Savin' Me

At school the next morning, I shut my locker door, my eyes shut, bracing the slam. When I opened them, there was a boy standing there that I'd never seen before.

His brown hair was combed back, swirls all over his head. His eyes were light, though it was difficult to pinpoint exactly what color they were. He was taller than me, but not by too much, and he had an angry look on his face.

Also, I couldn't help but notice how gigantic his nose was. It almost took over his entire face. If it grew a centimeter more, then his nose would be his face.

"You're Zoe?" he questioned, his eyes stormy.

"Uh...yeah?" I responded, looking around. My suspicions were that Lily was around somewhere, laughing about the strangeness of this whole thing.

"So you saw my friend Johnny yesterday. Being hassled by his mom?"

Oh, so that was his name: Johnny. It kind of suited him. Very boyish. "Yeah. So?"

"So, you better not go around tellin' anyone. Johnny would hate it if he was taken away from his folks. The whole gang would. So just keep your trap shut, hear?"

I shot him an angry look. "Whoever you are, and remember that, I've never even met you, I'm not going to tell anyone. You don't have to worry about it."

"I'm Steve. Steve Randle." He smiled briefly before shrugging and saying, "I just wanted to make sure that you didn't say anything."

"Trust me," I scoffed, inching toward my English classroom, "I would never say a word."

"Good." With that, Steve walked down the hallway. I shook my head as I entered my classroom, right on the bell.

"Better timing would be nice next time, Miss Preston?" My elderly teacher, Mrs. Houston had irritation written all over her face. What? I was on time!

"Sorry," I mumbled before scurrying to my seat and sitting down. I could feel Lily's eyes on me, but I was careful not to make eye contact with her. It would definitely set off a whole slew of questions that I wasn't about to answer in a classroom full of kids.

But that Steve kid was weird. Why did he approach me in the hallway to confront me about not telling anyone about Johnny? Had Johnny asked him to do that? Something told me that he wasn't that kind of person...

And how the hell had Steve known who I was anyway? I knew for a fact that I had never seen him before in my life. I couldn't linger on the thought for too long because before long, Mrs. Houston started giving an assignment for a theme that would be due in two weeks.

"Alright, so I want you to write at least five pages about..." She took a pause as her frail hand hurried across the board, still writing in a perfectly loopy script, "anything. Anything that is important to you. To most of you, that means that you're going to have to write from personal experiences. Others...maybe it might be different. But it's up to you."

She smiled warmly at the class, but most of them groaned back. I had realized during the third week of school that I was actually the only one in my class that was absolutely loved to write. Everyone would whine about having to write a paper, but I always looked forward it.

But the question was, what should I write about? I certainly couldn't write about my father and how he treated me. That would just land me in a foster home somewhere, and that was not somewhere I wanted to be.

I bit my lip and sighed. I still had two weeks to think about it, so there was no immediate rush.

"Hello?" Mrs. Houston questioned, waving her hand in front of my face. It wasn't until then, strangely enough, that I noticed how much the blue veins in her hand stuck out against her pale skin.

"Sorry," I mumbled. "I was just trying to think about what the subject of my paper should be."

"That's all well and good," she scolded, "but it's time to listen in class. You understand?"

Of course I understood... I wasn't stupid... "Yes, ma'am."

She nodded in approval before walking back to the front of the class and continuing her summary of the two chapters of To Kill a Mockingbird that the class had to read the previous night. I had already read the book a few years ago, and multiple times since then, so the synopsis that she gave in class was really of no use to me.

I'd tried to warn Mrs. Houston that I'd read the book many times before, but she was convinced that she would make it more challenging, so I could read the book the same as everyone else and get the same grades. Well, that didn't work because I got perfect grades while everyone in the class struggled a little with it. So, logic failed.

The bell rang finally, and I got up out of my seat, slinging my backpack over my shoulder while being careful not to hit anyone with it. One time, I hit someone in the face with my backpack (though I wasn't completely sure how that happened), and they got a really bad bloody nose.

I shuddered as I remembered that. It wasn't a good memory of mine...

"So I saw you with a guy this morning!" Lily singsonged from behind me.

Scrunching up my face in disgust, I turned around to face her. "Ew. If you can call it that."

"What? Was he mean?"

"Eh," I shrugged. "Weird, yes. Rude, yes. Ugly...absolutely."

"Oh, that's nice of you," she laughed, nudging my shoulder.

"What? Are you saying he wasn't?"

"Truthfully, I didn't get a good look at him." She scanned the hallway, as if she expected that he'd be around again. "But now I want to. You see him around?"

Stepping on my tip-toes, I looked at all of the faces flashing through my vision. "Negative," I replied formally.

"You're weird," she giggled as we weaved our way through the hallway further, our calculus class in sight. "So anything interesting happen to you last night?"

There was a flash of Johnny's face through my mind. But instead of telling her, I just shrugged. "You know, the usual."

Lily nodded and pulled open the heavy wooden door. "Same. Our lives are so boring."

Oh, if only she knew how wrong that was...