Emerson didn’t have anything to say after that. Instead, he changed the topic to what I’d been reading – yes, he’d caught me not paying attention. But by the time he’d driven me home, I’d asked him whether my being there meant he could “remember” tonight. He did. Which meant going to his games was going to become a regular thing for me. Thank god I had a load of books downloaded to my Kindle.
I decided I much preferred hanging out watching Emerson’s non-game practice than when he was playing against another school. Mostly, because I’d found a way to entertain myself whilst still being engaged with the “game”.
Besides the odd-girlfriend of those playing, I was the only one in the stands – Jenny was at her many afterschool clubs, so she wasn’t there to support Robbie. Since there were so few of us watching, like when Emerson had overheard me mumbling to myself when he’d been in gym class, he could equally hear me now.
I figured one way to even the playing field – literally – for the non-vamps on his team would be to distract the guy with preternatural senses and see if he could perform under pressure… or annoyance, as it were. My aim was by the end of practice to get Emerson to fail getting at least one homerun or miss a swing.
It took until the second hour of the practice for me to realise that the only way to distract Emerson was by either being highly offensive to the vampire species, or to tease him about how he said he liked me. It was a good guess since being teased about my crush annoyed the hell out of me, that I figured it might affect him, too.
Actively flirting with him, sex-talk, and teasing him about all the things I bet he’d like to do with me, were the most successful distractions. By the end of practice, I could officially say I had met my target. Emerson’d had the worst practice of his vampiric life.
‘When’s your next doctor’s appointment?’ Emerson’s coach asked him as he came out the locker room, walking towards me fresh from the shower.
‘Next week,’ Emerson answered, ruffling his wet hair, sending a spray of water into the air.
He had his bag slung over his shoulder and waved when he spotted me. He very much wanted to flip me off instead, but with his coach there, he wouldn’t dare.
The coach said a few more things before Emerson reached me, and went off to annoy some other kid who’d been slacking during practice.
‘Doctors? What was that about?’ I asked.
Emerson shrugged. ‘I needed an excuse for why I missed so many after school practices. Most guys wouldn’t get away with it and would be off the team. I used my condition.’
‘Ah, the serious anaemia and bad mental health,’ I said. Vampirism was certainly a big setback, health wise.
‘Yes. Coach thinks I was messing up today because I was running out of meds or needed a new prescription.’
‘You really should be more dedicated to your game,’ I teased him.
‘How did I not realise that you’d manage to turn such a nice suggestion of support into annoying the shite out of me, love?’
‘I don’t know. A massive oversight on your behalf, really.’
Friday morning was just one of those days when I woke up and knew that nothing was going to go right for me. Emerson had practice again tonight so I would be having to watch through that before I would be able to get a lift home. It was also the day before Halloween, so most students were attending school in costume – though why I had no idea. I didn’t abide by the usual social rules, so I’d opted to not bother.
I could safely admit that my bad mood waking was entirely down to my dream the previous night, which had focused on how close Charlotte and Emerson had been in the past. I knew it was all fiction, but that still didn’t mean the jealousy I felt watching them… be intimate didn’t burn me up inside.
‘Are you okay? You look a little ill,’ Gi said as we made our way to the auditorium for lunch. I’d had a free period, and classes by myself until last period so I hadn’t seen anyone from the AA Team until now.
‘Just tired.’
‘I can’t believe you’re actually committing to go to all his games,’ Gi said, assuming that I was tired from getting home late each night this week due to Emerson’s baseball games and then running lines with the AA Team on the phone and doing my homework.
‘High school is draining when you have friends,’ I said, deflecting the real reason I was tired. ‘You should have warned me about that when you asked me to become part of your group.’
‘I’ll be sure to warn the next potential member of our very taxing and time-consuming demands,’ Gi joked.
We never made it to the theatre. We were stopped by a teacher on the way there.
‘Olivia Morgan. You’re wanted in the principal’s office.’
Going completely on automatic, since this was one in a billion times over the course of my education I’d been asked to head to the principal’s office, I followed, no questions asked. For Gi, she didn’t exactly go quietly.
‘Why? What has she done?’
‘Gi… this doesn’t really concern you,’ the teacher said. She said her name familiarly enough that I guessed Gi must have been in one of her classes.
‘Miss Armstrong,’ Gi said. ‘Come on.’ In all my years I’d never seen two words be so effective. Somehow, it was all Gi needed.
Like how easily she had won me over into her friendship group, the teacher not only allowed Gi to tag along as I was escorted back into the main school building, but explained that there had been some damage to school property and a witness had come forward to name me as the culprit.
‘That’s not possible. Liv has been in class all day,’ Gi said.
For once, she wasn’t lying. I had. And I even had my teachers as witnesses. Bar the hour free period where I’d hidden myself away in the back of the library… that missing chunk probably wouldn’t go down well. Unless the librarian happened to remember me, though I very much doubted that.
When we got to the principal’s office, the teacher knocked on the door. It was opened by the vice-principal. I was let in. Gi wormed her way through, too. Not letting me go through this alone.
