The Sweet Taste of Honey

STAY

AVERY

On this particular morning, in the bad mood, I was in, I dreaded getting up for school. I remembered the torturous conversation I'd had with my dad the night before. He wasn't sorry for what he did he was just sorry that he got caught. I thought about how easy it would be to just stay in bed but then I thought about how much nicer it would be to hide away in her classroom.

I did in the end after many battles in my mind make it to school that day, not early enough to say hi to Miss Valentine, but I still looked into her classroom quickly as I walked down the hall, there she was just as tired as the first day but still enthusiastically teaching her students.

It was strange, her class only behaved as they normally would, and she taught as she normally would, but this outside perspective I had, had shown me there was nothing normal about it at all, about her.

Nothing about her mannerisms seemed ordinary, her smile wasn't genuine and I know that that shouldn't have meant anything to me but it did because I'd seen the way her face would light up at the colours in the sky or my hands on hers, I'd made her laugh and I'd made her smile and that ghostly smile she had painted on her face that day was nothing like the one I'd seen before.

It was a lie.

There was nothing I could do at that moment but go to class, continue my day and wait until after her class to talk to her but I knew even then with the little time I'd known her she'd never tell me the truth and that worried me.

I noticed her behaviour more when I sat in her class and on this day unlike the others, I didn't focus on the lesson at all. I did wait behind after class like I had been doing since day one, I took my seat at the desk in front of hers. She looked at me with a half-smile that I knew she didn't mean.

"Is everything okay?" I asked.

She paused for a moment like she was about to unravel every secret she had like she was desperate to break the dam but of course, she didn't.

"Yes, how did your call with your dad go?" She rubbed the back of her neck as questioned me so casually.

"It was fine."

She nodded her head.

"Juliet, what happened?"

She frowned as if she didn't quite understand my question. She shook her head as she began marking assignments again like every day. There was always something to grade, exams, assignments, homework, there was always something, always a distraction.

I knew something was wrong; I also knew that she wouldn't tell me, so I pulled a grading sheet off her desk and took half the stack.

"You don't have to keep doing this," she told me softly.

"Just let me stay for a while," I pleaded.

I had figured that if she wasn't telling me something it was probably because she didn't want to or because she couldn't; so all I could do was mark her papers and keep her company. The idea of leaving her alone felt worse to me than me being alone. All I could do was hope she'd feel the same safe comfort I found around her, around me.

"Why do you insist on staying so much, the fact you don't want to go home aside?" She asked as she studied me. I could practically hear the cogs turning in her mind as she pondered the thought.

"Can't this just be my good deed?"

"And what could've Avery Jenson done that's so bad she needed to make up for it?"

She waited for an answer because I guess she'd expected me have had something to say. I guess she'd been curious as to what bad things I could've done but I hadn't, not a day in my life and neither had she, not really.