Page 46 of Web of Lies
“You are not getting twenty-five dollars to sit here and get tutored by me. Either you take the tutoring as is or you leave.” I stare up at him through my lashes, watching as he deliberates through his actions.
“Fine! But you had better be good at this,” he grumbles, sliding me over his math worksheet for the same class I’m taking. A practice quiz with a big, fat F on it. “I need to learn to do all that,” he says, pointing a finger over the problems.
“You’re in luck, math is my forte. I can help you with this if you want.”
Honestly, with how cruel he’s being, I should set him up for failure. Make him tank every quiz he has to take and laugh in his face when he fails out of this school. But I’m not that cruel. Even if I had the choice to take away his dinner privileges, I wouldn’t. Food is necessary and so is education. There are other ways to get my revenge like I did to Hadley. Speaking of her, I haven’t seen her since I posted her medical report on FlashGram. It took her an entire day to have that post deleted. I secretly hoped she would have had the whole account deleted, but no such luck. Guess I’ll have to do it myself.
“Why?” he asks, eyebrows shooting up with confusion.
“Why what?” I ask, looking over the paper still.
“Why would you want to help me after?” I swallow a lump and look into his eyes. As soon as the words spill from his lips, he shakes his head. “Anyway, is there any way to salvage that?” He asks, referring to the paper, but his eyes ooze forgiveness, and I instantly ignore it.
“Yeah, I’ll teach you a better way. They make it so complicated. I’ll make it easier,” I mumble.
After our initial conversation, we focused on his work. I show him an easier, less complicated way of figuring the problems out. And after an hour, he’s corrected every problem on his practice quiz with ease. If there’s one pleasant thing I can say about Seger, he’s a quick study. He’s smart too, I’ll be surprised if he stops coming once he gets all his math straightened out.
“All right, well, I’ll see you tomorrow,” I say, closing my books, packing everything away into my bag, and I stand.
He strokes his jaw, adjusting his crossed legs. “Yeah-yeah, see you tomorrow, New Girl.” My heart lightens a fragment at the name he used. Stupid, annoying, but yet endearing nickname.
“Yeah,” I mumble, heading towards the door.
That night in my apartment, I consume spoonfuls of leftover soup. My stomach still hasn’t recovered from the poison Hadley gave me, but I know it will soon go away. I can’t dwell on the damn laxatives, because I have a certain calculus teacher to take down, way down, and hopefully bury him. I’m sick and tired of the disrespect I get every day in class.
Steven fucking Stephans. Poor bastard, I’d act the way he does too if I had the same name twice. I move through FlashGram, searching for a profile. But I come up empty. It’s no surprise that a fifty-year-old, overweight, math teacher doesn’t have one. So, I head over to the dead platform of SpaceFace and search there. My Aunt CeCe has one of these, but kids in my generation don’t flock to it like the grandmas and grandpas of the world.
I sift through several profiles and finally spot one. It’s him and thankfully not private. I look through the photos he has of him and his sons. They’re standing in front of baseball stadiums with smiles on their faces. His captions are cute, “Good day with the boys.” Nothing really out of the ordinary there, but that’s what I get for looking at a public domain. The only thing I came for is his email, which sits in the information of his SpaceFace account. Perfect. People don’t understand what an email can help me do. Not only does it give me the location of the computer or phone the user uses, but it also gives me access to the account too.
A minute later, I’m elbows deep into his emails. But there’s nothing there. Nothing to nail him with like I did Hadley. Why couldn’t the gods bless me with another miracle of an STD confirmation or—
“Holy shit,” I whisper, leaning in towards the computer.
I click on an email, my eyes examining the contents. It’s a confirmation email for another email address registered to him. It’s a confirmation that he approved this email address as a backup for this new email address, and by the name, it’s nothing good.
I swallow hard, typing in the recent development. Within a few keystrokes, I’ve broken into his new email, and I want to hurl. My fingers curl over my mouth and lean back, shutting off the screen. I don’t know how he’s gotten away with that, but he’s going down—absolutely going down. A man in his position, in a classroom filled with kids, needs to be taken down. Way down—like buried six feet down, down.
As bile fills my mouth, I hack into his home computer, thanks to his emails, I can nail down his IP addresses. The content gets worse and worse, and more incriminating and perverted at every turn. I can’t stomach what he’s got stored in his fucking cloud from his computer, so I do what I need to, and I add more things to my ever-expanding shit list.
A few days later, I pop a muffin into my mouth as I walk out of my apartment. There’s still paint on my door, the same as before. Maintenance refuses to change it or paint over it. Since they think I did it, I should have to suffer from the art. Or someone is pulling their strings and forcing them to ignore the situation. The latter is my guess. But who is pulling those strings? I still don’t know. My guess is on the cloaked bastards who painted it in the first place.
I’m on edge at all times when I walk through campus. I’m public enemy number one now and everyone’s target. When I walk, they snigger at me or throw things at me. I pop my headphones in, hanging onto Chase’s iPhone for dear life, and try to ignore their presence, but sometimes that’s hard.
Yesterday in between classes someone lobbed a full can of coke at my head, knocking me down to the ground. Kids laughed around me, not bothering to help. It’s pathetic really that kids can turn that fast on another human being. I get animals; I understand them, but humans? Humans are unpredictable, horrid creatures to one another for no reason. Animals have a reason. Whether it’s their territory or fighting for a mate, they have a reason.
I stop in front of Seger and Zepp in front of the busy dining hall, turning my music off. They cross their arms over their chests with matching scowls. Since Monday, I’ve stood in front of them every day for every meal. At this point, I’m not even hungry, but it’s the principle of it all.
“Hello, boys, are you taking away my basic rights today?” I bite into another muffin, tracking their eye movements.
“You’re a determined little shit, aren’t you?” Seger mutters, wiping a hand down his disgruntled face.
I shrug my shoulders. “Determination is a wonderful skill to have.” I tilt my head, smiling at the two of them.
My eyes drift towards the window, an empty space greeting me. Chase is missing from his normal spot, like the day before, and the day before that. In fact, he was missing in class too. From school, period, like a ghost, my cheerful guy has disappeared.
Zepp lets out a heavy sigh, his shoulders sagging. “You know the drill, New Girl, we can’t—” He whispers through sadness.
“Let you in,” Seger finishes his sentence, face falling. He shakes his head, running a hand through the longer strands of his brown hair.