Inside the room, Emma, and the cheerleading coach (I didn’t know her name, but she was in her mid-thirties and looked like I imagined Emma would in another eighteen years) sat opposite the principal. The vice-principal went to the chair in the corner of the room.
‘Miss Morgan. Please have a seat,’ the principal said. Her tone was fair and calm, but this was already a done deal. They’d already decided I was guilty, regardless of the facts.
‘Miss Kushieda, is there a reason you’re here?’ Principal Raasch asked.
‘Yes. I’m here in Liv’s defence.’
‘This isn’t a trial,’ the cheer coach said.
‘I’m not playing her attorney,’ Gi turned to the cheer coach. ‘I’m here to prove that whatever Emma here is accusing her of is a lie.’
The cheer coach pursed her lips, whilst Emma just looked smug sat in the chair. As soon as Principal Raasch’s attention was on her, she turned sullen. Oh, this was a set up a mile away. Anyone could see that.
‘As you are aware, the Pep room was found to be vandalized this morning-’ Principal Raasch started. I didn’t let her finish.
‘No,’ I said.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘No, I wasn’t aware that the “Pep room” was vandalized. What the hell’s a Pep room?’
Gi smiled at the principal. ‘Can we start from the beginning assuming Liv is innocent until proving guilty?’
I had no idea what it was about Gi, but the principal nodded, like this seventeen-year-old Cabbage Patch Kid actually had some authority here.
‘School property has been damaged. A specific area believed to be chosen to send a message to the cheerleading squad. Emma and a few members of the cheer team believe that this was done by you, Olivia.’
‘They don’t believe it,’ the cheer coach said. ‘My girls said that they saw her in the Pep room.’
The principal tu
rned her attention to Emma. She nodded, dejectedly, like she was so ashamed to have to admit that she’d seen me at the crime scene. Oh, boo-freaking-hoo, you lying bitch.
‘It’s true. We didn’t put two and two together until we saw the damage that had been done. No one goes there, you see, so it was easy to recall that we’d seen her skulking around that area. And, Olivia does have a… history of this sort of thing.’
I stared daggers at Emma. She didn’t smirk, not whilst the eyes of the staff were on her, but I knew she wanted to. I also knew exactly what she was referring to – what she’d no doubt read in my file that she had stolen from her dad.
Back in my last year of middle school, I’d had a detention which consisted of picking up all the flyers and trash after a basketball match. I was the only one in the gym when the fire had started. Some fuse had shorted in, ironically, the escape sign that lit up over the fire doors. The one spark as it popped, like something out of Final Destination, had landed in the open trash bag of posters and shit I’d collected and immediately caught.
I hadn’t noticed the flames until I smelled the smoke and saw the fire trying to move up towards the banners which had been partially taken down at the end of the season. When I did, I ran to the fire extinguisher rather than just to escape. No one ever taught me how to use one, just like no one seemed to check the expiration date on them. By the time I’d given up, the fire had already moved onto the walls and benches.
Death, as good a friend as ever, decided to help by jamming the door on the opposite side of the gym. A door which had never jammed before in its life. I’d used the line marker machine, which they kept in the storage cupboard, to attempt to break down the door. When that didn’t work, I smashed the windows (even though you were advised not to do that in a fire due to the increase of oxygen causing a flash fire – it wasn’t like I had any other option of escape) and had to use one of the gym ropes to crawl up to the high windows and get out.
For some reason, probably my reputation as a bad kid and troublemaker, the school had assumed that it had been arson, not an accident. Especially since I “made it out perfectly okay” – if you disregarded the smoke inhalation and various gouges on my arms from broken glass. I had been quickly expelled from school and had already moved on to my next foster home by the time the apology letter came after the insurance company had discovered the faulty exit sign had been the cause, and not teenage angst. Not apologetic enough to have them remove the charge of “arson” from my casefile in the system, though.
Principal Raasch tapped a finger on the file open in front of her. My transcripts. It was thicker than most people’s since it had my past guidance councillors’ notes, records from each school I’d been to, foster care notes and a list of my suspensions and expulsions. There was no such thing as a “permanent record”, and I was never more glad of it than when it came to the dirt that I’d accumulated over my high school career.
Principal Raasch briefly relayed how it might seem that Emma was right considering my expulsion for something quite like this. They’d assumed in that high school I had been angry at the basketball team jocks and that’s why I’d set the fire. I mean, the team sucked balls and was never going to get anywhere in the league, but there was no actual reason why I would hate them. It was them just grasping at straws for why the loner kid would do anything. Like usual, they’d just assumed that the unpopular kid would have it out for the popular guys because they were jealous.
‘That’s not proof of anything she did now,’ Gi said, defending me.
‘Can anyone explain to me why Miss Kushieda is still here? I really don’t see how it’s proper-’ Gi didn’t even let the cheer coach finish her question.
‘Regardless of what Liv might have done in past schools, here she’s been nothing but a great student. She attends all her classes; she’s part of the school play and she supports school sports – she’s been to every baseball practice and game this week.’
‘Please. That girl is anything but a model student. She has been both the cause of a fight between Emerson Lark and Brett Cavanaugh and was given a week’s suspension after assaulting Emma last month,’ the cheer coach said.
