“I said I’m fine,” She said in her most polite tone. She didn’t want another lecture about what she was doing wrong from any of her parents. Danny fell silent and muttered a “goodnight” to his daughter.
Tremaine made sure her doors were locked shut. She grabbed a curtain rod that still needed to be put up, and laid it next to her as she lay on her bed.
Chapter Seven
Tremaine rode her bike as fast as she could on her way to school the next morning. She left her house, assuring her parents that she would be fine on her own. She almost crashed into the side of a car in her rush. She feared that the supposed Goatman would jump out of the woods she traveled beside. She was relieved when she made it to the school in one piece.
“Tremaine!” Hannah greeted her by their lockers.
“Hey, Hannah.”
“I know you’re probably freaked out,” she said, “But now you know they exist! And I didn’t even have to persuade you like all my other friends!”
“So I guess your brothers told you about it,” Tremaine said. “I’m glad you’re so… happy.”
“I’m sensing sarcasm.”
“You sensed right,” Tremaine said, as she opened her locker, “I ain’t happy that he came into my room and then attacked me when I took his picture.”
“You came at him with a knife, though!” Hannah said. “That must have been epic beyond belief!”
Tremaine was silent.
Hannah added, “We’ll catch the Goatman. Skyler Hornbostel... that’s its name, right? That’s what my brothers wrote in the report. We’ve been trying to find his kind for a while now.”
“I hope you do,” Tremaine looked into her locker and grabbed a few books, “I just want to forget about it.”
“Sure,” Hannah agreed.
They went into class a little bit late. Mrs. Lopez gave them a stern look, and the girls hurried to her seat. Once they sat, Mrs. Lopez held up a stack of papers to the class, “Pop quiz.”
The class let out a collective groan.
“Don’t worry, it’s not on the first unit. It’s just to test how well you read my requirements on the syllabus,” Mrs. Lopez said as she separated the papers and gave each column of the desks a stack to pass back. Tremaine started to write her name at the top.
“If I hear one peep out of any of you, your grade will be an immediate zero,” Mrs. Lopez warned. She took a seat at her desk.
Tremaine was in the middle of her test when she felt her arm starting to tire from writing. It was cramping up, too. She flexed her arm and then her hand, making sure not to make a big scene of it. She was one of the first ones finished and leaned back in her seat with her paper turned over.
That’s when she saw it.
A purple, unnatural looking snake coiled around her left arm. It looked like it was tightening around her limb, trying to squeeze her dry despite its small size. Tremaine shrieked, “The hell!?” and stood from her desk, attacking the snake on her arm.
“Miss Boppel!” Mrs. Lopez stood from her desk.
“There’s a snake!” Tremaine shoved the snake off her arm. By the time Mrs. Lopez and the students looked down at the area Tremaine pointed at, the snake was nowhere to be found. Hannah looked under her desk, raising her feet into the book holder under her seat just in case there was one slithering around.
Mrs. Lopez wrote down something on a yellow slip of paper. “Come here.” Tremaine approached her desk with her book bag. “You will be spending your break after lunch in the detention hall. Show this to the secretary up front.”
“That’s not fair,” Tremaine said. “There was a snake; I swear to God!”
“Do not swear to God,” Mrs. Lopez scolded. “I do not appreciate students who curse in my classroom. You can sit out in the hallway for the remainder of the quiz. You will be getting a big, fat zero.”
Tremaine snatched the slip of paper from Mrs. Lopez’s hand and stormed out. She shut the door quietly and sat down on the tile outside of the classroom. She kept glancing at her arm, expecting to see a snake there. She saw the snake, but she never felt it. It was like a vision. After ten minutes of sitting in the empty hallway, she stood and started to walk down the hallway.
She came to a fork in the hallway. The left turn was a maze of high school classrooms, and the right turn led to a few classrooms and a pair of doors. They led out to a balcony and a set of stairs.
