Cat & Drew's Whirlwind Adventure

6. Safe

Given a week I thought the climate surrounding our little prank would have started to simmer down, but if anything it's only getting worse. Nobody seems too wise to us spiking their lunch, seeing as I've heard rumors of food poisoning, but apparently pulling the fire alarm is a huge deal. That, and I guess the whole actual fire thing. Either way the principal has been scrambling around every day since, pulling students into his office, but I've managed to stay under the radar so far. At school that is. At home, it's a totally different story, I didn't account for how personally my mom would take this one stupid thing that happened.

I've mostly been trying to ignore her, which hasn't been so hard seeing as I'm still grounded to my room every second I'm home—save to go to the bathroom and eat dinner. I haven't been minding it quite as much though, not now that I have Cat. We've been texting like crazy, bonded by this dark secret we'll now carry to our graves, but mostly we're just talking about stupid stuff. The kind of stuff I'd expect everyone else is. I know it's all the same stuff I said was pointless, and it is, but I don't know. I've been texting Troy some too, but not as much, I still can't make up my mind about him so I'm being cautious.

I'd take him any day over my mom though.

"They just let this kind of thing happen, and you're telling me there's nothing they can do about it? This is ridiculous! I don't expect them to provide a five-star education, but for our tax dollars you'd think they'd make more of an effort." Mom grumbles across the table. She's barely touched her food, she's been too busy complaining the entire time since dinner started.

"What do you want them to do? You heard the principal, they weren't able to look at footage—that camera is broken." Dad responds, disinterested. There's a whole secret guidebook to Goodbury High, I'd tell them what rooms are always empty for kids to mess around in, or what cameras are perpetually broken, but I don't think I'd be helping. If we were a private school like Delton it might be different, and there were days before when I wished we were, but in this case I used it to my advantage when Cat and I were planning.

"Better. Is that really asking so much? I want them to do better. We have a mentally ill teenager, Dan, and he's surrounded every day by kids who pull pranks and set fires, does that sound like a healthy environment for him to be in?"

"Probably not any less healthy than talking about him like he's not even here."

"Don't. Don't you dare do that, make me out to be the bad guy when I'm just trying to keep him safe." She glares over her mountain of peas, an unsettling warning that things are about to get nasty. A tense standoff ensues where it looks as though he very much wants to say something else, but then he heeds that vast wisdom of his and backs down. Even then she keeps glaring at him for a full, long minute before turning her attention to me. "I don't like this, not one bit, are you sure you didn't see anything? You have no idea who could've done this?"

"Not really, no." Believe it or not this actually isn't the first time I've been asked this question, no matter how many times I give her an answer she continues to come back to it.

"I don't like this," her voice rises as she repeats herself. "I think it's time we get you into therapy."

"What?" The fork I've been using to push food around my plate, so it looks like I've been eating, falls out of my grip. "I thought we settled this, I already said I don't want to do therapy, mom."

"And I don't want you to do something stupid again, especially now that we know you've been cutting yourself. I just read this article last week that said these highly stressful situations can be triggering for people who have been through something traumatic—not to mention those struggling with mental illness."