The Good-For-Nothing Society | Completed

Chapter Thirty-Four

The next day my things are packed and loaded. Grace has managed to shove all of her stuff into one suitcase and one duffel bag. Vince is barely taking anything with him at all; it's been slotted into the back of a 4x4. Ready to cart us away. Elijah and Stan's parents are on their way to collect them and take them home to recover, they've been hired an in-house nurse to tend to them.

We're all stood in the foyer, Elijah and Vincent are puffing their chests out and glaring at each other. Stan and Grace are (not so) covertly grinning at each other, finding the whole thing hilarious. I want the ground to swallow me up.

"Right," Miss Gateshead says, gracefully coming down the marble stairs. "An accomplice of mine is meeting us at the safe house. We stand better odds the more adults are involved, and now we know that the meeting with Ethan Kade is set, it won't be long until the proper authorities will be taking over."

No one says anything back to her. We all stand in stoney silence. Not one of us is happy with this arrangement.

"Right," She says after the silence becomes stifling. "I'll give you five minutes to say goodbye and then we must go." She makes her way to the entrance, before stopping and looking back at her son. "Vincent, help me load the rest of the stuff."

"It's all loaded," He says, folding his arms across his chest and not moving.

"No." She says, her tone full of authority. "It is not."

She goes outside and Vincent slinks behind her. I look to Elijah. He's not pleased, not at all. If it were reversed I wouldn't be either. He's got to get better; that's the most important part. Besides, none of this will matter once I give the hard drive away. We can come back to school and start training. We can go back to how it was before I knew about the bioweapon. All of this will have faded into the background, a part of our story but not the whole story.

Stan steps forward and gives me a hug, "You better look after yourself."

"I'll try," I say, giving him a squeeze.

"I mean it," Stan says, pulling away to look at me. "You've grown on me."

I laugh and then take a deep breath, turning to look at Elijah, whose eyes are only for me. I walk up to him and he rests his forehead against mine.

"I don't like this," He mutters.

"I know you don't," I say, "But it's not for long."

"Three weeks is longer then you think."

"It's a lot less than six months," I say. He winces and I immediately feel bad. "Sorry."

"It's okay," He mumbles, fingering a piece of my hair. "Two minutes until you have to go."

"It really won't be long," I say, he just nods.

Then I do the only thing I really want to. I kiss him.

It's longer and deeper then we have ever kissed before. I don't care that Stan and Grace are there, or that my head teacher is waiting outside. I don't care that the world has ended more then once this year. In this moment, I'm just a girl and he's just a boy. We're just two people kissing, as though it's the most important thing to ever happen.

Then I break away. "It will be over before we know it," I say, as if the kiss was something I'm used to, as if it didn't mean more to me than I'll ever express.