There's No I in Story

Stanley

The Hero was on her way to escape the throng of students that was a flood between the hallway's walls. They were the knotted muscles of a snake, the waves of a tempestuous ocean. The Hero trudged onward doggedly, jostled from every angle, head down to better shut out the chaos around her. The screams of the Marked sounded around her, echoed by the Seconders' calls. They shut her out as well; who was she to break the unwarranted shouts and sobs of the alphas? And so the Hero was rendered alone, though perhaps there was a part of her who preferred to be alone as opposed to strangled by the snake wrapped around her.

Stanley appeared to her left, strangled by the snake. He glanced at her over the shoulders of the Marked, between the snake's scales, and told her between students, "Hey, so the track team's gathered by the... well, by the track, and Marco asked me to go there... for a few hours after school, after the buses leave, so-"

"Okay," the Hero snapped, vexed both by the elongated class they had just suffered through and the utter monotony of Stanley's speech. "You won't be on the bus. Cool."

"Yeah," the Seconder added, apparently unable to catch the venomous tone of the Hero's words through the snarls of the beasts around them. He shoved past a student who was short enough to be swept away by the crowd, paused to get around the Hero, then dashed off down a second hallway that was not as crowded. He glanced back and called, "Bye!" The Hero turned away.

However, just before she got to the gallery hallway, a flash of black from Stanley's backpack caught her eye as he turned to leave. The past years had rooted deep throughout her a coherent sense of motherly tendency to care for Stanley whenever he moved too fast to do so alone. And so the Hero swung out of the fray of the Marked, took a few steps, then bent down and gently took the folder from the floor. Reason told her that the Seconder would not hear her even when she called as he shot down the hallway, backpack open, but another part of her grumbled that to have run after Stanley would have been to waste treasured seconds. Yet the Hero knew that her morals always won out over her reason, and so, after a moment, she darted off after Stanley.

The fray was molasses throughout the gallery hallway, where the Seconder turned to depart the school at the end of the passage. The Hero followed, curses that would have broken her morals trapped on her tongue. The Marked flashed by her, and pushes showered down upon her from everywhere as shouts rang throughout the hallway. She caught only subtle photos taken between the shoulders of the students around her: the Seconder's neck, the Seconder's head, the Seconder's back. He dodged through the students, accustomed to the swarm, and though the Hero was as well, she could not seem to make the length between herself and Stanley shorten.

When they eventually reached the matted concrete that bordered the school, out the smudged glass doors, the Hero was able to make her way toward the Seconder through the newborn fractures woven throughout the student body. Stanley's footsteps matched those of the crowd, and thus he went on, clueless but slower than the Hero. She had almost come close enough that she would have dared to shout and wave the folder above her head, but at that moment the Seconder chose to deter from the path and move out of the crowd around the corner of the wall that protruded from the school. That wall blocked off a grand maze of bolts and metal yarn that helped to regulate the school's system. An exasperated groan was all that escaped the Hero before she made her way after Stanley.

The Seconder was now alone, and the Hero swooped to the corner of the wall to stay unseen. Wonders repeatedly swung around her head: What was Stanley up to? And who had he just encountered? Who was she, and why was she-

The Hero's thoughts suddenly all fled to the grave. The student and Stanley were close enough as to cause the deep, dreadful awareness that they were attached to one another. The Hero could not draw her thoughts any further than that, but the scene made them transparent: the two hugged, and then the other student leaned dependently upon Stanley's shoulder. Her warmth for the Seconder was grossly exaggerated, and the Hero found a snarl curled upon her face. So Stanley really was part of the others now.