Phoenix's Lies

Before

River

Five Years Ago

Walking into school feels weird. As if something is about to happen, the world is holding its breath. Everywhere I pass people walk in small, subdued groups. Their eyes seemed to linger on me. Keeping my head down is a tempting option with what's going on in my life but part of me refuses to give in. Even with him seeming to be gone and what he did to me. With what happened between us I can't let it - him - go. Pathetic I know but I can't help it. I can't help it. He had been my whole world. Up until a week ago, I could have laid out my whole future. Had known it all. That was until it happened and my world started to shatter. All over one boy who I......No. I wasn't going to go there. Not again. Not now or ever.

Shaking my head to clear away the numbness inside I noticed the prolonged stares and awkward eye contact had faded. Changed to the noise I could suddenly hear down the corridor. Following it with a tug in my chest - in my heart - that I can't work out its origin of I run. Pushing past people in front of me the worse that feeling grew. The more it consumed me.

Racing after the screams at the corridor's end I skid to a stop, a shocked look on my face, as the scene before me crystalised. There. Beaten bloody and bruised I could see the dark hair of my childhood best friend, his back turned as he tried to move from the taller, equally dark-haired figure that almost swallowed my view of who I hoped I hadn't seen behind the figure approaching him with an angry almost predatory focus that shook me to my core.

"Nix?" Despite the rift between us, one that grew with every passing day we didn't speak, when Phoenix turned to face the other figure, Derek, I could have cried out. I could see it. The murderous expression lodged in those dark blue-silver eyes. At the hatred. The anger. "Nix please, stop." Without my conscious permission, the words slipped past my lips where I stood like a statue, hoping my whisper would be lost under the crowd cheering around me. But that wish was a foolish one.

No sooner had the words left my lips than his eyes found mine, the stormy expression calmed ever so slightly as I took in his battered and bruised appearance. The blood. As I open my mouth again to speak, Phoenix tries to move between me and Derek but is stopped when he's thrown against a row of lockers with a crash, the sight causing me to finch and run. Moving until I sat in a window facing the front of the school outside, my traitorous heart still hurting from what I'd seen.

Though it wasn't even....there wasn't even much point as the hallways were so quiet you could hear a pin drop in one direction and the sounds of the fight in the other. Absently my eyes wander in the direction I had just run and see Nix's locker open and strewn all over the floor. Two uniformed officers searched it with a second two officials in high vis jackets plus the school's principal heading toward the commotion still disrupting the silence of the early morning before the first bell. Holding my breath in anticipation I hear the worst crash yet before a pained groan reaches my ears and I have to clench all my muscles, to fight everything I have not to run toward him.

Hiding my head in my knees I wrap my arms around myself as the sounds of shouting filled the air, hoping that if I focus hard enough then it would all be a dream. A bad dream. Something I'd been doing for the last few weeks as our relationship - friendship or whatever we were calling it - had started to go downhill. To break. But that later proves to be a fool's hope when I looked up to see our principal leading a bloody and beaten - though not as bad as Nix - looking Derek down the hall past me towards her room. With no Phoenix in sight. Returning to what I'd been looking at it before my heart sinks and I rush toward the new location of the noise. Once again hoping with all I had that I was wrong. But I wasn't and I hadn't realised how far from not being wrong I was.

Rounding the final corner I see the back of Phoenix as he's led away in handcuffs, his eyes lingering on me as he passes. Dropping to the floor I take a second to add this to the puzzle that I didn't understand about him before running home and waiting to see if he'd come to his window. To my door to talk. To his. But he never did.

That was the last time I saw him. Three weeks later he and his family were gone. House was empty and moved out of sight. Never to be seen again.

Until now that was.