She backed up a few steps and looked down the right turn of the hall. Standing in front of a fire alarm was a girl a little older than Tremaine. Her white skin was tanned, and she wore jean shorts and a t-shirt like she was about to go to the beach. As Tremaine crept closer, the more she prayed it wasn’t who she thought it was. No snake could scare her more than the girl who turned around from facing the wall. Tremaine curled her fists.
New Jersey, last September. Tremaine and Vito entered the English class, finding a few friends she had in common. The middle school was merged with the high school, to cut down on costs. The classrooms sounded like a busy bar instead of a place of learning. As the overstressed and underpaid teacher tried to quiet the class, Tremaine turned away from her friends to see what other familiar faces were in the new class. Of course, she recognized most of the students from last year, except for the few girls and one boy in the back. Due to them being a bit bigger and more fashionable, she knew they were older students who had to retake a lower skill class.
Robbi Sabatelli was there. They locked eyes for a moment, and then Tremaine adverted her gaze. She was a relative, in a way. Her mother’s sister married Robbi’s brother, and every time the couple had a party, their daughter’s birthday, or an anniversary, Robbi was there with her big hair and red lips. “Her family is the ultimate definition of trash,” Tremaine remembered Josey gossiping to Danny. Robbi would not acknowledge her presence or even look in her direction during family parties. They were small things, but big enough to get under Tremaine’s skin.
Robbi turned to her friends. As older students, they all claimed the back corners of the classroom. “You see that girl with the brown, curly hair?” They nodded. “She’s my kind of relative. She’s a real bitch, you know.”
“She is?” one of her girlfriends whispered.
“Uh-huh,” Robbi whispered back. She pointed to Vito, who sat beside Tremaine, “And her friend there. He’s gay.”
“Who, the other girl?” her guy friend said, “That’s hot.”
“No, the guy.”
“That’s disgusting,” the girl crinkled her nose, “How do you know?”
“It’s pretty obvious,” Robbi rolled her eyes. The upperclassmen chatted some more about it before falling silent. Robbi leaned over and added as an after thought, “I bet Tremaine is gay too. She’s into boxing, you know.”
“You think?” The girl said.
“Oh, yeah,” Robbi said, “That can be the only reason they’re thick as thieves, those two.”
The teacher glared at the group of sophomores huddled in the back. They ceased their conversation. Tremaine didn’t hear what they were talking about, but she sensed they were talking about her. She could feel it. She couldn’t be sure, though. I'm just insecure, Tremaine thought. In the coming weeks, she forgot about them.
A couple of weeks later, the class was louder than usual. The teacher had her back faced to the class. Her eyes were brimmed with tears as she wrote on the marker board. The class was still talking after she yelled at them for being too loud. She clenched the marker and then threw it down to the floor. She spun around, “I didn’t get my doctoral degree so I could come to this school to teach you monsters! I’m getting the principal!” and she stormed out of the classroom. The whole class laughed.
Robbi took this opportunity to strike. She pulled up a picture of a half-naked male model on her phone. She held it up, “Hey, Tremaine!” Said girl turned around. “Can you ask Vito if he likes this picture?”
Vito bit on his lip. He met Tremaine’s eyes. She shook her head at him, and then glared b
ack at Robbi. “Shut the hell up, Robbi.”
“One more thing,” Robbi brought her phone back to her and typed away in a search engine. She now had up a picture of a slim and gorgeous bikini model, “Do you like this picture?”
She thought of Vito. She could just turn around in her seat, ignore a few more insults from Robbi, and forget about it within a couple months. Vito needs justice, Tremaine decided. Robbi couldn’t get away with embarrassing Vito like that, especially when he didn’t retort anything back. She would probably get another detention by the time this was over, but after the numbers of punishments she’s had, they were nothing to her.
“I sure do,” Tremaine said. Some of the class was listening in, including her friends.
“Ew, you do?” Robbi said. “Do you like girls?”
“Maybe,” Tremaine said with a smirk.
“Well, if you do,” Robbi clicked off her phone, “Don’t hit on me, please.” The class laughed.
