"It was... interesting," I said with a subtle surprised look on my face.
"Whoa. That's a face I've never seen before. Care to explain?"
We walked over to my locker to grab my books. We had English together, which is where we met in the first place.
"You've heard about the new janitor, right?" I asked.
"Oh, I've heard about the janitor, alright," She giggled. "Mr. N? They're saying he's 19 years old."
"19? I thought janitors were supposed to be old." I laughed back.
"It's not nice to make assumptions." Maria wagged her finger at me.
"What happened to the old janitor?"
"Retired. He's worked here for 60 years. How much gum-scraping and toilet cleaning do you think it takes to eventually drive a man insane?" She replied.
"I don't know, 70 years, maybe?"
I quickly collected my stuff as the bell began to ring. School has always been pretty important to me, but only because grades are so important to my dad. He would murder me if I had anything below a B minus.
We made our way as quickly as possible to class, Maria was walking a little quicker than me since my legs were absolutely killing me after all the running I've had to do today.
"Maria, wait!" I groaned. She didn't hear me over all the shouting and shoe-squeaking coming from the student-filled halls. As people shuffled to their classrooms, I lost sight of the top of her head entirely.
Fuck. My leg felt like it started to cramp up and it was killing me. Sometime in this madness, I must've made a wrong turn because the hallway I was in now was completely empty and dead silent.
I took a deep breath and began to limp my way down the hall. I was looking from side to side, checking the room numbers to see if any of them were my English class.
I was so focused on finding my class that I wasn't paying attention to where I was going and I accidentally bumped into someone in front of me. It scared me so bad that I almost fell to my knees. I let out a slight gasp as the person grabbed me by my forearm. Their hand held a tight grasp around me and I could feel a cool, metal sensation against my skin. Black and silver rings.
I looked up, it was Mr. N.
He was staring at me intently. His eyebrows furrowed together with much concentration, my arm in one hand and a broom in the other. My mouth fell agape as I looked into his eyes.
In the locker room earlier, he had covered them with his large hand. But now that I could see them so up close, I realized I had never seen ones like his before. They were amber, but as I stared at them for longer, they began to glisten red.
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