Derek Smith walked out of the Library and slammed the door behind him, half expecting Mrs. Richards to give him a verbal scolding for it. He glared at her and waited for it, but she saw a malevolence in his eyes that chilled her deeply and she decided against prying any deeper. She turned back to organizing her card catalog. Derek breathed heavily, his knuckles white with the need to bury them into something. Anything. Specifically, Tim White’s soft facial flesh. His face was livid with anger as he stared down at the cuts his nails had made in his palm, blood bubbling to the surface.
“He can have that effect on people,” came Mike’s voice from the corner. The tall blonde leaned against the coat racks and lockers that lined the walls, his black shirt and jeans hiding him in the shadows. His milky-white complexion stood out though, making Derek wonder how he had missed it. Mike stood up and took a few casual steps towards Derek, smirking a little at the teen’s rage. “Lemme guess, he kept pushing buttons until he found one that hurt you, then he kept pushing it?”
Derek actually laughed at that, waving a finger at Mike. “Something like that,” he reasoned, “Jeez, don’t you just wanna rip that guy’s head off?”
“Sometimes,” he nodded, then re-thought the response. “Actually, all of the time. Tact isn’t his strong suit, I’m afraid. One of these days, he’s going to break his neck jumping to conclusions.”
“Yeah,” Derek snarled, “He actually accused me of helping Al and Raine do this shit to Julie. Me! I mean, she’s probably the one person in this school that I wouldn’t take a machete to...” his voice trailed off for a second, eyeing Mike’s right side sheepishly. “...Present company excluded, of course.”
Mike laughed, an act that stretched his stitches painfully. “Think nothing of it,” he replied, trying to keep the agony out of his voice. He didn’t do a very good job of it. “But that’s not really what I wanted to talk to you about.”
Derek squinted, backing up a pace. He hadn’t realized that there was an agenda to this conversation. The revelation did not bode well with him. He felt his fists clench tight again, almost without his knowledge. “What did you want to talk to me about, Harris?” he asked accusingly. “You come here to give me the third degree too? Guilty by association, right? I’ve got a dick so that makes me a rapist?”
“No,” Mike stated evenly, careful to sap all of the emotion from his voice. “I think we need to have a little talk... about what to do about the way things are in this city.”
Derek smiled. He was beginning to like Mike.
Xander felt Cathy dab another cotton swab onto the gash on his brow, feeling some of the fibers get stuck there by the half-congealed blood. He was beginning to get used to waking up covered in various bodily fluids with a cute brunette leaning over his face. He stared blankly at his computer until his eyes began to hurt, then stared some more. He felt something plop onto his cheek, something moist. He turned and looked at Cathy, who was still crying far more than she would have believed herself able.
Her throat bled, pumping redness into her mouth every few seconds. Her entire face shone from tears and sweat from dragging Xander over the stairs and into his room, which had made her feel even more warm and clammy than she already had. The air around her was humid, making it difficult to move as she dabbed the swabs all over her friend’s body in an effort to halt the bleeding that only seemed to be accelerating. Cathy struggled to see where the two of them had found humor in this only a few hours before... even some small degree of romance. She watched him, his tight skin splitting from mere movement and creating more cuts for her to tend to, and she couldn’t help but think of him as the loser that had sat across from her in tech class all last year. He’d barely paid any attention to her while they were in school, or her to him for that matter. There wasn’t any need to; their social lives were so different. She’d always felt like they were on two different planets... But even that was better than how she felt now. It was as though her world had been destroyed and she’d been thrust into the hell that was Planet Drew. A place of pain and constant suffering, where she was just some stupid secondary character in a story that was all about him and his new life. When night fell on that planet, she went from the tortured to the hunted... and if you’ve never experienced both, you simply can’t appreciate the difference. At least she could see who was torturing her. When she felt hunted, there were only glimpses in the darkness, shadows that haunted her dreams and made her wake feeling cold no matter how many covers she piled onto herself. They stalked her through the night, but she never once saw them. She could only trust that she knew who
