Crooked Halos

The atmosphere is cold in the classroom.

Two empty desks.

Pete’s and Kyla’s.

It’s enough to scare the shit out of anyone and it certainly did the trick for us. Even Gabe’s quiet.

Jared’s strangely subdued from where he’s flicking between taking notes and writing something in a notebook and… is that pity in Gerard’s gaze?

Dead people are dead, they’re not suffering any more, it’s the living you have to worry about and more than one person is worried about wiL.

There was too much blood around the drain after he’d finished in the bathroom. Self-harm is nothing new here, most people do it simply because it’s an easy way to escape reality seeing as drugs and alcohol are hard to come by in a government-controlled building like this. But there is a line called ‘too much’ and no one can physically produce that much blood without crossing that line.

He didn’t want to come to lessons today, but he’s shit at faking sick, so he had to.

It seems to be the only thing on peoples minds because all through our RE lesson when we’re supposed to be discussing capital punishment (so cruelly ironic) I catch almost everyone at least once glancing beyond me though the window where you can see the ashes of a bonfire, the gardener’s burying the ashes; a headstone with two names, a classroom with two empty desks.

The scary thing is the idea that if Ky didn’t do it – which when thought about logically she couldn’t have – then who did? Someone killed Pete with Kyla watching then slit her throat and I don’t think it was her.

“So why do you think capital punishment is wrong, Mr. Francis?”

Half the class stares at the bitch in utter amazement.

She can not be that heartless.

But her gaze is steady and it makes me wonder whether she’s actually just incredibly stupid… as in, amazingly, stupidly stupid… lives under a rock kinda stupid.

wiL looks nervous and twists his shirt between his fingers, glancing at Pete’s empty seat once and swallowing hard.

“I-”

He stops, looking across the classroom to where Ky should have been sat and he bites his lip.

“It’s hard,” he says finally. “You can never be sure you’ve got the right person, sometimes innocent people get caught in the crossfire and end up paying the price. It’s too permanent, you can let someone out of jail and pay them off, but you can’t bring someone back from the dead.”

He breaks off, looking out the window – a bad move in my opinion because his eyes tear up and he ends up hanging his head, trying to hide his eyes with the little fringe he has.

“A valuable point.” Ms. Smith sounds so cold, so harsh. “Has anyone else got any views they wish to share?”

“It’s shit.” Frankie says from the back. “It’s supposed to put people off, but it doesn’t work like that. It just means that if you want to die, you don’t have to take your own life, you take someone else’s and the government takes yours.”

“A form of suicide. Very good, Mr. Iero,” she purrs and switches her glance at Gerard “got anything to share Mr. Way?”

“You can’t kill someone for taking someone’s life,” he says bluntly. “They suffer more if they have to live with what they’ve done.”

***

It feels like we’re living on a knife edge sometimes.

It’s always been insanity on one side and suicide on the other, the thin line between them being where most of us live, but now there’s a killer somewhere along the line.

Someone trying to fuck us over and push most of us one way or the other – by the way things are going already it’s going to work.

Jared hasn’t said a word all day, he keeps writing things in his notepad then ripping it out and shredding whatever it was. Shannon’s playing solitaire in the corner but he’s yet to turn one card over, he’s just sitting there staring at them blankly. Gabe’s louder than normal, talking double his normal speed and his laughter too loud in the silence. Frank and Gerard have vanished somewhere, probably to fuck so no one’s looking for them. Jade’s just in shock, his eyes wide and he refuses to talk, I can tell Davey’s trying to act normal and strong for both of them, but it’s not working. wiL’s gone again too, but if he turns up dead we all know why so it’s not a massive deal.

People top themselves all the time around here, seriously. We had another kid go just last week – Ian – he was from the other dorm so we saw him around quite a lot. I always thought he was a happy-go-lucky kinda guy, but I guess I thought wrong. He ended up with a knife sticking out his neck… quite how he got the knife will forever be a mystery. Probably nicked it off the wardens, little bastard.

Me, Brendon, Ryan and Patrick are the only ones acting remotely normal around here and it’s starting to piss me off because Patrick was never normal to start with.

“What that fuck’s up?” Someone crows from the doorway and, upon looking up… it’s Bert.

There’s a bunch of kids living in the other dorm. I think they’re a couple of doors down from us but I wouldn’t swear to it. They’re the same age as us and everything. They just get taught separately and live in different places. Most of them scare me, they’re not like us… they’re different.

“Hey, Bert.” Gerard brushes past the greasy-haired creepball, Frank following at his heels.

“So where’s the broken hearted lover-boy?” He glances around. “Hayley said he was from this dorm.”

“He’s probably dead by now.” Jared mutters, not looking up from his notebook. “We haven’t seen him in ages.”

Bert laughs nervously, glancing around once more before leaving.

“What brought Bert here?” wiL walks in, cradling his wrist with one hand and his eyeliner running in tracks down his cheeks. Blood stains his fingers and clothes a sickening red – like a rather gruesome finger-painting session.

“He wanted to have a good gawp I guess.” Shannon finally turns a card over.

Patrick tentatively hands wiL a tissue, staring wordlessly up at the dark-haired boy with wide eyes and a half-twisted smile.

Jared stares down at whatever he just wrote then rips it out of his notebook, strides across the room and shoves it almost aggressively into the bin.

Ryan points at something Brendon’s doodling and giggles – that’s right, giggles… and I thought I was a bit feminine sometimes.

Yeah, I guess we’re all a bit fucked over right now.