“Oh, you don’t have to worry,” Tremaine said, “I wouldn’t want to, anyway.” Tremaine heard some boys make an “oh” sound. It only encouraged her, “Gaudy jewelry and nails as fake as your eyelashes… not my type.”
“The hell you say?” Robbi growled. She was taking off her hoop earrings.
Nearly the whole class gasped, laughed, and some clapped. Tremaine regretted picking on Robbi’s appearance, for it wasn’t her style, yet it was all she had if she wanted to get the better of her.
“I think you heard me.”
“This bitch!” Robbi slapped her earrings on her girlfriend’s desk. Tremaine stood up in defense as Robbi rushed down the aisle. Robbi grabbed Tremaine’s hair by her side and started hitting her in the head. Some boys gathered around, hollering. The students near Tremaine scrambled away as Robbi continued her attack. Tremaine grabbed onto Robbi’s wrist as she held her hair. She brought back her fist and used her training to send a hard punch to Robbi’s gut. Within seconds, the principal and a male teacher were pulling them apart.
“Robbi?” Tremaine answered in fear. She looked exactly like she did in a picture that was given to her. Robbi’s brother gave Tremaine and Josey copies of their household pictures for their own home. There was only one appearance of Robbi in a picture with her other cousins. Tremaine had scribbled over her face with a black pen. She was wearing the same clothes in the picture that she was wearing now, even though they were inappropriate for the weather.
Robbi raised an eyebrow, but stayed standing in front of the fire alarm, “I know what you did, you little bitch.”
“What are you talking about?” Tremaine tried to play dumb, “How are you here?”
“The glitter in all my drawers,” Robbi said, ignoring Tremaine’s second question, “You thought you could just ruin half my wardrobe and get away with it? Go off to this little island and live without paying for what you did?”
“I didn’t do anything!” Tremaine lied, “How the hell did you get here?”
“That’s not what you should be worrying about.”
“Did you seriously pay for a ferry or get a plane ticket to this island, just so that you could confront me?” Tremaine asked.
“I’m here to get even, just like we did at the beginning of the school year.” Tremaine expected her to grab the side of her head, tightening her hand around her curls. Instead, she oddly stayed in the same space but brought up her leg for a kick like she was a martial arts master. Before Robbi even had time to make contact with her, Tremaine brought back her fist and hurled it towards Robbi’s face.
By the time Tremaine launched her fist, Robbi was gone. Her fist met the glass fire alarm the older girl was formerly standing in front of. Tremaine screamed in pain as her fist slammed into the button, and the glass shattered. Her leather glove protected her fist from the shards of glass, but her knuckles still felt the force of the metal.
“Robbi?” Tremaine spun around. After a delayed few seconds, the alarm started to ring throughout the entire school, and high school classes started to shuffle out of the classrooms. The middle school went out their own emergency doors.
Tremaine stepped to the side, looking around for a place to hide. She felt a hand on her shoulder and jumped. She turned around to see her history teacher looking down at her. “Miss Boppel? Did you do this?”
Tremaine sighed, and lowered her head.
Chapter Eight
Detention at this school was ten times worse than the detentions back home. In New Jersey, Tremaine would walk into the assigned detention room and join some of her friends in the back. The teacher assigned to looking over the delinquents would plug music into her ears and grade assignments as they goofed off.
The afterschool detention at the island’s school could not be more different. Only one other student was in there, and he was at the board. The teacher assigned to detention was in front of Tremaine in an instant. He plopped a piece of chalk in her hand, “You’re the young lady that punched the fire alarm, correct?”
He didn’t wait for her to answer. He pointed to the right end of the chalkboard, “I want you to write, quote, I will not hit the fire alarm when there is no fire, end quote, over and over again in the smallest print possible and you can leave when you have filled up your side of the board. Questions?”
“Yeah,” Tremaine held up the chalk “Have you guys not heard of dry erase boards?”
