The Return

Chapter Seventeen

Scarlett

Thursday April 20th 2018.

She blinked her eyes instinctively, a yawn slipping through parted lips. She could feel the lines and ridges imprinted on her cheek.

It was one of those days.

Her mouth was bone dry and her lips chapped.

All she could see around her were empty tables.

Fuck.

Even the gangly Baseball players who hung out after class were gone.

The clock on the wall by the whiteboard read 4:15 P.M.

She assessed the posters on the walls of Vowels and Consonants and the scrawny handwriting on the board.

AP English.

Mr. Pinbrough sat by his desk buried in a pile of papers undoubtedly from yesterday's pop quiz.

She didn't need to see her grade to know she flunked it.

Who had a pop quiz the morning of her father's arrest?

If anything, he was to blame for her poor performance.

... And not the cans of beer she downed on her way to school.

She pushed off her desk in the back of the room.

Her chair screeched against the floorboards.

She gathered her books into her black bag and slung it over her shoulder.

She wasn't ready for the after-school gossip about how she was kicked off the cheer squad for absence and lack of coordination. It would be the background noise of her walk to the parking lot.

Plugging her ears would do nothing against the pointing and laughing. And by luck, if she managed to bypass the horde of kids by the baseball field, there were white vans and women in pressed pantsuits stalking her.

They had her surrounded.

Trapped like a rat.

She closed her eyes concentrating on the air wafting in from the open windows.

Why wasn't anyone talking about Malcolm Kent? Lincoln Lane's star pitcher was falling from grace to grass after his grades took a nosedive. Or how he was an interested party in the fight for prom king since both his friends were surprise, surprise, on the committee.

No one's talking about it because that's not newsworthy...

She was never the drown her problems in a drink kind of girl, neither was she the smoke a blunt till she blacked out type either...

She didn't have a way to handle her stress...

So, she did both. She dabbled in anything that ebbed the ache in her chest. She was already familiar with the soft burn of liquor and the warmth of smoke in her lungs.

By third period, she caught Lucas Flint snorting Molly under the stairs by the Biology lab and she joined in. And for the first time that afternoon, she felt connected to him. Even if it was for a moment crouched beneath the stairway.

She walked up to the front of the class.

Nathan Pinbrough didn't look up from where he was tracing a red pen over a script. It didn't look like her handwriting.

It was 50/50, either he already graded hers and tossed it aside or he was yet to get to it.

She reached for the water bottle on his desk and twisted the cap. "Drop it, Miss. Leighton—"