CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO