No Chance for Redemption

If Keiran had to describe the world in just one word, the word would be ‘materialistic.’ It was like one big roll of material. A bunch of different fabrics laid out, more like, but the world was materialistic. Everything was laid out the way it was for whatever reason, and if someone were to fight against the status quo, they were asking to change the world.

It was easy to dye fabric but you couldn’t turn chiffon into silk. Meaning, someone could paint a picture but that didn’t change the paint that the paper was still paper or that the canvas was still a canvas. Do what you want with the world, but as a whole, your change does nothing. And Keiran Murphy was smart enough to know that just ripping down posters that a certain boy had stuck up wasn’t going to do anything.

Keiran froze, his hand suspended in mid-air. He knew that voice. Hell, everyone knew that voice. It was the voice that one most feared, and the voice that he heard every day down the hallways of Riverdale High. It was the voice that sent chills darting down the spines of even the strongest man, and would turn him into a whimpering puppy. He slowly turned around to see a pair of hostile dark blue eyes glowering back at him. However, it wasn’t the owner of the eyes who made the first move after the ominous statement.

“You heard the man. What the fuck are you doing?” Owen Martinez scoffed, looking at Keiran up and down in a manner that certainly wasn’t friendly; it was as if he was assessing to see whether if he could beat him up.

Keiran swallowed; his throat dry and what felt like a layer of sawdust seemed to coat his tongue. He risked a look at Dillon Cassidy, who was still looking at him. The other boy’s face was like an expressionless mask, as if it were to hide the true dangers and depth of his anger which lay underneath, concealing its true contents from the rest of the world. He didn’t know what he was expecting when he tore down the pictures of Calvin Myers cross-dressing, but it certainly wasn’t in the hopes of attracting Dillon Cassidy’s attention.

“Oi, you. Can you hear us? You retarded or something? Did your mom drop you on the head when you were a baby?” Owen hollered, waving a hand in front of Keiran’s face.

"W-w-what you guys are doing...it's m-m-mean. People are g-g-getting hurt," Keiran stammered, his throat feeling more parched than ever.

An ominous silence followed and he squeezed his eyes shut, waiting for the inevitable punishments that were sure to follow. An outbreak of laughter came from Dillon’s friends, breaking the dim, heavy silence. Keiran’s eyes flew open; he wasn’t being pummelled to a pulp? Dillon chuckled in amusement and Keiran’s shoulders tensed up. Dillon Cassidy being amused was never good, it meant that he was using you as a source of entertainment, and what entertained him was never something good.

“We’re all mean people, aren’t we? People are just mean. Hell, if people weren’t mean, Hitler would have never gassed all the Jews and Bin Laden wouldn’t have ordered the planes to be driven into the Twin Towers. It’s life, people are just mean. It’s like an endless cycle of meanness going around and around," Dillon said, maliciously.

Keiran gulped. Ryder Nicholls snickered, his green eyes dancing back and forth from Kerian to Dillon in amusement. Owen watched the scene play out steadily, a tiny smirk hovering on the corner of his lips.

Dillon turned to the other boys, and tilted his head. Ryder and Owen were at his side in an instant and they followed him out of the hallways, the three of them not sparing Kerian a single glance as they left. Keiran let out an audible breath, raking his dark hair back from his face, his nerves more than frazzled.

“Oh. My. God.” That was the statement that Natasha made, when she and the others caught up with Keiran later on and every word was punctuated with an emphasis on the end of the word.

“Dude, I can’t believe you did that,” Sean said, almost admiringly. “What the hell on earth possessed you to say that shit?”

Keiran shrugged. “I dunno, man. I just…I just didn’t want to see them get away with it, y’know?”

The others nodded in agreement, and as they turned around the corner, Keiran couldn’t help but feel elated. Even though he was stammering like an idiot half of the time, he was happy that he actually opened his mouth to actually say something. It caught the boys off guard, and it made him feel strangely…proud.

A loud noise jolted Keiran out of his reverie, and they had just turned the corner in time to see Dillon slam Cameron O’Reilly’s face onto the drinking taps. He continued to pummel the other boy’s face onto the drinking taps, as the other boy yelped in pain. A silence fell over the schoolyard which was abuzz with senseless chatter just seconds ago, and Kerian could just hear the people holding their breaths, waiting in anticipation to see what Dillon would do.

“You really thought you could get away with it? Did you?” Dillon spoke, his voice barely more than a whisper but everybody heard; everybody was hanging onto his every word, waiting to hear what he would say. “You thought wrong. Now we will have t-”

“Wait.” Ryder had butted in and had a cocky grin plastered all over his face. “I have something on him.”

Cameron struggled against Dillon’s vice-like grip to glare at Ryder. Keiran couldn’t help but feel a sick sense of excitement to see what would happen, and what sort of nasty, filthy secrets that Ryder was sure to spill out.

“Fuck you, Nicholls!” Cameron’s voice was muffled, as his face was pressed against the water taps. “Fuck you to hell! At least I was there for her! She told me she called you up telling you she was pregnant while you were playing video games. And you fucking told her to get an abortion and just hung up! At least I was fucking there for Whitney!”

His voice seemed to echo and magnify, making it a hundred times louder than usual and the silence that followed was deafening. The trio burst out into hysterics, including Dillon who usually didn’t join in. Loud, rancorous chuckles burst out of Ryder’s lips as he looked down at Cameron, who was still under Dillon’s grip.

“Fuck you Cam! I told you to keep it a secret and you tell the whole entire fucking school?” Whitney Rhodes shrieked, fury dripping off every word. “Stay the fuck away from me!”

She stormed away, leaving a stunned audience behind her in her wake. Ryder chuckled, and shook his head.

“Girls, girls, hey?” he said, smirking as he looked down at Cameron.

The other boy shot him a look of fury. “You fucking slept with her.”

Ryder shrugged nonchalantly, not denying it. “Yeah I did. But I always take care of my business…I don’t want any Ryder Juniors coming along the way. Sounds like someone needs to take care of their business.”

The boy let the last sentence hang, obviously to cause maximum effect. Which it did. “Also, I wasn’t actually going to say the whole pregnancy thing. I mean, yeah, it would make an interesting story, wait, make that ‘is’, since it’s no longer a ‘would’ since everybody knows now. I was actually going to say that Owen and I came across your dad in the mall’s parking lot a week ago and…” he trailed off, looking at Owen.

Owen was more than happy to continue, and he looked down at Cameron who had gone deathly pale, smirking. There was a malevolent glimmer in his eyes, it was clear he was enjoying every second of watching himself destroy Cameron’s life.

“…and your father was sucking the dick of another guy,” he finished, a wide grin splitting his face.”

“Bullshit,” Cameron said, but it was very faint, so faint that Keiran had to strain to hear it.

“We have pictures!” Ryder taunted, waving his iPhone around in the air. “We have a perfect view of your dad getting some little boy on boy action.”

The boys erupted into another round of malicious laughter, and Keiran felt sick to his stomach. It wasn’t funny, it was horrible. It made him sick to see that Ryder coerced Cameron into spilling a life-ruining secret, in order to drop another bomb on top of that. Did they seriously know that they were fucking around with people’s lives? Wait, he was sure that they probably did. No, scratch that. They knew they were doing it, that’s why they were doing all this in the first place. To watch other people’s lives unravel by their own doing.

Keiran caught Dillon’s eye then, and the other boy just looked back, his face arranged into an emotionless mask per usual. As the other boy’s blue eyes drilled into Keiran, another pair of blue eyes flashed into Keiran’s mind. Another pair of light blue eyes, bright and flashing, which were so different from the still, secret pools of dark blue which were looking at him seconds before.

As Keiran turned away, he caught sight of a poster tacked up on the bulletin board to his left. It was an advertisement for the Social Justice club and at the bottom of the poster; it read Free rights for all.

Suddenly an idea of hope sparked in Keiran’s mind, and he knew what he should do.