The Entitled

New adventures

Curfew

I was up to my knees in dirt. Literally. Damp, brown, sticky dirt. It covered every inch of my body now, Bailey's pink wellies now tainted a dark black colour.

As I lifted my shovel high into the air, bringing it down with force, I subconsciously shrugged further into my coat. The night time here, cold and haunting, wasn't anything like the city. At home there were lights everywhere keeping me and my friends awake into the earliest parts of the morning and a constant movement of people that kept me warm. But here, in what could only be described as the desolate pits of England, it was dark and cold. The static silence chilling almost.

"You shouldn't be helping me," I said for the fifth time that night, my shovel hitting the wet soggy floor, "You could all get in trouble."

Edmund, stood a few feet away, stopped digging too and waved his hand at me dismissingly, "Don't worry about us," He insisted, a friendly smiling coating his mouth despite the flushed appearance of his cheeks.

My eyes hovered over the three boys. All wrapped up like broken porcelain dolls in thick jumpers and padded coats, they looked the furthest thing away from the picture of teenage boys I knew at home. The boys I knew, Max included, were sharp, polished. Sickly charming. Like furniture in the way that their edges had been cut perfectly, they were positioned in the right places and decorated with the plushest fabrics. And my impression had been that boarding school boys would be the same, if not worse. But from the three in front of me, Edmund with his choppy brown hair and enflamed cheeks, Preston with his torn school coat and Scott with mud smeared across his temple and tousled blonde locks, I knew my preconception was uneducated. They were nice in the messy, sporadic sort of way, willing to get their hands dirty on my behalf. I knew I liked right there, so much so that I felt guilty for involving them.  

I stopped shoving the blade into the ground and leant my arm on the handle for a minute. Wiping trickles of sweat off my forehead, I sighed, "I don't understand why you're helping me?" I asked as a mist of air breathed past my lips and fogged the night.

"You're Bailey's friend, therefore you're our friend," Scott shrugged simply, his reddened face covered in a thick moisture of sweat like mine.

"I don't know what it's like with your friends," Edmund added, staring at me through the darkened night, "But around here we have each other's backs."

Just as he finished speaking he picked his shade back up into the air, his shoulder pulling back and then dropping as he hit the edge of the blade into the ground.

"Plus," Preston added, flipping a pile of dirt from his shovel into the wheel barrel they'd stole from the groundsman's shed, "We live for danger."

Edmund scoffed, his head shaking disapprovingly as he dug further into the dirt and then pulled up with force, "Digging holes is hardly dangerous," he said, barely glancing at his friend as he answered him with a sarcastic remark.

"The risk of getting expelled is though," Preston said though it were common-sense, his brows cocked in the direction of his friend arrogantly.

I ignored their light-hearted bickering and got back to digging further into the hole I'd created, "Well thank you for whatever reason it is you helped, I appreciate it."

They all shrugged, as if it were nothing, which to them it seemed it wasn't. I thought to how my friends at home might have acted if I had them help them tonight and all I could imagine was the moans that'd come out of Lottie or the laziness that would entail Adam. I was lucky if anything that it weren't them helping me and instead it was the Crawford boys.

"Are you sure we're not going to get caught?" I asked, looking around the dark pitch over to their school. The castle likes structure was crammed with tiny little windows, not one of which were lit. Each rectangular shape was black, curtains or blinds pulled behind them.