The last thing James "Jay" Hale ever imagined was to begrudgingly return to Beacon Hills, find out his older sister was murdered, and then be forced to go on a wild goose chase after some fuck ass Alpha that seemed to have a particular interest in r...
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CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE:
Blame Game, and He's Always The Loser
✧✧✧✧
For the remaining debriefing of chemistry class—which Harris decided to prolong well past the bell on purpose—Jay made solid eye contact with Derek up to the moment he stepped out of the classroom, craning his neck to keep his gaze locked until the literal wall blocked his line of sight.
As soon as he turned away, he shoved his friends into Coach's office nearby without a word of warning. Scott and Stiles collided clumsily, nearly tripping over each other, and Allison yelped in surprise as he herded them inside the room, kicking the door shut behind him with enough force to rattle the frame.
Without saying anything to explain why he just shoved them into a cramped office, he threw himself toward the desk, frantically searching for a pen while they collected themselves. His fingers scrambled over the dusty surface and he yanked a page out of a random Economics textbook sitting on the side to use as stationary.
"Derek's outside, waiting for Lydia," Scott spoke up, adjusting his flopping hair. It wasn't just an update for the two humans who didn't notice Derek; it was his attempt to fill the silence while they all watched Jay manically test pen after pen and realize none of them worked. The first pen's ink was dried out, so he threw it against the wall before trying another. The next pen suffered the same fate.
"What the hell does Coach even do in here?" Jay muttered under his breath, growing increasingly frustrated with every useless pen he grabbed from the cup on the desk. The pens were ancient, clearly untouched for who knows how long, and the more Jay thought about Coach escaping here during every free moment he could to apparently not mark papers, the less he wanted to imagine what else went on in the room.
As if on cue, Stiles made a loud, disgusted sound behind him. Ever the good audience.
In his frustration and disgust, Jay grabbed a handful of dead pens and hurled them at the wall. Stiles barely managed to duck in time, narrowly avoiding having his eye gouged out. Five pens embedded themselves into the drywall behind him, and any other time, Stiles would've gloated about his reflexes like he'd just won the Super Bowl. He'd be posing like Spiderman right after too, insisting those were his spide-senses at work. But today?
"What the fuck is wrong with you?!" Stiles shouted, incredulously looking at the pens then between Scott and Allison like he expected them to step in and scold Jay for it as the parents of the group.
"You mean Derek's waiting to kill her?" Allison asked, crossing her arms over her chest. She ignored Stiles' loud exclamations and Jay's angry grumblings to turn to Scott—somehow the only rational one at the moment out of the three boys.
Scott nodded grimly. "If he thinks she's the Kanima, then yeah. Especially after what happened at the pool."
Jay finally found a tiny, worn-down inch of a pencil stub and scribbled furiously on the torn-out page, managing to write, "JACKSON IS THE KAN—" before the pencil's lead snapped and ruined his life. With a growl of irritation, he slammed the nub down and held up the paper for the others to see.
