The Secrets We Keep

The Twenty-Seventh Chapter

Christopher

"It's not what it looks like!" Hayden says, her eyes wide as she leans over Mr. Johnson menacingly. The man himself has gone the color of a tomato as his sweat-soaked face looks up at mine and Nathan's pleadingly. 

"Please make her stop," he begs between broken sobs. 

Nathan is the first to recover between the two of us. He rounds the student desks in the classroom, wraps his arms around Hayden, and picks her up from where she's disabling Johnson. She goes limp in his arms and allows him to displace her on the other side of the desk. 

Johnson weakly recovers without her holding him down but before he even has a chance to cradle his hurting arms to his chest, Nathan shoves his head back into the desk. 

"What did you do to her that made her have to hold you down?" Nathan demands as he keeps one hand on Johnson's face and another on an arm that he presses to his back. 

Hayden scrambles away from them, a guilty expression on her face. When she comes close enough to me, I can see the top few buttons of her school shirt are missing. Her tie's also badly done (which wouldn't be out of the ordinary for her since she's allergic to tying the damn thing properly) but she has red finger marks all over her neck and as she gets closer, I can see her body is slightly shaking. 

"Tell him to let him go," she tells me weakly. "I got what I wanted." Her eyes widen as she thinks of something. "Can you get my bag? It's behind the desk." 

Her eyes are flittering everywhere but my face and something dangerous unfurls inside me when I realize she's too shaken to go anywhere near the teacher again. 

Like Nathan, I want to demand what he did to her to make her so skittish but I'm too angry right now to speak. 

I do as she says and cross over to the desk to grab her bag. Once I've swung the pink monstrosity over my shoulder, I make eye contact with Nathan. 

"Let him go," I say. Nathan clenches his jaw but does as I ask. 

Johnson swings up again and stumbles back into the board with a few shaky steps. "I'm going to fucking ruin you kids for what you've done to me!" He spits and his face is almost unrecognizable with all the blood that's rushed there. "I swear to you, I'm going to make every one of you sorry-"

"You won't," Nathan says, stepping back in front of him. The older teacher cowers under his height. "Because if you fucking tell one person about what happened here today, I won't just get you fired, I will fucking kill you." 

Johnson's eyes flicker back to Hayden who's shifted closer and closer to the door. 

"I barely fucking touched her," Johnson starts. "She was the one who-"

I close my eyes, wishing the teacher hadn't said anything. Unlike me, I don't think Nathan saw Hayden's neck. And now Johnson's just admitted to hurting her. 

But before Nathan can take a swing at him, I come between them. "Let's not do anything to make things worse right now," I say and try to catch Nathan's eyes. "She's scared," I whisper, and nod my head in her direction. "Go check on her." 

Nathan finally calms down enough to look over his shoulder at Hayden. He sees her nervously waiting for us at the door and swallows. 

"Let's just go," Hayden says when all of our eyes are on her again. 

I want to call the cops. But the truth is, until Hayden tells me what happened here, I'm worried all I'll do is get her in trouble. So I look back at Johnson and say, "We won't say anything if you keep your fucking mouth shut. Ok?"