Chapter 2 #2
And of course he would. After all, Principal Oliphant was Mom’s best friend, and best friends always dreamed of their children ending up together, right?
Landon and Madison would look good together whenever Landon got up the courage to pull the trigger.
Then again, it wasn’t only Landon’s love life Mom had planned out.
“Hey.” Morgan pulled my attention to her. “You know, you never told me—why didn’t you take the learner’s permit test on your birthday? Or even after? It’s been two weeks. The second the DMV opens on my birthday, I’m so there.”
A ball of something dark turned in my chest, thinking of the way Mom had laughed hard in the car. “My parents want me to wait,” I told Morgan now, making a show of shuffling the papers.
I didn’t see her eye roll, but her voice made her stance clear. “You don’t have to have their permission to get a permit.”
“I do, actually. They have to be with me when I take the test. I already checked.” Resentment had taken root behind my ribs that day, and I hadn’t quite been able to get past it since.
Even so, the push to defend my parents shoved me hard, forcing me back into my ingrained behavior.
“It’s better to listen to them. They know what’s best.”
Morgan didn’t try to hide the twist in her expression. I mentally braced myself for whatever she was about to say. “For a sophomore, you’re pretty codependent on your parents, you know that?”
And just like that, we were back where we started. “Just because I don’t argue with my parents doesn’t mean I’m codependent.”
“No, the fact that you do everything they tell you is. And so is the fact that you tell them every single thing. You don’t have to tell your parents everything.
You don’t have to obey their every command.
” Morgan made a show of pointedly looking away from me.
“You don’t have to let your mom pick out your clothes every morning.
You don’t have to date Jaden Morris if you don’t want to. ”
I squared my jaw, hating when our line of conversation went down this road. And it did often. I’d had the entire summer off from hearing her speeches, but of course as soon as school resumed, so did Morgan’s insistence. “I’m not dating Jaden, for one—”
“No, you’re courting, or whatever freaky thing they did in the eighteen hundreds. Letting your parents arrange your future marriage and what you’ll name your babies.”
The conversation was devolving at a pace I couldn’t keep up with, so instead of fighting back, I simply shrugged. “Takes the pressure off of me for choosing the right name, then.”
“Gemma.”
I didn’t know what she wanted me to say. Sometimes I wondered why Morgan cared so much. She’d built her soap box to stand on after our moms stopped being friends last year. She now took every chance she could to “talk sense into me.”
She didn’t get it, though. There was no escaping the expectations of me. Living how they wanted me to was easier than anything else.
It was like Bridge Boy had said—what was the point in fighting things if nothing would change?
“I appreciate you worrying about me,” I said, pulling out another poster and analyzing it like I was looking for a typo. “I know it’s coming from a good place.”
The intensity didn’t fully evaporate from her expression, but it did lessen as the silence passed. When she elbowed me, it was a little too hard. “I don’t want you being sucked into the hive mind. I want you to think for yourself.”
But you know what happens when you don’t give in to the hive mind, I wanted to say, thinking of her mother. You’re cut out entirely. The thought of Mom pushing me away left a panicked buzz in my chest.
We came up to the bathroom doors, and after taping a poster to the girls’ room, Morgan passed me her roll of tape and ducked inside. The roll scraped across my skin and hugged tightly against my wrist, looking a whole lot different than the way it spun loosely on hers.
With how jam-packed these halls had been only an hour ago, it was strange to see them so deserted.
A “Welcome Back” banner hung from one corner of the ceiling to the other, stretching out with the Bobcats logo.
I shuffled the flyers to one arm and smoothed my free hand down the side of my skirt to see where the high and low points were in my hemline.
The fabric draped perfectly in the front, but in the back, it dipped low enough to drag along the floor, collecting dust. I didn’t realize until now how wonky the hem was.
Too thick in some areas, too narrow in others. It made for an uneven hemline.
Mom must not have seen it this morning, but she’d be disappointed when she saw it.
She’d probably waste no time in telling me so.
I grabbed the fabric of my skirt in the back and lifted it up half an inch, gauging how noticeable it was.
Maybe I could fix it before she saw. She didn’t get home from work until after five—that was plenty of time, right?
I’d have to check my other skirts I’d made, though, to make sure they weren’t faulty as well. Before Mom spotted it.
She’d say she taught me better. She’d make me fix it before letting me wear it again, and I could hear her words already. Us Settlers have to look our best.
Thinking of Mom’s catchphrases weirdly had me thinking of Bridge Boy, and it was the bazillionth time he’d come to mind since I saw him.
At first, I marveled at the bizarre quality of the interaction, him grabbing me tightly, afraid I was going to fall off the edge.
And then I thought about that stirring feeling that’d come when he wrapped his arm around my waist, bringing our faces mere inches apart.
Warmth had bloomed low in my stomach in a way I’d never felt before.
And then, every time, my recounting would end at the resolute way he’d spoken, head tilted at me, gaze serious. Is there a point to fighting if nothing will change?
I was too preoccupied with my hemline, with my rollercoaster thoughts, to realize I edged too close to the corner of the hallway.
A figure swung around the corner and had no time to stop before slamming into me.
Their shoulder collided with mine like a freight train, and the sharp force sent me spinning, the papers in my loose grip exploding up into the air like giant pieces of confetti.
My shoe caught on the fabric of my skirt, and I tripped to my knees amidst the scattered flyers, palms jarring against the ground.
For a long moment, I sat there, blinking and shaking. My wrists ached from the impact, and so did my knees. From my peripheral, the boots belonging to the figure who’d slammed into me stood motionless.
