Three's A Crowd

For the rest of the school day, I kept an eye out for Jez, wondering what happened after the fight, where she’d disappeared to the bathroom after telling me that I had to go back to class. Obviously, I did what she told me, but that didn’t mean that I paid attention in class, instead propping my head up on my hand, staring out the window, and wondering what was happening with her.

It wasn’t until the end of the day, when a couple of football players stopped at one of their lockers a few away from me, that I got a smidge of information. “Yeah, that girl who got into the fight with Karofsky ended up going to the principal to complain about it. What are we, in third grade?”

“I heard Karofsky beat the living shit out of her though, like she was totally covered in blood and she was limping: whole nine yards.”

My jaw clenched. She didn’t get hit that badly. Which meant that all her visible wounds were self-inflicted. Again.

It pissed me off that she did that, but she thought it was for the better, in order to get what she wanted from people. Which it did, don’t get me wrong, but it still killed me to know that she put herself through hell for anyone’s accord.

The football players discussed for another couple of minutes before going off to practice, changing their subject to a party that had happened over the weekend, where one of them had scored with a college girl. Clearly, that girl must have been severely drunk.

Once they were gone, I threw my brightly-colored backpack on, filled with my history and English stuff, and started out the door.

That night, my parents were quite contented with the fact that Jez made absolutely no appearance at all, not even to tell me exactly what had happened after the fight with Karofsky. After all, the football players only knew what they wanted to, what Jez let them know. Even though I’d gotten a couple of tidbits, I wanted the real story.

The clock had long passed saying that it was midnight as I tossed and turned, struggling to suppress my worries about Jez as I tried to force myself into unconsciousness. As it was, I already had enough troubles sleeping, and fretting about how hurt Jez may or may not be was making everything a thousand times worse.

What worried me even more was that I hadn’t heard from her at all. Not even a stupid text message.

* * *

The next morning, I woke up from a very shallow sleep groggy and disoriented. I threw on my clothes, only half-conscious, before finishing my daily routine.

Mom tried to make some small talk with me over breakfast, but I wasn’t having any of it. More than anything, I just wanted to run to school, find Jez waiting at my locker, and make her tell me everything. If she wanted to tell me, of course. But why wouldn’t she want to?

“So do you know if Jez is coming over tonight?” Mom asked, trying to sound nonchalant, but I could see the sparkle in her eyes.

“I don’t know,” I responded without a speck of disrespect. “I haven’t heard from her.”

Promising words to my conservative mother. “Okay.” As I grabbed my bag and started toward the door, she added, “Love you! Have a nice day at school!”

“Love you, too,” I smiled before pulling the door closed behind me.

On the way to school, I kicked a variety of different debris out of my way, wishing that my parents were more accepting of Jez. Just because the two of us had met under strange circumstances didn’t mean that our friendship was any weaker than other friendships.

To me, it seemed to make it even stronger, the fact that we had something crucial in common like that. Not that they would allow themselves to see such a thing.

When I walked into the school, the hallways were filled with people talking and laughing with one another, and I dodged them on the way to my locker, expecting to find Jez there.

But she wasn’t. I waited for a good ten minutes, until the warning bell sounded, for her. She never showed up.

“Well, if it isn’t Mrs. Jezebel Kerrigan,” an intimidating voice expressed from behind me.

My heart jumped into my throat, pumping at a dangerous speed, as I turned to find Karofsky.

He definitely looked like shit, his face purpled and swollen in places, cut up in others. “Where is your wife today?”

Swallowing my fear, I mumbled, “She’s not my wife, she’s my friend. And I don’t know where she is.”

“Well, we both know that’s a bunch of bullshit,” Karofsky sneered, shoving me toward the lockers. My back collided with the metal as my stomach knotted and my palms started to sweat. If there was ever a time that I wished Jez would come out of nowhere and save me, that was it. Jez was the fighter, not me. Jez was the one that was good with confrontations, not me.

“So you,” he threatened, putting his hands on either side of my head as he leaned closer, his foul breath spraying all over my face, “are going to tell me where the fuck she’s hiding, or I’m going to kill you.”

Gulp. “I’m telling you,” I squeaked, cursing myself for being a coward, “I don’t know where she is. I swear.”

I felt the intense coldness of two different slushies being poured over my head, soaking through all my clothes, and realized with a deflation of hope that, with my fatigue that morning, I’d forgotten completely to pack an extra set of clothes. Damn.

“Last chance…whatever your name is. You can tell me where she is, or you can get your face rearranged.”

“You wouldn’t hit a girl,” I said with as much courage as I could muster. On a second thought, my eyes widened a little, wondering where my sudden boldness had come from. Not that I was complaining, of course.

He let out a loud laugh as he pushed away from me. Letting out a sigh of relief that was as quiet as I could make it, I looked up at him. “Please. You’re hardly a girl.”

But he left me alone, taking his two cronies with him. Taking shuddered breaths and trying to contain the tears that were starting to form behind my eyes, I took off to the bathroom, where I could hopefully clean off enough to finish getting through the day without drawing too much attention to myself.

Of course, my hair had already begun to stick in tangled strands that stuck to the back of my neck and my face, so I had to work my best to wash that out. As for my clothes, which had, luckily, just been some sweats and a t-shirt, were stained completely, red in some places, purple in others.

“Well,” I whispered softly as I ran another wet paper towel through my hair, “there’s no way that I’ll get an interrogation session from my mother for this.” The sarcasm was practically palpable in the air.

Sighing once again, I gave up on my hair and threw it up into a messy ponytail. All day, I knew, people were going to be laughing at me, at the horror that Jez couldn’t prevent, that she couldn’t stick up for me. It hurt, the blatant realization that I depended so heavily on Jez and her toughness, her strength.

Without her, I was just stupid, weak little Evangeline. I took a deep breath through my nose before grabbing my bag once again, which had thankfully been spared the slushie bath, and starting toward my first period class.

* * *

As I’d predicted, all throughout the day, people laughed. At lunch, I sat alone. Karofsky, I saw from across the cafeteria, was eating with his buddies what looked like enough food for my entire family for a week. Originally, I’d scrunched up my nose, wondering why in the world someone would consume so much food in one sitting, but upon realizing that his eating was keeping him from harassing me some more, I became grateful to God that He created food.

My eyes were fixed on the table, careful not to make eye contact with anyone, as I ate my lunch. Thanks to my constantly churning stomach, my attempts at eating didn’t last too long, so soon enough, I got up from my table and started back into the hallways to go to my locker before I had to go back to class.

It wasn’t until I was in the totally deserted, deathly quiet hallway that I realized just how lonely it was going to school without Jez. I wasn’t the kind of person to strike up conversations with people, not that anyone would ever want anything to do with me, so I was really alone. And, therefore, an easy target for thugs like Karofsky.

The stickiness of my shirt became all-too-obvious once I started thinking back to this morning, so I shook my head of the thoughts and focused on what I needed to get from my locker for the rest of the day.

Since the quiet was so thick, I almost expected someone to pop out of nowhere and scare me, just like in all those TV shows and movies. Like someone would care enough to tell me that they’d love to beat in Karofsky’s head for pouring a slushie all over me in Jez’s absence, even though I was a loser.

But my life wasn’t a movie or a TV show. It was reality. And that meant that I stayed alone, wishing that Jez had come to school, while also worrying about her. How badly had she beaten herself up, anyway?

And please, please, please let her not have started drinking again.