"Shit!"
I jumped out of my skin, at someone jabbing my hips. I dropped my pen down on my English notes and twisted my head behind me, to find Van, looking rather pleased with himself.
"You ready to go?" he asked me. The school day had finished, and I had stayed behind an extra hour in the common room, waiting for Van to attend intervention. I refused to let him leave unless he went to it, after talking to his parents last night I felt the need to try my hardest to keep Van's grades from slipping- not that it was my job at all, but I wanted to do it.
"Yeah," I answered and began packing my notepad away. "How was it?"
"Alright actually. Who knew? An hours media intervention can teach you so much."
"Wow. Who knew?" I repeated, sarcastically and wide eyed. He then grabbed both of my hands and pulled me out of my seat.
"Makes me think, you know, if I started going six months ago I'd be getting straight A's by now," he laughed, releasing my left hand but not my right. This left me being dragged out of the building by him, our hands laced together and me with a stomach full of butterflies.
"You see? Turning up to college is actually worth it."
"Suppose so," he smiled as he led me out the way we came in this morning. "Still boring as hell though."
"You'll get used to it."
He didn't say anything to that. He was looking to the right, so I diverted my eyes in that direction too. Scarlet was walking on the other side of the road from us, she was glaring at the pair of us, with a cold, hard look in her eye. Van used his free hand to wave at her, and he shot her an over exaggerated smile.
"Van!" I swatted his arm, and tugged on his hand to get him to walk faster, trying to evacuate the whole situation.
"What? She's been staring at me all day, what's her problem? I thought she was starting to like me."
"She doesn't even like me at the minute."
"What happened with you two?"
"Well I confronted her about what she did." He gave me a puzzled glare as we walked. "About her telling Larry about- you know," he nodded, understanding what I was talking about, and accepting that I didn't want to bring it up. "So yeah, I asked her why she did it, she was just like 'I was doing the right thing' in that whiny voice, you know what I mean. And she made me feel like I was in the wrong, she totally turned it all around. It got pretty heated very quickly- keep in mind we were in maths at the time. We were basically screaming at each other until Me Johnston told us to shut up. And yeah, we haven't spoke since."
Van hummed, to show he was listening.
"It's not like I shouldn't have brought it up though, is it? Surely she'd know I'm not going to let her betray me like that."
"Oh yeah, definitely. Not going to lie, she was an idiot for what she did to you. And you have every right to let her know how you feel about it," Van agreed with me.
We carried on the rest of our walk to Van's house, voicing our opinions on Scarlet's actions. I did feel pretty harsh, talking about my best friend the way that I was, but I realised that I needed to let it all out. Keeping my feelings and thoughts bottled up inside was something I was prone to do, and I intended on changing that. Hiding from my thoughts and emotions always resulted me in breaking down by the end, it was best to let it out.
Once we were outside Van's front door, he fumbled around in his pocket searching for his keys. "Got it," he mumbled when they appeared in between his fingers. "Mum should be home in around an hour."
