Violetta (Violet) Jackson has big dreams. None of which happen to include sitting in detention for a week straight for a lab disaster that wasn't even her fault. That's all thanks to Will Hawthorne, his friends (one of whom she unfortunately used to...
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Unfortunately, my confrontation with Will did not faze him at all.
In fact, it only seemed to make him more intrigued than anything else.
For the following few days, at least five times a day, I caught Will looking my way — during classes, lunch break, during homeroom, and regrettably, during chem, where Mr. Stevenson had decided that the best course of action would be to ignore my existence completely; as if pretending I wasn't there at all would mitigate any potential impending explosions of fire in his classroom. Every time Will and I locked eyes, the knot in the pit of my stomach tightened, and I would be reminded, once again, of my insane decision of deciding to take the fall for him in order to keep his mom from moving away. I was always the first to immediately break the eye contact, but I could still feel his eyes on me after I had fixed my gaze on something, anything else.
Will's undue attention toward me had another negative side effect: Ethan.
Walking to English on Thursday, I passed Ethan and his usual group of friends, staring straight ahead, willing them not to bother me. Will was standing off to the right side of the hallway, by the lockers, in the same pose as he had been in when he ambushed me in the hallway before — sneaker up on the wall nonchalantly, hands in jacket pockets, looking right at me. Even as I quickly snapped my gaze to someone else passing me by on my left, I caught a glimpse in the corner of my eye of Ethan turning his head to glance at Will, then at me.
"Bet you had a blast in detention, Violetta." I didn't have to turn around to picture Ethan's smirk as he said the words. I didn't bother to stick around, picking up my pace and turning the corner and out of earshot as snickers of appreciative laughter from Ethan's friends bounce around in my ears, my face burning.
What does Will think he's doing? I thought, fuming. Does not get that he's only going to get me in more trouble the more attention he gives me? Or is that his goal?
I adamantly decided that, if direct confrontation had failed, the thing to do was avoid Will at all costs. I had to give him credit, though — he was relentless.
On Wednesday, he tried to talk to me after history by waiting outside the classroom — history was my last class of the day — but I speed-walked away and disappeared into the crowd before he could catch me.
On Thursday, I spotted him up the hallway waiting at the entrance as students poured out for lunch break, and snuck out the side entrance before he saw me. Thankfully, he didn't try to ambush me after I served my time in jail — sorry, I mean detention — that day.
On Friday, I was beginning to feel more like a spy-in-training than a student, using back stairways and more circular routes to get to my classes. At lunchtime, however, Will seemed to have decided it was time for a more direct approach, and he started walking right to the table I was sitting in the middle of the lunch period, at which point I promptly got up, packed up my lunch, and exited the cafeteria and the main building itself, taking a lap around the school's expansive mile-long track and field, surrounded by the shade of tall oak trees, before heading back inside for my next class.