The other student snickered. “Get to work, Miss Boppel,” the teacher sat down at his desk. Tremaine started at the top and started to write the phrase over and over again. Her arm was tired by the time she wrote the tenth sentence. Tremaine took a small break but pretended as if she was still writing. She looked up at her work and noticed one sentence amiss.
If you don’t want detention again, it read, then meet me outside by the exit door of the seventh-grade classroom. Tremaine read it over again and then erased it. She rewrote her original sentence, and then an hour later, finished. She left and went to her locker. She put on her leather jacket and scarf, her stomach tightening as she was about to meet with her ex-neighbor.
He wants revenge, Tremaine thought as she slid on her gloves, or he’s trying to get my attention in a very cruel way. She didn’t have a weapon on her, but what she did have was a pen. She slipped it into her jacket pocket, just in case.
Tremaine walked outside of the school and went to the side of the school building. She paused for a moment, hesitating. She pulled out her phone and texted Hannah; “The creature you’re trying to catch told me to meet him outside of the seventh-grade exit door.”
“I’ll let my brothers know,” she texted back minutes later.
Tremaine slowly walked to the seventh-grade exit door. Each middle school classroom included one, in the case of an emergency. The high school section of the building didn’t have them, because their classrooms were too far off of the ground.
The memory of the earlier event made her blood boil. She picked up her pace to meet with the creature that ruined her day and her reputation. She hadn’t even been here a full two weeks, and her name was being said in whispers not only in the middle school but in the high school as well. She could probably imagine what they were saying about her after the snake incident.
She approached the door, and then looked around at her surroundings. The building and the door faced a forest, in which Tremaine entered. Walking through the woods alone like this was a new experience. She hated feeling the urge to look over her shoulder every time she heard the snap of a branch. She stopped when she was covered with shadows.
“Hello?” a meek voice said. Tremaine jumped at the voice.
Skyler Hornbostel came into view. He looked the same as when Tremaine last saw him, except for the fact that the skin beneath his eyes had darkened, and his luggage was gone, “Miss me?”
“Considering that you’ve been stalking me for the entire day with your apparitions or whatever,” said Tremaine, “no, I haven’t.”
“Don’t be so salty,” whined Skyler, almost playfully.
“I was just trying to get your attention. I figured if I scared you a couple of times, then you’d listen to me. Besides, what you deal with in the school walls,” he pointed to the building. It was far off now, “is in no comparison to what I have to deal with… which gets me to my main point-"
“Deal with?” Tremaine laughed, “I had a snake coil around my arm, you did an apparition of my worst enemy, my arm is still numb from writing on the board in detention, and not to mention the fact that you broke into my house after you sent all those creepy messages!? What do you have to deal with?”
“Hm, I don’t know,” Sky put a finger to his chin. “I ran around for a full twelve hours, your friend’s brothers coming this close,” he made a pinch with his thumb and index finger, “to catching me. When I finally lost them, I went to a barn and slept a good hour and a half before I heard the owner of the barn shouting at me to get lost. I even forgot my stuff.”
“Oh, so you want me to feel sorry for you?”
“I was hoping so,” Sky said. Unlike the night he was in her room, there was barely any spunk or vitality. He looked like he could barely keep his head up.
“Well, I don’t,” Tremaine folded her arms.
“Need I remind you, darling, that you were the one who started this.”
“Don’t call me ‘darling,'” said Tremaine, “And no, I didn’t. You were the one being anti-social.”
Sky scoffed, “I tried talking to you after you invaded my house, but then you got the hunters involved.”
“As was in my right, as someone who felt threatened!”
Sky opened his mouth to say something, but then instead sighed. He pinched his brow, “We can’t argue all day like this.” He looked to Tremaine, locking eyes with her, “I’m sorry about my apparitions. I’m sorry about Robbi. I got her from this family picture that was in your room. What a jerk, right?” Sky laughed, but Tremaine didn’t.
“Get to what you want from me.”
Samhain Island (Episode One) Page 7