Rattlebones (bxbxb)

The Great Lupercalia

(Valentine's Day Special Coming up! This is a bonus chapter and reveals a little more about Darcy. <3 <3)

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+12 Years Ago+

"Darcy Brown, would you like to kick off our Valentine's Day party with a few interesting facts?" 

I look up from where I'm drawing an image of the Spanish Inquisition. There are burning books in the background and people running around screaming. My five-year-old hands weren't very good with coloring just yet, but I thought I had potential and the blood looked very realistic. 

"Oh no. Dorky's going to talk." Eugene Wilder mutters to his friends. He has super curly hair and he's dressed in yellow overalls with ketchup stains on the front. 

"Come stand up here, please." My teacher, Mrs. Booker, gestures for me to stand by her desk.

I slide out of my desk and slowly walk up to the front. My mother had chosen to dress me in white shoes and a Valentine's themed suit in the color pink, so I looked horribly put together. 

"What should I say? I hate Valentine's Day." I tell Mrs. Booker, and I look up at her, silently hoping that she asks me to sit down again, just this one time.

The woman smiles. She actually smiles, like the devil that she is.

"Just tell us what Valentine's Day really means to you, Darcy!" She chirps.

I turn back to the class and hear them snickering and cracking jokes. One plump, blonde boy in the back is stuffing his face with cookies that had been handed out earlier. I think his name is Igor, or something like that.

"Valentine's Day is a lie," I announce to the class, and everyone gasps. "They just made it sound fancy and nice because they don't want you celebrating the true reason behind Valentine's day. What we really should be celebrating is The Great Lupercalia." 

"What? Is that, like, the Great Pumpkin? Are you Charlie Brown, now?" Eugene begins to laugh and his friends join in.

Mrs. Booker scrambles to usher me back to my seat, but I'm not having it and I fight back when she starts pushing me towards my desk. 

"Lupercalia is the celebration of life!" I shout at the other students. "It's a day where everyone runs around naked in the woods and tries to make babies! It's also a day where a man had his head chopped off! Did you know that the human head lives exactly twenty seconds after death?! That's practically a whole minute!"

"Darcy!" Mrs. Booker shouts frantically, and she drags me out of the classroom. "To the principal's office immediately!"

Life isn't fair. 

I end up sitting outside of the principal's office, crying my eyes out. Valentine's Day had been ruined for me, permanently. I hated the day as it was, but I hated it even more now that I had made an idiot of myself in front of the entire class. 

I'm still crying when the blonde-haired boy who had been stuffing his face, shows up in front of me. He's glaringly ordinary, wearing a dark sweater and worn sneakers. 

"What do you want?" I sniff, and I wipe my eyes. 

The boy reaches into his pocket and he pulls out something wrapped in a napkin. At first, I think that it's one of the cookies that he had been eating. And then he unwraps it. 

It's a tiny head of a man screaming in agony, made of green clay. 

"I thought your story about the guy being beheaded was cool." The boy, Igor, admits. "And Mrs. Booker wanted us to make Valentine's day hearts, but I thought that heads with no bodies were cooler."

He hands me the head and I sniff and stare down at it. It has to be one of the nicest things that anyone's ever made for me. 

"Happy Great Lupercalia, Darcy," Iggy tells me, and he smiles.

I didn't think that I was capable of it, but looking back on it, this was the first time that I felt affection for another human being. Even at five years old, it had been hard being pulled from my home country and forced to fit into an entirely different mold.

Iggy and I meet eyes across the distance, and something forms there between us, even for a moment. Even if we were destined not to talk for years and at one point he had dumped my lunch into the school garbage can and laughed about it with Eugene.

And speak of the devil.

"What's that?" Eugene Wilder demands, and suddenly the decapitated head is torn from my hand when he appears at our side with his group of friends. "Ew!" He takes one look at it and then he throws it down, crushing it under his shoe. 

"That was mine!" I scream at him, and I stand up. 

Eugene laughs and then he reaches down and shoves me so that I fall. "You gonna do something about it?" He sneers. 

"Eugene, lay off!" Iggy protests, "He hasn't done anything to you!"

I start to cry again, a rage unlike any other running through me. But the final nail in the coffin is hammered in when Eugene takes his anger out on Iggy and both of them start to fight. I can't handle it anymore. I begin to snarl like a wild animal.

This is the effect of the Great Lupercalia. 

Eugene screams when I suddenly launch myself towards him and bite down on his arm. He shakes it wildly and howls in pain and anger, then throws me off, his forearm bleeding profusely. "He bit me! He fucking bit me!"

The Principal comes out and begins to scream at us, prying me away from Eugene when I throw myself at him again. Iggy is holding his eye, and there is a decent amount of bloodshed that has occurred between all three of us.

It proves to be one of the best and last fights that I ever have.

But as the Principal is leading us into his office, Iggy turns to me. "What was that back there?" He asks me. "You just bit Eugene Wilder like an animal."

I stare down at my shoes, feeling a little shy. "Did you like it?" I ask him. 

Iggy stares at me a bit longer, and then he turns away, "No." He replies, and my heart shatters.

I stand corrected. I hated Valentine's Day with a passion.