No good. (BWWM) *CONTINUED*

2.

Cayden's POV

It could've just been the mood I was always in, but like all of the other days in the past six and a half months, this one sucked.

I sat at my desk in the middle of the quiet classroom, watching as the clock ticked down to mark the end of the day. A blank worksheet stared straight up at me. The teacher sat at her desk grading a stack of assignments which was without a doubt guaranteed to have excluded any of my work no matter how long and hard she searched for it. For the past month that school had been in session, my grades were at their all-time low and my GPA was the opposite of a sight for sore eyes. At this point, showing up to school wouldn't matter. Who would miss me while I was gone? I didn't know what was worse; the fact that I was wasting my time locked up in this prison they call High School or that if I stopped showing up, I'd be dragged back kicking and swearing in the back of my fathers squad car with my mom in the front passenger seat. So, after careful consideration, I decided I'd stay.

A deep smooth voice came over the intercom and radiated through the classroom. "Mrs. Flynn, may you pick up the phone?"

Her head, which was once down, rose at the sound of the voice spilling through the speaker. "Just a second," she called back to the voice before rolling away from her desk and standing up from the chair she sat in so comfortably just moments before. She strolled over to the phone by the very speaker that summoned her and plucked it from the wall. "Hello?" With her back to the class, she spoke in a hushed tone. "Yes," there was a pause before she responded again, "Yes. I'll send him right down. No problem." The clang of the plastic phone returning to its resting place on the wall marked the end of the clandestine conversation.

Just like I expected she approached my desk. I wasted no time in packing my things. Grabbing the blank worksheets she had handed to us after finishing the lesson and the pencil I didn't use, I carelessly slipped them into my bag. They would never be completed anyway. By that time Mrs. Flynn was by my side with a small packet and a short reading. She bent down so that our eyes met at the same level. Then she began to speak using the same tone as she had earlier when she picked up the classroom phone. "They're expecting you in the assistant principal's office." She started. "This is the homework. It's okay if you don't get to complete it, just do your best." She threw an empathetic smile my way. I took the documents she had in hand and slipped it into my bag.

"Thanks."

My peers couldn't seem to focus on the work in front of them even if their lives depended on it. All eyes were trained on me when I stood from my seat. I followed Mrs. Flynn to the front of the classroom where she let me out.

The door shut behind me as I stepped into the hallway. I didn't even have to think about where I was going. My feet kept moving and sooner than I anticipated, the destination was ahead. Just a few more steps and I'd find myself right outside of the room I've been in too many times to keep track of. Now you have two options here, I thought to myself. You can bail and no one has to know... for now. The other, you could just walk through that door and face that prick... again. My eyes followed my own hand reaching for the door and I watched as the knob twisted. The door swung open. The attention trained originally on my hand shifted past it to the shiny black shoes already in my line of sight. The hand extended in the direction of the doorknob dropped back to my side.

I scanned the figure in front of me from the bottom up. He wore black dress pants paired with a button-down white polo shirt and a black suit jacket. They say that black slims a person down, but it wasn't helping him out in the slightest bit. Mr. O'Neal was a tall man. The size of his gut was that of a full-term pregnant woman; maybe even bigger. His skin was many shades too tan, which made it hard to look at him without wanting to remove my own eyes from my sockets. He smelled like if one of those dollar stores sold colognes, combined with straight black coffee. His wispy dark hair was thinning at what I figured to be around the age of 45.