Nightmare {h.s | au}

1.15

Bennett and I sat beside each other in English. A couple of weird looks were thrown our way but it wasn't anything too horrible or I'd have moved. The information may be important but I wasn't comfortable being seen as Bennett's item. We sat a good distance apart too just to emphasize the friends factor.

But it didn't matter. People were going to talk especially when we had always given them a reason to.

Mr. Brussels waddled in and silenced the class effectively with his overbearing physique. He'd gotten straight into talking about the finer forms of sentence structure and how to make a sentence flow.

A note about Mr. Brussels: he had learned English his freshman year of high school after deciding that he'd wanted to become a teacher in the American school system because he didn't agree with how things were done in Germany-funny of him to be named Brussels when it was a place in Belgium that the Germans had invaded not once but thrice during the world wars. He was a tall man that worked out in his free time and just so happened to be the wrestling coach. There was nothing horribly important about him except for how he'd affected the lives of many of his students. He'd taught them many life lessons that were more than important.

Bennett opened up his notebook and scribbled on the page. His script wasn't as neat as Harry's and looked more like chicken scratch than handwriting, but I made no comment about how illegible it was. It took me a while to make out what it said.

What do you want to know?

I opened my own notebook from my book bag and scrawled out: Reece and Jade.

Bennett looked at me as though he couldn't believe what he had read. And I could understand that completely. There had hardly ever been a time that Reece or I had gone behind the other's back to find out information. Normally things were straight-forward and then we'd go on our way. But...I don't think I could trust Reece to tell me the truth. He didn't even seem like he was planning to tell me anything until I'd caught them red-handed.

When I looked back over, Bennett was hard at work writing. What I could see was actually legible. Quickly I looked up to Mr. Brussels who seemed too involved with talking about complex sentence structure to be paying us much attention. For all I knew, he thought we were taking notes.

Bennett sat up and tucked his pencil behind his ear to show that he had nothing more to say about the subject. I cast my eyes on his paper and forced myself to read because this felt so wrong.

Reece and Jade never really ended things, I guess. They acted like they had so people would stay out of their business. Jade didn't like the spotlight. So Reece was willing to keep the secret if it meant keeping her. That also meant he'd keep it from you. I think I'm the only one who knows.

I sat back in my seat, glaring at the page and praying it would ignite. But it didn't because I couldn't just magically set things on fire with my eyes.

But then I really sat back and thought. If Reece was willing to keep this relationship a secret, then he must love her. These weren't just random hook-ups for the hell of it. He was doing this because he was head of heels for her. That's the only logical reason I could come up with.

The picture of the delicate hand squeezing the heart came into my mind.

Reece was like Dad. Dad had his heart ripped out by our Mom. She had slowly squeezed it until it was pointless for him to even try to be in a relationship anymore. Jade could do that to him.

Jade would do that to him.

If she couldn't handle high school popularity with my brother, how was she going to handle it when he went to college for football? Would they still be together or would she cut him off because it was too much for her? How could she do this to him?