Page 101 of Fractured Fates
I keep running, crashing through the gym doors and out onto the pitch. There’s no one out there; the grass and the stands empty.
I run right across the center of the field, spying the perimeter fence in the distance. If he doesn’t give up, I’m leaping straight over it.
But he’s not the star of the dueling team for nothing. He may be huge but god dammit he’s fast.
I hear the thud of his feet. I hear the pant of his breath.
I grit my teeth and run with everything I have. It’s no good.
He hooks his arm tight around my middle and tackles me to the ground with ease.
I hit the hard grass with a thwack, my face meeting dirt, and the heavy weight of his body mushing me into the ground once again.
“Get off me!” I yelp, squirming underneath him, despite every bone in my body crying out in pain.
He only presses me deeper into the dry grass.
“Do you know how I know?” he snarls.
“Know what?” I snarl back.
“That you’re not taking any of this stuff seriously.” I don’t answer him. I’m pretty sure it was a rhetorical question anyway. “First, the authorities’ enforcer. Now Andrew Playford.”
I freeze. “Huh?”
What is he talking about?
“Firstly, you’re fucking around with the man in black. And now a week later, Andrew Playford,” he spits right in my ear.
“I’m not fucking around.”
He laughs hollowly. “And you don’t even have the guts to own it. If you want to be the school slut, at least wear that shit with pride.”
“You’re such a misogynistic asshole,” I hiss. “I’m not ashamed of who I am. But I’m not having jerks like you spreading rumors about me either. Andrew and me, we’re just friends.” At least we were. I’m not sure if we still are. “And me and the man in black we’re …” What the hell are we? Friends? I don’t think so.
“You expect me to believe that!”
“I don’t give a flying crap what you do and don’t believe. I’m telling the truth!”
His body turns rigid. He’s silent, his heavy panting dying away to a whisper by my ear.
“If it’s not true,” he says sinisterly, “then why was Andrew telling all the locker room about how you went around to his room on Saturday night, let him eat you out, before he fucked you on his desk?”
Now it’s my time for my body to tense, my next words faltering in my throat. “He … he didn’t say that.”
He wouldn’t. It isn’t true. Why would he make something like that up?
Spencer is quiet again. I can hear the gym door banging in the breeze and feet in the gymnasium pounding the sprung floor.
“He did,” he finally says, more quietly now.
“He didn’t. You’re just trying to fuck with me like always.” Andrew is my friend. He was angry with me on Saturday night but that is because I hurt his feelings. I’m sure he’ll come around. I know he wouldn’t say that stuff about me … would he?
I think about the way the boys leered at me this morning. I think about how several of them invited me to see their desks.
Spencer rolls off me and onto his back on the grass. He looks up at the cloudless sky, and then turns to look at me. The irises of his eyes are like two dark spheres floating in an ocean of light. That sensation tugs deep in my gut.
“I’m not fucking with you, Rhi. That’s what he said.”
