Calamity

My gaze stares past the messy letters on the crinkled papers I’ve been grading and suddenly all I can see is the whirling events of the past few days. There’s Laura, lifeless and bleeding, with her eyes wide and her face speckled with dirt and leaves. Then I see Derek and he looks like he’d personally like to arrange my body like his sisters had been found. A shiver picks it way down my spine as his angry face continues to flash through and I try not to get caught up enough to start trembling.

Laura is gone—there’s no way I can right the inexcusable thing that had been done to her. Derek, though… He was still here, but I feel just as helpless when it comes to him as I do his sister. I want to ask him what he’d been talking about days ago and attempt to not feel so lost, but I’m too afraid to go to him again. I’m too scared that he’ll make good on his promise and I will be found, dead and alone, like Laura.

He would never do that.

The thought is barely a whisper, so weak that I almost lose it within a second, and that, I decide, is how fragile my chances of survival are if I were to go back to Hale House. All of my questions and that unquenched ache to let Derek lean on me like he’d done before will have to be quieted somehow. I can’t go to him again; I know I won’t return if I do.

“Ms. Kohl?”

I nearly jump out of my seat. There is no grace in the way I manage to catch myself but I don’t crumple to the floor and none of the papers fly away. Tucking a few strands of hair behind my ears as I clear my throat and feel my cheeks heat up, I look over to the doorway. Stiles Stilinski is standing with slightly wide eyes and an apologetic grimace on his face.

“Yes, Stiles?”

I don’t smile. Instead, I turn my attention to the papers that I’ve still not thoroughly graded and try to straighten them.

“I was just wondering if I could talk to you about my essay. The one you assigned us on Thursday?” he says.

“Sure,” I murmur. “Walk with me down to the teachers’ lounge.”

He nods and falls in step with me after I collect my books and the papers. The door falls shut behind me.

As I resituate everything in my arms, the brown haired boy begins to prattle. He’s worried he won’t receive a good grade because he’s been ‘distracted’ lately and wants to know if he can have an extended due date. I nearly roll my eyes at the way he’s attempting to sweet talk me.

“I’m sure your paper will be fine, Mr. Stilinski,” I interrupt.

Stiles grimaces again.

“Yea… But I can’t take a ‘fine’. I need a ‘fantastic’ or a ‘brilliant’. My GPA needs a ‘magnificent’, Ms. Kohl.”

“Why—“

“Stiles!”

We both turn at the sound of the younger boys’ names being ground out. I have to do a double take because I can’t believe what I’m seeing. Derek Hale is standing a few lockers down from where Stiles and I are walking, looking pale, with dark circles under his gaze as his body slumps a little. I take a few steps forward before catching myself and listen to the warning he’d clenched out back at his house. It flows through my mind till it’s beating at the front of my brain.

Instinctively, I angle myself in front of the student who always talked too much during class, attempting to glare hotly at the black haired man now scowling fiercely at me. Something that sounds like a growl ripples out into the quiet hallway. Behind me, I feel Stiles jerkily moving his body. I don’t turn around to see what he’s doing. I’m too scared to take my gaze off of Derek; I don’t know if he’d make good on his promise just because he’d merely laid eyes on me again.

“I need to talk you, Stiles,” Derek hisses.

“No, you don’t,” I counter.

I try to make my voice strong but it wavers too much and I swallow in hope that it will within stand the torture of having to face my once-upon-a-time friend again. At the same time, I inch Stiles and I back a little. I can’t remember how far we are from the teachers’ lounge, but I think we can make a run for it if we have to.

“Shut up, Rosalie!” Derek spits with a sneer.

“This is a school, you lunatic! You can’t just barge in after threatening me and demand to talk to one of my students!” I whisper-shout.

“Stop meddling and just let me talk to the kid!”

I try to ignore how much frailer his deep voice is now—I try not to pay any attention to his weakening state, but he starts to cough just as I begin to inform him of the campus rules and I almost lose the idea of my own safety.

It’s obvious that Derek was sick. As he holds his middle and covers his mouth with a big hand, I figure this to be more than the flu or some mundane sickness.

“Ms. Kohl, maybe I should—“

Stiles doesn’t finish his sentence because Derek’s body starts swaying and then suddenly he collapses onto the linoleum floor in a heap of broad shoulders and long legs. I see as his head smack against the hard ground, my eyes widening as it bounces.

Letting out a curse, the brown headed boy who’d been residing behind me pushes past and skids to where to Derek is now lying. The younger boy’s shaking hands fly over Derek’s muscled body, almost hovering, but it’s clear he doesn’t know what to look for. When I scramble over, Stiles moves aside and waits till I’ve declared that Derek is still alive before sprinting off.

I hope he hadn’t finally gone to class; I prayed that the twitchy boy was getting some help.

“Derek?” I whisper.

I’ve moved his upper body so his head is now resting in my lap and have begun to push some of his black hair off his sweaty forehead. My heart has started beating much too fast, a result ofbeing so close to the person I’ve spent days learning to fear. I wonder what he would do should he wake up and find that we are the only two people in this hallway. The thought makes me even more frantic and I flick my gaze around in search for Stiles.

It takes a few more minutes before the echoing sound of footfalls reaches me and I sigh a little. But what rounds the corner causes my eyes to widen once more and anger to boil up in my system.

“You went and got McCall?” I hiss.

Stiles falters a little. “Well… yea! He… Scott knows Derek, you see, and Derek told him about this real rare medical condition that only he has and then Scott was like, “Wow, dude! I just found out I got that condition too!” and—“

“Does this have anything to do with why Derek passed out?” I ground out.

“Erm… Kind of. Scott knows how to make Derek better. We can take him somewhere that he can get help,” he says.

When I glance over at Scott, the lacrosse player is looking skeptically at his friend, but smiles brightly at me when he catches me looking.

For a second, I try to work out what to do. Derek needs a hospital, but he was still wanted for his sister’s murder and I didn’t know if he was sidestepping Sheriff Stilinski because he knew he’d be arrested or if he was looking for the one who truly had been the reason for Laura ending up in two pieces. Whatever Derek’s reasoning (and despite his hostility towards me), I decide that taking him to the hospital now would be unhelpful to everybody.

“You two go back to class, alright?”

When I start trying to get Derek up, Scott and Stiles grip his elbows and upper arms in an attempt to help. I sigh exasperatedly.

“I said to go back to class!”

“We can really help him, Ms. Kohl,” says Scott. “He’s not like you think. You can’t take him to the hospital and have my mom fix him. He’s too different.”

I narrow my eyes at the teenager.

“We’ve been friends for—“

“Please, Ms. Kohl. Let Scott help him,” interrupts Stiles.

My moth opens and closes twice as I stare at the two high school students. I don’t trust them to accurately help Derek and the fact that they’re trying to lead on about some special kind of knowledge about him makes me even angrier. But the school day is about to end; I’m running out of time and options.

Sighing, I nod. “Fine! You help me get him into my car and then I’ll follow one of you, okay?”

Scott and Stiles nod, then go about getting underneath each one of Derek’s arms in order to haul him out. I quickly bend down to gather the things I’d dropped and sprint back down to my room for my bag before they even have him past a set of lockers.

When I near them again, I hear Derek moaning and then a hiss of a word I think has something to do with a wolf, but forgo trying to figure out what had just been swapped between the two boys and my childhood friend in favor of getting us all out of here before the last bell rings.

As we load Derek into my back seat, I ignore the pounding thought that what I was doing right now was illegal. I also ignore that not only was I endangering two teenagers, but myself as well.