Wolf Iron

Chapter 1 / Rodney Booked

"Booked!"

A rough hand came hard and fast and knocked Rodney's binders and novels to the hallway floor. 

Laughter from all around him burned his ears and his face and he felt for a moment, like a star, ready to implode. The kids around him seemed as if planets, doomed to orbit him at every embarrassing turn, every spill, every fall. They picked their faces up from their phones and virtual LOL's became real ones, the face of all of them an indifferent 2D emoji. 

He's got absolutely no Clout Rating on Reeve whatsoever, hasn't he?

Looking down, he gathered his books as quickly as possibly and made a beeline for the loo. At least Rodney knew that he could be alone there.

He ran straight into the first stall, the one with bleach thrown on its walls because of a very nasty thing that someone had said about an Egyptian math teacher the year before. The loo was where people put things and did things they wanted no no else to see. And Rodney went there because he wanted to see no one else. 

And more often than not, and in his many sojourns to the boys' lavatory throughout the day he would bring a paperback from his favorite series of novels, The Kindread Chronicles, and get lost in the Kingdom of Edgard and its warring constituents. There he imagined himself as a knight of great renown, slaying beasts of the nation with the legendary blade of the Engraver's Severance, a sword etched with protection from the Gods and given to him by the High Blacksmith of Wymer. 

Edgard was where he could go to when things got really bad. In Edgard, there was no thought of court mandated visitation time from disinterested and conflicted parents, nor were there squabbles over petty possessions like records and antique vases. In Edgard, he could vanquish all of his foes, all of his demons, with naught but a swing of the Blade of the Gods.

Glancing at his phone, he felt like flushing the damn thing. Why have all the people insult me over the internet? he thought. Man, the bullies back in the day really had to put in their work and punch in their hours. Now they just did it with a swipe of a thumb. Effective, he thought.

I must be such a pathetic idiot he thought. I'm sure everyone saw it. Perhaps if I'm really lucky, I could at least go viral. Maybe that could be the silver lining to it all.

His tears fell to the floor silently and he made no move to stop them from reaching his lips. He absolutely hated school. He hated going to it and he hated coming from it because it just meant that he would have to go back again the next day. Another day with absolutely no friends to speak of, even though he and his mum had moved to this town almost two years prior. 

Sometimes, he would go whole days without speaking.

It was his little game, something he could do with himself to occupy his time. His teachers had learned long ago to not press him too much on matters in class and that they could rely on him to do his schoolwork. He would openly drop his head on his desk in the middle of class but the teachers had little recourse to dish out. He did his work and that was that. 

But the reason he did it was twofold. 

One: Rodney had no one to talk to.

Two: Even if he wasn't really sleeping, at least it made it so that even if the other kids were talking about him, he was asleep and no judgement would be made on his ability to confront them.

Odd bod alert: it's that Dungeons & Dragons wanker. 

I reckon his parents married at the chink-shop...

Handy Randy whose mum is a copper/ Caught her husband with another tosser. 

Rodney ripped a piece of toilet paper off and dried his face upon the sound of a door opening and unceremoniously flushed the toilet. 

Later that day, a tree fell in a forest very close to Rodney's flat. But no one was there, and so no one heard it.