Chapter 3 #3
Striding over to her desk, the teacher rips a drawer open and smacks a stack of detention slips down like a talisman, bending to scribble his name on one like she can banish him. The whole time she stands there, shaking her head, pretending she’s so sad. Acting like she regrets this.
“I don’t know how they did things at your last school, Mr. Lokke,” she says, “but here, we show decorum.”
Sebastian grins with too many teeth.
“Never met her. She cute? I’ll show her anything she wants.”
A certain silence swallows the room, hungry and expectant. The other kids shrink down to minimize the target they present, but their eyes dart between Mrs. Wilson and Sebastian, memorizing every detail to relay around their lunch tables later with dramatic flair.
Through her teeth, Mrs. Wilson says, “A second detention can be arranged, Mr. Lokke.”
But Sebastian practically glows, alive and alight with mischievous excitement. Grinning, he presses his hands flat to his desk and stands.
“Hell, make it three. Four, if you’re feeling feisty,” he says, and pops her a wink.
Mrs. Wilson’s pointing finger shakes. “Go to the principal.”
“Absolutely, toots, you got it. Just one thing real quick.” And before she can stop him, Sebastian strides up to the board.
He swipes off Industrial Revolution with the sleeve of his gray hoodie, leaving a wicked black streak across the fabric, but he doesn’t seem to notice.
He’s too busy scrawling State Propaganda in thick, black permanent ink.
I cover my mouth, stifling a noise somewhere between a laugh and a horrified gasp.
Remnant Safety always happens on October 1. He remembered, and he came prepared.
“There you go,” he announces. “Fixed it for you.”
Shaking, apoplectic, Mrs. Wilson hides her rage, but I see through her.
Her eyes dart to the landline, to the pile of detention slips—what does she do if empty paper threats don’t weigh enough?
Her authority over the classroom questioned, nervous flickers of laughter kindle throughout the room.
The other kids lean forward, transfixed, daring to giggle behind their hands, eyes darting between the boy and the teacher with eager glee at his small anarchy, at the little empress so easily overthrown.
Quietly, through her teeth, she tells him, “Get out.”
“If my lady commands it,” Sebastian says, folding into an elaborate, hand-twirling bow.
But he’s only looking at me.
I can’t breathe. I stop trying. Sebastian tilts his head, fixed in the deep curve of his bow, and pauses.
A half-second hesitation, but time slows in that electric, bubblegum moment—the echo of David Bowie still heavy on every exhale, his whole body aimed at me—and I know he’s not going to leave. Not unless I say so.
What if I don’t? What happens if I ask him to stay? If I hold out my hand like I were reaching for him under a library table and he takes it?
What if I leave? What if I just stand up and walk out of this room?
They can’t stop me; they can’t put their hands on me.
I can get up and start walking and never stop.
What could they do? Write the name I hate on a slip of paper?
Call my mother? And what could she do? If I disappeared into the wind, where her little white lies and for your own goods would never reach me.
In that single instant of terrifying freedom, I flinch.
Time restarts in a jolt. I mouth, go, and hate myself as soon as my lips shape the word.
But Sebastian rises out of his bow unaffected.
He grins at me as he circles around for his backpack and passes me on his way out of the room, dropping an overheated hand on my shoulder.
Even through my sweater, my skin burns. The residue remains long after the door closes, the flames in my rib cage blistering my throat, heat haze swimming in my eyes. I clamp my teeth, fingers clenching. My bones creak with the effort of containing me.
For a blistering second, I’m positive that if I fall out of my body now, I’ll never be able to wedge myself small enough to fit again. I’m… afraid.
“Persephone,” Mrs. Wilson says in the tone of someone who’s been saying it awhile.
I blink the blur out of my eyes to find the whole room staring, Mrs. Wilson standing by my desk, frowning.
I swallow hard. It takes me too long to remember how to speak—to blink, my dry eyes gritty.
“What?” I manage.
She sucks in a deep breath, about to roll into a scold, but pauses. Her brows furrow.
“You’re awfully pale,” she settles on, voice gentling. “Are you feeling okay? You look sick.”
“Lovesick, maybe,” somebody stage-whispers. “Missing her freak boyfriend.”
I’d flip them off, but I can’t feel my fingers.
My hands belong to a distant stranger, buzzing with cold static.
My soul swells at my seams, threatening to rip.
Every inhale, every drop of blood in my veins, demands my full concentration.
I—I have to stop. I can’t do this. Not here. I need to get my head on straight.
Grinding my teeth, I force my body to move.
I shove against the desk, cracking my spine on the chair back.
My knee jogs restlessly. My fingernails tap out the rhythm of a song.
It’s not enough. The free-falling feeling still threatens at the corner of my blurry vision, my head listing, ready to drop and leave my flesh behind it.
I need to wake up. I need adrenaline. I need a fight—
I blurt, “Why don’t we talk about the Ghost War?”
Something in me needs to hear her say it.
I stare at her, this sudden wildness itching me down to the bone.
Go on, I want to tell her. Say it. Tell me all the best lies.
Tell me about microplastics in the water supply causing metaphysical decay.
Tell me about experimental 6G cellphone towers giving us brain cancer and warping our perception of reality.
Tell me about the enemy nation that snuck in and bombed us with mad science no one has ever seen before or since, how no one knows the nation we’re at war with, or how to replicate what they did.
Tell me the government didn’t build a necromancy department.
Tell me how it wasn’t founded before all the conspiracies began.
Before microplastics and cellphone towers.
Before the Ghost War. Before I was born.
Tell me you believe it, right here in front of everyone.
A hungry, waiting silence swallows the room, heavy with the expectation of impending punishment. Mrs. Wilson purses her lips, staring at me. Another war, weighing the risk and reward of picking a fight with me?
It takes a second, but she comes to a decision, crosses back to her desk. She pulls open the detention slip drawer again, metal body bouncing on its runners, but this time a plank of wood lands like a coffin closing on her desk.
My vision flickers. For a split second, tongues of fire leap at my bare feet. I smell pine tar seeping, ocean salt. The waves rise up, seething—
No—I swallow hard, dragging myself out of this cloying daydream—it’s just teenagers whispering, giggling, the competing stink of body sprays and ghost salts.
“Because it was never a war,” Mrs. Wilson says with unusual gentleness. “It was, as best anyone can prove, a naturally occurring tragedy, and sensationalizing it does a disservice to the memory of those we lost.”
Her voice carries to me down a far tunnel, overlapping with the sound of wood falling. Mrs. Wilson drops a hall pass on my desk, a nub of two-by-four sawed short, flaking acrylic paint spelling out her room number in a field of flowers. My vision whitens—
(Raspy asphodel catching in a cotton gown. The hush of distant reeds. Water laughs from a deep, black river. And stars, oh the stars—my beloved hoard, diamond-spattered, reflected in every grasping white flower head and in the endless, glittering mirror of black water.)
I snap my eyes shut. The dream winks out, a projector turning off. I slam back into my body, stagger to my feet. I can’t stay here another second. I have to get out, have to leave. Snatching up my carpetbag, I shovel my textbook inside it, juggle the hall pass under my arm.
“Go straight to the nurse,” Mrs. Wilson tells me.
I barely hear her, the door already swinging shut behind me.