Puck Off!

Chapter 31

The flight from Boston to Detroit is a little over two hours, and I spent every second of that time with my mind churning through so many things that it should be fucking butter by now. Hell, I barely made the flight at all, but Sunday traffic in Boston wasn't bad, and I got lucky that Chef Manzino was free to give me a lift to the airport, so I didn't have to wait for a cab or an Uber. I slipped him $100 too, so that might have contributed to the speed that we'd travelled at. Even still, I barely made the flight as I just grabbed the soonest reservation I saw while we were driving. I even paid for first class so I could be as close to the front of the plane as I could get. It was already boarding when I got there, but I was only carrying my work laptop backpack, so I didn't care about luggage or anything.

               From what Ella told me, Ryn was unconscious in the hospital, and it was pure luck that it hadn't been worse. She had been with Elske and Bonnie in the hotel, and they were going to find Ryn to go out to dinner after the captain's meeting when they found Fisher trying to get into his room with Ryn over his shoulder. He came up with a bullshit story about her being drunk and him being the nice guy and trying to take her to sleep it off, but then wouldn't let the girls take her to their room to do that. With Elske being her roommate, that made the most sense, but Fisher refused, and the girls had to call hotel security and the cops to make him relent.

               The police now had Fisher at the station for questioning, while Ryn was having tests run to find out what was wrong, but everyone who saw her said it looked like some sort of a date rape drug. Knowing Fisher, that wasn't even a little surprising. The worst thing was that I hadn't taken him seriously about getting back at me for the flash drive, but it turns out he went after Ryn instead of me. It made me sick.

               For the first time in my life, I wanted to kill someone. I wanted him hurt. I wanted him crying and realizing that you can't do the shit he does and get away with it.

               But first I needed to make sure Iryna was okay. I needed to see her eyes and hug her and kiss her and hold her until I knew she was safe. I had tears in my eyes for most of the flight while looking out the window, willing the plane to go faster so I could get to the hospital and see her. My stomach was in knots, and I was doing the best I could to not throw up from the tension. I needed to see her. I needed to at least hold her hand.

               I'd had a measure of revenge back in high school. Not physical, it wasn't like I could beat up Cullen and his other goons. But I could still screw them over. Now, Tilly may have had nothing but the AP Calculus test to get past for the rest of the year, but the guys needed term papers written. Term papers that I completely sabotaged.

               I'd been writing their papers for the better part of four years, and they'd grown accustomed to just handing in whatever I gave them. They never even read them. Why should they? They'd never studied anything on the subject, so they wouldn't have understood them anyway. I had little doubt they would hope to do the same thing to some poor kid at their college too, because there was no way they were going to suddenly start doing any work.

               I wrote each of them two paragraphs of a paper. After that, each of the papers was identical, detailing each of the papers that I'd written for them, the fact they obviously hadn't written this one, that I'd done the same thing for years because of their bullying. Every single thing I wrote down I substantiated with a copy of each paper written from my hard drive sent to the principal. I might have also sent a copy of everything to the district superintendent with dates and allegations from my first two years that had been ignored by the guidance office and vice principal, because they had made the school's anti-bullying promise an open hunting permit. I knew very well I wasn't the only one that had been victimized.