Don't Tell My Brother

Chapter 55 - Autopsy

Lucas was ten minutes late to school. Usually, this would've been distressing, but he barely blinked when he was handed his tardy slip, drifting into his homeroom and sitting down at whatever desk was available. He passed the lesson in a daze, a confusing mix of worry and bright, bubbling happiness keeping his mind off whatever his homeroom teacher was trying to tell them. He barely registered the people beside him. He needed to think this through, make sense of it, make a plan, anything to stop the constant buzz of panic humming in his head.

Somehow, it seemed, the rumour had gotten around that Damien was gay. If Mark, who went to an entirely different school, knew about it, then chances were everyone at Damien's school knew too. And if their reaction was anything like Leon's...well, Lucas had already bitten his thumbnail down to where the skin was red and raw just thinking about it. Maybe things would be okay, like Mark said. People wouldn't care, would they? Surely they had more important things to worry about than whatever Damien's sexuality was?

Still, he couldn't forget the way Leon's face had twisted in disgust. Couldn't stop thinking about the ugly words and raised fists and Damien sitting alone, surrounded by silence and ever-watchful eyes, picking at his food in the corner of the cafeteria and— Lucas checked his phone. No messages. Nothing yet. Damien said he'd text him if something went wrong, and Lucas didn't want to be overbearing, but his fingers itched to text him every time he opened his phone.

Damien loved him. That's what he'd said. Love you. So casually, as if it wasn't anything life-changing at all. Which maybe it wasn't. Bye. Love you. So casually, it could've been an accident. Maybe he didn't mean it, hadn't thought about it, was probably not texting because he'd made a terrible mistake...no. Lucas shook his head. That was ridiculous. Even so, his mind kept ticking, running through every possible scenario, conjuring up the best and the worst and everything in between.

Lucas was so caught up in his own head that he didn't notice the stares until he entered his Literature class. As soon as he opened the door, a handful of heads turned. Some girl, Alison, nudged her friend. Jamie in the front row glanced his way, and then furiously began texting someone. Lucas took a deep breath. He'd gotten so used to being invisible that even these few eyes felt like an autopsy. Before Lucas could find somewhere to sit (annoyingly, neither Alex nor Mona took AP English Literature), somebody grabbed his arm.

He jumped a little, and his panic didn't abate when he saw who it was. Mallory's shell-pink, oval-shaped nails were digging into his arm, and before he could protest she was dragging him into a seat beside her.

"Sit."

Lucas frowned, too confused to be annoyed yet. "What? Why?"

"Just do it. I need to talk to you." She sounded impatient, as if any question to her authority was a waste of time.

He didn't have many other options. Making sure to frown at her, he sat. There was a twinge of pain when he did, but he ignored it.

If he'd hoped class would've provided an opportunity to ignore whatever it was Mallory wanted, Lucas was mistaken. Their Literature teacher, Mr. Swain, was a mercurial man. Lessons with him would sometimes be impassioned rants on the texts they were studying (and some they weren't), where he'd pace back and forth and draw complicated diagrams on the board to illustrate the social hierarchy of Imperial Russia and throw his whiteboard marker at students who said something he found particularly stupid. Other times they were 'quiet reading lessons', where he seemed either too tired or too bored to teach them anything, and left them with a couple of chapters and instructions to annotate anything they found interesting, busying himself with his own book and the flask he kept in his jacket pocket.

Unfortunately for Lucas, today's lesson was one of the latter. Mallory also happened to be one of Mr. Swain's favourite students: she had an opinion on everything, even books she hadn't read, and although she got the marker thrown at her a fair few times she was always ready to answer again, or start an argument when somebody disagreed with her interpretation. Nobody batted an eye as she closed her copy of their current text, Jane Eyre, and leaned over to speak to him.