‘Exactly,’ Emma said. ‘She has a history with hating the athletics teams – and pitting baseball and football players against each other is just a bonus. She has it out for me and my cheerleaders. There’s a reason she chose the Pep room.’
‘Oh, for hell’s sake, will someone please tell me what the hell a Pep room is?’
Emma turned her phone around to show a picture of a completely trashed room. Cheer outfits were strewn across the floor in tatters. The walls, painted in the school’s colours, had picture frames of all the past cheer and football teams. There was a display case in the middle of the room with trophies, but the case itself had spiderweb fractures across the surface. The floor was littered with broken glass from the frames on the wall, the smaller display cases, and shredded bits of paper.
‘I still don’t get what I’m looking at,’ I said, looking up from the phone.
‘It’s one of the rooms in the rec-wing,’ Gi said. ‘Doesn’t really matter,’ she muttered under her breath to me. Yeah, didn’t I know it.
Gi addressed the principal and the others in the room. ‘Lots of people don’t like the Cheer crowd. That’s not a specific motivation for why Liv would do something like this,’ Gi said. ‘And Liv hasn’t got any problem with the cheerleaders, just Emma. Since you stole her clothes – which is why she retaliated by hitting you. She hasn’t been near you since you stopped antagonising her.
‘I think it’s more suspicious that the cheer uniforms destroyed are your old summer kits you already tried to petition to have updated. Plus, someone new to the school wouldn’t know about the importance of the Pep room since it’s been shut for remodelling these past couple of years.’
‘That was clearly an act,’ the cheer coach said.
Gi continued like she’d not been interrupted. ‘Liv’s only interaction with the Pep room was when you locked her in there so you could steal her car.’
I edited out the damage from the picture and could vaguely recall what it had looked like before. Huh. So, I did know what the Pep room was, after all. Well, technically I had damaged one of the things in that room when I’d broken the window. But not to the extent that I was being accused of.
‘Steal her car,’ the Principal Raasch said. ‘Now that’s a very serious accusation-’
‘Just like accusing Liv of vandalism. Only my accusation is true.’
Emma’s mouth hung slightly open. She closed it once, then opened it another time, but no sound came out. Gi usually ignored everything that Emma put her through, but like when the teacher had tried to suspend Emerson for fighting with Brett, she wasn’t going to back down.
‘Do you have any proof, Miss Kushieda, to back up your claims?’
‘No more proof than Emma has of it being Liv who trashed the Pep room,’ Gi said. ‘Just that Emma has a history of antagonising Liv, and she happened to be absent when her car went missing and locked her in the Pep room around the same time.’
‘It seems to me,’ the vice-principal said, standing up. ‘That there is a lot of drama between these girls, a lot of accusations, but not a lot of evidence. As much as we’d like to get to the bottom of this, until we have more than hearsay, we can’t act on any of these claims.’
I had a feeling, now that it went beyond school property with Gi mentioning my car being stolen, the staff were leaning more towards dropping their “Liv definitely did it” case, since it would mean bringing in the police – who was literally the parent of the girl being accused of grand theft auto – to investigate.
Personally, if it wasn’t Officer Barnett coming into the school, I would welcome the police investigating the shit out of this so they could have the proof that this was just Emma’s ridiculous attempt of getting back at me.
‘You can’t be serious-?’ the cheer coach began.
‘Coach Milne,’ the vice-principal said, ‘I think perhaps it’s time you take Emma back to class. You, too, Gi.’
‘Liv-?’ Gi asked, both as a question to myself, and the principal. Whether I was okay defending myself, and why I wasn’t dismissed, too.
‘We simply want a private word, Miss Kushieda,’ Principal Raasch said.
I nodded, telling Gi it was alright. I would have been fine handling this on my own if she hadn’t been here – but I had to admit that Gi’s charm had certainly swayed the staff here like I wouldn’t have been able to.
After half an hour I was eventually dismissed. I didn’t bother going back to class as last period had almost finished. It was probably easier to catch up with Emerson when he turned up for baseball practice.
I wasn’t suspended since both the principal and vice-principal agreed there really wasn’t any proof besides hearsay, but I was on a “final warning”. The next time they did have proof of me breaking the rules, I wasn’t just going to be suspended. I’d be expelled. I suggested that they bring in the police to investigate who’d trashed the Pep room since vandalism was a crime and all, and they’d assured me they had put campus security on the case and were very invested in finding out the identity of the perpetrator. I just knew they still believed it was me, even if Gi had convinced them not to push it.
I waited outside the boy’s locker rooms for Emerson. I was going to ask if we could leave practice a little early. I wasn’t going to bring up Emma or the threat of expulsion (Gi would no doubt be informing the group chat as we spoke), but I just wasn’t up for slogging through hours of mindless baseball. Sometimes he liked to stay for an extra half-hour, and I could possibly convince him to skip that. But he never showed. I was already in an awful mood, the last thing I wanted was to be stuck waiting here for ages. I only started to really get annoyed when it began to rain. I put my hood up, but was drenched quickly.
Robbie nearly ran past me in an attempt to get out of the rain, before he went in to change for practice, then spotted me and skidded to a halt.
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