Behind the bully (On Hold)

Chapter Two

Chapter Two

“Hey, um, can I sit there?” I was surprised to see the girl from yesterday, Amy, ask from beside my desk. She was motioning to the only unoccupied seat in the room. Normally the desk beside me was cast away as a spare, a forever-unoccupied waste of space just in case. Now with a new student, I guess it would have to be used again.

I grunted my reply, too tired and cut up from last night and this morning to be bothered to say anything. Amy took this as a yes.

The old chair groaned when she sat on it, more to do with its age then her weight, after all, she looked light as a feather, I’m sure if I wanted to, and I probably would soon, I could snap her in half like a twig.

She grimaced as her knees grazed on the bottom of the desk; she brought one of her legs out to reveal a line of mini splinters from it. She gave the desk a look of distaste before turning back to me.

“So you, um, you normally sit alone here?” she asked, attempting to start some kind of conversation, and failing dismally. I just kept staring straight ahead. After about ten seconds of silence she seemed to get the picture and got her books out and turned around again to face the front.

 “War,” Mrs Esperanza, my doom and gloom first period history teacher started. Today she was dressed no differently than her usual. Her black stiletto high heels with her black fishnet stockings and her tiny black leather shorts, her black fishnet stocking-like shirt revealing her tattooed stomach and piercings, with her clingy black crop top over the top and her opal-like stone black necklace, the stone being the only colour in her outfit; bright, blood red ruby.

Her black shoulder length hair was pinned up in two high ponytails with a long box fringe that covered her eyebrows. Her face, white and powdery, highlighted her large emerald green eyes, which are highlighted by about a kilogram worth of black eyeliner, mascara and every other form of eye makeup you can imagine. Her large, full lips a bright, blood red colour. She looked like dark, slutty evil personified and her classes were always full of death, tragedy, murder and heartbreak.

 I liked her.

 “It is gruesome,” she continued, walking up and down the rows of desks positioned around the classroom. “It is horrible,” she looked around the room once and continued. “It is pure, heartless, merciless, necessary, evil” she finished standing directly in front of me now. “It clears away the weak, it shows the courageous, and it creates heroes, though which man fits into which category is never clear. No, it is never clear, not until their death” I gulped and shrunk a little in my seat. Could she know? Could she possibly know about my dad? About that note, that note that claimed he was missing in action? The note that condemned my mother and I to a life of misery and uncertainty?

 “It leaves, even the greatest of men, broken, a shell of themselves. It leaves them afraid to sleep in a house with an unlocked door, scared of anything that resembles the sound of a bomb or bullet. Shaky if so much as a cat sneaks up on them.  It often deprives them of a chance to re-live their lives as it were before they went out to war all those years ago. They come home, often unable to feel the joyous emotions; happiness, joy; love. They live the rest of their life unable to relax, always on their guard. They expect the worst in people they don’t know and make snap judgements that the old lady that is casually strolling down the street with the walking stick and a hearing aid is an undercover soldier from some alien enemy and that, given the chance, she will strike him down. Strike his head with the edge of the stick, wrench out a heavily loaded machine gun from her little handbag. Thrust him in a obscure, dark, shadowy room where the walls are lined with murderous metal barbs that are covered in the reeking smell of smeared blood of other helpless victims.”

 She looked up suddenly, her eyes blazing and a dark shadow over her face. The class held their breath, not daring to move or make a sound. Our eyes trained on one single spot in the room, Mrs Esperanza, frightened that at any moment she’ll let out an evil scream and put us under some kind of enchantment and kill us, or that she’ll spread open her arms and open the very gates to Hell. None of us dared take our eyes off her.

 “With honourable men being left like this, how is it possible to find the heroes from the weak? When they have put this very curse that is war, on another soldier in the opposite side? Does this make them the victim, or the torturer? The innocent? Or the guilty? The heavenly? Or the damned” she whispered quietly to the class, her eyes still burning bright. There was silence for a long, long time before the bell finally went, signally the end of first period. We all filed out silently with perfect posture. No one dared make a sound until we were down the hallway and out to lunch.