On a numb sort of autopilot, I began shuffling all the papers together, and only stopped when the boots began to walk away.
Walk away. Seriously? “You’re not going to help me?” I demanded, the incredulity in my voice crystal clear.
The figure paused in its retreat, turning around.
I cursed myself for letting the words snake out, opening the door for confrontation.
Morgan might’ve, maybe, but I’d been taught better.
I tried to pull on the timid smile I knew by heart, frequently used in times of tea parties and banquets, but when I looked up and met the gaze of who owned the bulldozer of a dark shadow, my politeness turned into horror.
Every school had a student whose reputation preceded them. The one that the seniors told freshmen about as a ghost story. Brentwood High had a few rotten apples to dodge, ranging from druggies to potential gang members, but there was one that took the cake. The Grim Reaper.
It would’ve been funny if the name didn’t suit him to a tee.
The dark colors he wore made him look like death himself, with a shock of wheat-colored hair that ended near the base of his neck.
Even though I was only a sophomore, I’d known about senior bad boy, Hudson Bishop, a lot longer.
Hudson had been the other participant in my brother’s first fistfight during their freshman year.
Landon’s eye had been black and blue, and the split in the middle of his lip almost needed stitches.
Even though senior-year Landon was the quarterback, ninth grade Landon had no idea how to throw a punch.
Hudson Bishop did. And it wasn’t only Landon he’d attacked, but two others from my brother’s friend group. After that fight, the Grim Reaper was born.
I ducked my head down until my nose was practically parallel with the ground, squeezing my eyes shut. Landon’s beat-up face filled my mind’s eye, as well as the other kids rumored to have picked a fight with Hudson and had lost. Violent, people would say. Unhinged. Off his rocker.
Hudson probably ate sophomores like me for breakfast.
The boots took dooming steps closer, and I curled my head to my chest, instinctively waiting for him to strike me or something.
Morgan, any day now. Heck, or even a teacher.
Someone could’ve walked down the hallway to save me from being eaten alive, but it was deserted, with no one but me and the scary senior.
The papers on the ground began shuffling again, and I flinched at the sudden sound. Risking the wrath of the beast, I peeked up.
Hudson crouched on the other side of me, his loosely laced boot centimeters from leaving a print on the flyers. Tears in his black jeans exposed the deeply tanned skin at his knee, right at eyelevel. His blond hair hung mostly in his eyes, which were focused on the papers as he compiled them.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, brain already reeling with the certainty that he was gathering the posters to dump them in the trash.
My heart was thundering too loudly in my ears, mouth drying at the thought of any sort of conflict with him.
Even just talking to him in general. “I—I wasn’t watching where I was going. ”
It took him a second to lift his gaze, and when he did, I froze—turned to stone under the sharp, blue-eyed glare.
Eyes much too bright of a blue to be real.
They were almost hypnotizing. “I ran into you,” he murmured, voice low enough to make me shiver.
“I made you drop your stuff. I was going to walk away without helping.” Hudson leaned over the papers, bringing the ice of his eyes closer, freezing me further. “Why the hell are you apologizing?”
They were words I normally would’ve shrank back from, especially when paired with the mocking tone he used, but I didn’t.
His reply wasn’t amongst the list of ones I thought he’d choose from.
Get out of my way, grandma or Yeah, you’d better be sorry were options, but not Why are you apologizing when it’s my fault. Something in my spine prickled.
If I hadn’t been thinking about my birthday before, I might not have noticed how familiar his voice was.
I might not have noticed that the furrowed brow looked the exact same.
I might not have recognized the white scar down his cheek, one that was half the size of my pinky.
The outfits and the eyes were so drastically different, and he didn’t wear the thick black glasses, but the scar—there was no missing the scar.
The Grim Reaper was the boy from the bridge.
I sputtered with the revelation. “You—you—”
The bathroom door swung inward then, and Morgan stepped out into the hallway while flicking her wrists. “How are they out of paper towels already?” she began in a thoroughly annoyed voice, but like my heart, she did a full-stop when she saw who now occupied the hall with us.
Hudson didn’t look up at her as he finished compiling all the fallen flyers, tapping them against the ground once.
All the while, I watched him, glad I had enough mental awareness to snap my jaw shut before he looked up.
He offered the large stack out to me, but when I finally lifted my hands to take it, he didn’t let go.
Instead, he studied me for a long, long moment, and I waited for him to react to me, to recognize me the way I did him.
The left corner of his mouth curled upward. “Grow a backbone, Sophomore.”
I stared at his twisted smile and the cold gleam of his glare, questioning a bit of my own sanity.
Hudson let go and shoved to his feet, something in his pocket jingling with the movement. Without saying another word, he walked past me, boots squeaking softly on the freshly cleaned linoleum, leaving two sophomores gaping after him.
“That was ten years just shaved off your life,” Morgan hissed as she dropped to the ground beside me, bunching the fabric of my skirt in her fist. She craned her neck to watch the senior disappear down the hall.
“That was at least five years off mine. You encountered the Grim Reaper and lived to talk about it.”
I looked down at my now mixed flyers, at the spot where Hudson’s hands had been a few moments ago.
The depth to his voice still lingered in my ear, matching exactly to the voice from the boy on the bridge.
He didn’t act like he recognized me, though, even though I was sure I looked the exact same.
Even down to the braid that pulled all of my hair back. He had to have known who I was.
Sophomore. He called me a sophomore. So he did know.
I looked over my shoulder, but by then, Hudson had disappeared through the double doors leading outside, and my stumbling heartbeat was the only lingering sign he’d been there at all.