Dared (LSU #4)

Prologue

PROLOGUE

AGE TEN

“ H ahaha! It’s the stuttering ginger kid!”

I gritted my teeth, breathing through the hurt as several loud whispers and stifled laughs echoed around me. Why was it acceptable to be so horrible to another kid for something they were born with? Something they had no control over?

I didn’t even have a stutter. I just… When I was in front of people, my nerves overtook me. I froze up, and my mouth and brain and lungs didn’t always work properly together. It wasn’t like I could help it, any more than I could help my hair being the way it was. And anyway, I liked my hair. I liked the reds and golds and hints of brown. It reminded me of my mum. She’d died when I was a baby. My dad had never really shown much of an interest in me, and that was okay because I knew I reminded him of her, and it was painful. But I’d talked him into showing me photos of my mum, and I knew we shared the same hair. It was my link to her.

A lump came into my throat, and I blinked rapidly. Please. Please don’t freeze up. Get through this, and then you can sit down and be invisible again.

“He’s gonna freeze!” The excited, high-pitched voice came from my left, immediately shushed by the teacher, but it was too late. I’d already heard it.

Staring down at the paper in my shaking hand, I bit down on my lip, staring at the words that were blurring on the page. My entire body was trembling as I opened my mouth, a fast, shallow breath escaping. “Sh-Shakespeare wrote R-Romeo and J-Juliet in?—”

“Look at him!” This voice was gleeful, and I swallowed around the lump in my throat, the lump that had increased in size ever since I’d been forced to stand in front of the class and read out my homework assignment.

I licked my cracked, dry lips. It had to be obvious to everyone that I’d lost control of my emotions. My throat felt like it was closing up. “I-in?—”

“He’s gonna cry!”

Against my will, a tear trickled down my cheek and then another. The paper fell to the floor as the whispers closed in on me, the laughter growing louder.

The teacher rushed to the front of the room, reprimanding the class and ushering me back to my seat, but it was too late. I buried my face in my arms, digging my teeth into my left bicep in an attempt to stifle my sobs. My shoulders shook as the tears fell hot and fast with the eyes of my classmates on me, there to witness me falling apart.