Don't Stand So Close To Me

Who Are You?

Lyra got off the bus as it pulled up at school. Her brain was abuzz with a night full of played-through scenarios, and ultimately this whole Eddie thing was just too risky.

Sure he had let down his guard a little around her, and he really didn't seem the demon specific sectors of the school ecosystem would have you believe, but on a personal level, he felt dangerous to Lyra. Not because of anything he had done yet, but what she thought he might be capable of.

Eddie had already started chipping away at her walls of defence, and a little was fine, but yesterday he somehow managed to zero in on their weak points, and Lyra could not afford to repeat offend in her parents' eyes. She was on thin ice as it was. Embarrassing them by getting expelled, especially what she had been removed for. She had to keep focused on her work and not get sucked into temptation again.

Lyra gets to her locker and grabs a pen from her bag to jab into the side of the locker door to wrestle it open. She half expects to hear Eddie's voice ring out about how there is a much cooler way to open the door, as usual, but there is nothing. Lyra even checks behind the door, but he's not there.

She shrugs and thinks maybe the universe was cutting her some slack and breathing room. That was until she looked into her locker.

On the back of the door were taped three items. Two sweetheart candies. One said 'Hello,' and the second said 'Be Kind' Lyra smiles and shakes her head. This guy would get a telling off for breaking into her locker, but the candies were amusing.

Underneath both of those was a cassette tape. It looked like a blank.

Lyra peels away the cassette. It had no tracklist. She opened up the case, and inside were two pieces of paper. One was a note of some kind. The other had 'Lyrics' written at the top.

Lyra quickly checks around her for anyone near enough to read over her shoulder, and the hallways are filling up a little, so she leaves the candies, pockets the tape and its documentation, makes the great book exchange for the day and heads to the ladies.

She finds an empty cubicle and unfolds the note.

"Lyra,
I know, personally, that sometimes it's hard to find the words.
I thought that instead of saying the words you don't mean, if you wanted to, you could get someone else to say the real ones for you.
E"

She knows from the scratchy black and red handwriting this was Eddie. So at least that mystery was solved.

Lyra folds up the note slowly, confused by what he meant until she reads the second sheet.

"Lyrics:

'Who are you?
I really wanna know.'
"

Lyra takes the tape, puts it in her Walkman, and hears the intro to "Who are you" by The Who. She smiles broadly to herself in this private environment where she could allow it.

An incredibly sweet gesture, she thought. Lyra quickly corrects her brain. Kind, an incredibly kind gesture. Especially after nearly half a year of being fairly sharp with him, sometimes losing her temper with him.

Her brain jumps ahead severalfold. What was his end game? Probably the same as all guys this age. They all seem kind at first, don't they? Until you're standing in a room, defending yourself against their onslaught of lies.

She sighs and tries to shake the negativity from her mind. Calm down. Just take it at face value. It was a kindness.

Lyra tucked the note in her wallet and the lyrics sheet back in the tape case along with the tape itself and put it in a small zip compartment of her bag.

With her headphones still on her head, Lyra steps out of the cubicle only to be confronted by a tall, slender girl all decked out in her cheerleading garb.