Babysitting the Bad Girl's Brother: Who do you protect?

14) An Impatient Clock

Larry isn't at school.

It wasn't worrying at first, most people don't get to school as early as I had. I'd woke up early and was finally able to walk to school without an ever-present ache. The sprain was finally healed, with only some light bruising

I had first noticed the lack of a sprain when I had no issue walking around the house this morning. Mom wasn't home, as usual, work was work so I had no issue in hiding my injury. Dealing with a bit of pain to hide the truth wasn't hard, I'd been hiding the truth from my mom for ages. Her overprotective nature had sprung back to life since the whole stabbing incident and I didn't fancy her becoming as overprotective as how she had when it happened.

Did she still blame herself for my idiotic mistakes? I hoped not. But her reluctant nature was concerning. I'm still a bit surprised by how quickly she got from work after I suffered that head injury a couple of weeks ago.

Speaking of that head trauma, it seems it wasn't as bad as I first thought. The lost time period between sitting in Mr Edwin's house with her two children asleep upstairs to waking up in the school's infirmary was starting to come back. It was very strange indeed, it was as if the events were returning in a reversed and jumbled order. At first, events from the Monday of the ball hitting incident returned (like the match itself), talking to Brendan in my form room and my first introduction Caylnn when I was angry at Deroc over... something.

For whatever reason, even after I had opened up to Deroc about my personal issues, I couldn't shake this feeling of burning hatred. Whatever this deep-rooted subconscious anger I felt to Deroc was, it seemed to be coming from something between my loss of memory.

My mind was getting there, the events of the weekend before I got a ball slammed in my head were coming back; waking up annoyed, getting dressed, annoyed by something, doing my part-time job, irritated by something and falling asleep with more irritation and anger building up. I couldn't quite place it, but for some unknown reason, I had a need to check under my pillow this morning. As if my mind was telling me to find something that I couldn't quite remember seeing.

I'm getting off track. Larry. He's my focus at the moment. I'd gotten to school early today thanks to being able to walk properly without having to worry about the sprain hindering me. My shoulder was still a mess, I deemed it a risk to ride my bike. Plus, with Brendan's punch to my gut yesterday I realised just how badly damaged it my stomach was. A combination of Brendan's punch plus the bruising left by Simon and Deroc from Monday left a bluish-purple swelling. Yet, I pushed on passed the aching shoulder and severely bruised stomach.

Today's focus was Larry. He finally had the information about Figment that I needed. Getting it off him was my top priority. Unfortunately, Larry prefers to print off his information instead of leaving a 'digital footprint' as he put it. So instead of getting the file sent to me digitally, I needed to wait for a physical copy. It was annoying and I didn't fully understand what the whole 'digit footprint' thing meant, but I could tell it was some form of covering his tracks. And so, I respected his decision and waited for him to arrive.

I waited by sitting on a bench near the school's entrance, in order to catch him first thing in the morning. So, I waited...

And waited.

Tapping my foot to the beat of an impatient clock, I took a huge sigh of annoyance.

I hate waiting, everyone does. Waiting in a queue at a theme park or at a shop, waiting for someone to text back and waiting for a guy who had potentially an assortment of intel on an enigma: all of those types of waiting are quite annoying indeed.