These Broken Hearts Can't Fix Themselves

I hurried down the hallways, feeling lost. Alistair hadn’t been in my last lesson and I realized that I had no idea where to go for my amazingly, brilliantly, greatly, awesomely, fantastically fucked up detention. I skidded to my locker, bashing my shin on the one below it, and mentally slapped myself in the forehead; I hadn’t gotten my frigging locker combination. I ran quickly down the empty hall and back to the she-man that had greeted me with that brilliant fake smile that morning. She barely looked up at me, so I tapped my foot impatiently. She snorted and closed her book on teaching, sorry, her book on naked people. I noticed a picture of one of the female teachers hidden beneath the keyboard. She had drawn a small heart in the corner. I almost felt sorry for her for a minute before I remembered how much of a bitch she was. I realized I had an advantage over her if she ever really pissed me off.

“Yes?” she said sarcastically. I returned her icy stare.

“I have no locker combination.” I asked, bluntly. She looked at me for a minute before raising her eyebrows.

“…and?” I rolled my eyes.

“And I need a map of the school.”

“So?” I glared at her.

“If I say I haven’t got them, that obviously means that I need them, doesn’t it?.” I said, quietly and in a monotone voice. It was a trick I’d learned from my mother, when she was making some of her stoner friends pay more for the drugs. The secretary squirmed under my gaze and tone of voice and handed me some sheets of paper with lots of numbers on them, which I stared at before snatching away from her. I turned and stalked back to my locker, grinning at her stupidity.

-10 minutes later-

Ouch. Doors really do hurt when you slam into them at full force, don’t they? Well, I figured yes, they did, according to the fact that I would probably have a black eye in the morning. I grumbled noisily and entered the room; it smelt of my mother’s room after she had entertained a customer. I shifted nervously, because I knew the smell of stale sex a mile off. I wondered what had gone on in there. Mr Woodwin was hunched up behind his tiny desk, smoothing down his hair piece with greasy hands. I took him to be at least fifty, at a guess, and his double chin and bulbous nose made him seem constantly flushed. His large stomach strained against the material of his cheap cotton shirt and I saw, to my disgust, large patches of sweat under his arms and at the bottom of his back. I wondered if he was married, and how his wife coped with the strain of such a fatty every night. My thoughts were interrupted as Mr Woodwin eyed me up and down and pointed to the seat in front of him. I noticed Alistair wasn’t there, and fat man seemed to read my mind.

“Mr Crooks will not be joining us this evening. He has been held up by… a sports meeting.” I couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed, but busied myself being confused about Alistair’s whereabouts. From our brief meeting earlier that day, I just knew he wasn’t the type of boy who did sports. “Its just you…and me. We’re all alone. No other pupils or anyone.” I really didn’t like his tone, but sat down all the same just because I was bored of standing. And I really didn’t want to get on the wrong side of a teacher on my first day. He cast another glance across my face and overall body, as if he was studying it, then to what I hoped was my baggy shirt. I crossed my arms over my chest protectively and sniffed.

“What was it you wanted me to do, sir?” I asked. He nodded, but I figured he wasn’t really paying attention to what I was saying. He seemed to snap back to life as I coughed to show him how much of a dick he was. He (thankfully) didn’t see it like that.

“Well… I want you to do quite a lot, young lady… but I suppose that wouldn’t be very appropriate. How about you just scrape the gum off the bottom of this table here, and we call it even?” I nodded slowly and went to lie down on the floor, wielding my ruler, but he objected. “No, no, lying down isn’t the way to do it, there’s no work in that. How about you just bend over?” I shuddered at the sick pervert but carried on, determined not to let him get to me. After a few bits of chewing gum were scraped off I glanced at him, only to find that he was ogling me in a totally obvious way. Okay, now I was pissed.

“With all due respect, sir, stop fucking staring at my breasts, because it’s fucking pissing me off. And stop all the…” I waved at his hands, which were squeezing one of those stress balls rapidly. It wasn’t hard to guess he was releasing sexual tension; my mother did it all the time. “…so I think you’d better let me go now, and lay off my case for a while before I report you to the fucking sexual offenders institute, okay? Lets call it even.” He turned an angry shade of red and he opened his mouth to speak, looking like a demented goldfish. I rolled my eyes and flounced out of the room, slamming the door shut behind me.

I spun around and kicked the wall with all my strength, angry with school, my mother, my life. And now I had a fucked up foot, so I felt even madder. I felt so disappointed with everything that had been thrown at me that day that I wanted to attack the whole school and mark my place, but knew I had to get the main culprit first.

The door seemed strangely welcoming to someone who wanted revenge, so I whipped out my sharpie and started drawing.

Go see my artwork of Mr Woodwin having sexual fantasies over the head teacher sometime. It’s really quite a masterpiece. As is the letter telling him that he had been put on the sex offenders register that I super glued onto the door frame a few months later.

The secretary looked up as I passed her to get out. I smiled and lent over the desk that separated us.

“Is there a problem young lady?” She asked, looking down at me, which was weird because I was above her. I shrugged.

“Well maybe for you. You see, I think I know a secret of yours. About a certain…” I grabbed the photo of the other teacher and read the back of it. “… ‘Sexy Hannah Branning’? Seriously? You couldn’t be any more obvious.” She nodded slowly, looking at her feet. Ha, so much for the ‘looking down on’ business.

“Don’t tell a soul…” she whispered. I cocked my head as if I was thinking about doing it. She looked terrified. “No, please! I’ll do anything!”

“Good. Keys to the staff room please.” I held out my open palm and she looked at it warily before stuffing a large key ring into it. She glared at me.

“That’s the key to the main door of the staff room, and those little ones are for the teacher’s lockers.” I grinned and walked away from her before turning and throwing the picture back at her. It fluttered in the air and landed in front of her, like a silent but deadly bomb.