Starry Eyed

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Eighteen

I've only just put down my bowl of Ricies on the 'used dishes' table when it happens. The babbling explosions of chatter around the room pop and fizzle out. The announcement is loud and grim, stealing every smile in the room. Crackling loudspeakers all through the school echo the same two sentences that will change life as we all know it.

"We have ourselves a tragedy here on school grounds, in relation to juniour student Harlem Potts. We would like all pupils within the school to meet in the hall at nine'o'clock. You have exactly five minutes."

The once bubbling cafeteria falls, I swear to God, completely and utterly silent.

Silence takes the place of the talking, and nobody penetrates its invincible barrier. There are no words. Principal Huntley can dress it up and disguise it all he likes, but every single person knows what he really means. A tragedy relating to a junior student? Old enough to drive. It's the weekend; he probably crashed his car on his way home to campus last night, like so many teenagers before him. I wonder, painfully, who the unlucky soul was that stumbled across the kid. Blood and guts over the dashboard. He was probably drunk, like every other regular teenager over weekends. Every day I wake up, there seems to be a new scene to view and to prove that I've made the right choice avoiding alcohol all my life. I'd rather be called stiff and lame than lying dead in a pool of vomit in the gutter.

People abandon their seats, leaving spoons and bowls and plates deserted on the tables. A very faint whisper mumbles around the room, like saying it aloud is forbidden. It's the endless struggle against human nature. When something bad happens, we are painfully lost in how to react. So we panic, or we shut down. Now, every kid in the school is shutting themselves down. A niggling thought at the back of my mind keeps wriggling into my brain. I'm sure I know who Harlem is, but I can't seem to figure it out.

Tough kids are crying, or choking back tears, or trying to hold masks of stone across their faces and fighting to stay calm. Buff jocks are forcing themselves not to sound the alarm, petite freshmen girls are whispering "oh my God" to themselves, hipsters have stopped drinking their coffee and scholarship nerds don't dare to open their books. It's insane to think that in high school, the only thing that can possibly smash the walls down and bring people together, regardless of their genders and races and sexualities and lifestyles, is tragedy. There is no acceptance until a disaster shoves it away.

I see James amongst the crowd, alone, with not a friend at his side. He might have been a little drunk before. But now, his expression is completely sober, like he's been told he only has a few hours to live. Things like these make you feel exactly that way. When you watch someone's heart burst and their blood spill out on the ground, you realize how easy it really is for you to give in. 

I've never seen Finn cry before, but when I step into the hall, he stands at the front of the room, crumpled to his knees with his head in his hands. Star and her father stand beside him, comforting him through their own heartbroken words. That's when I know who Harlem Potts is. Finn's roommate. His only friend. Gone.

People around the room look lost, like they've reached their destination but can't remember why they wasted the petrol coming. Only a couple of kids up the front seem really upset. Everybody else just seems shocked.

I push through the crowd desperately to get to Finn and Star. I feel guilty, like I comitted homicide to someone I can't even put a face to. I didn't speak to Harlem once this year, never even noticed who he was, and Finn and I are far from friends. But I dobbed Finn in yesterday, giving him enough grief as it was, and now his roommate's dead and he's just an echo of the guy he was before. I never could have predicted what was about to happen, but I'm part of all the hurt piled up on Finn's shoulders, because I spewed out the only secret he ever had, and what does he have left now?