FLOOD [Pokémon]

Chapter 53

DARWIN

Friday, April 13, 2018

I barely got a wink of sleep Thursday night, and when Friday morning dawned, the bathroom mirror showed me someone ghoulish and half-alive.

I tried to clean myself up by taking a shower and scrubbing some life back into my face, but it didn't work: when I went into the kitchen to pack my lunchbox, I caught Mom and Grandpa Jon both staring at me, Mom with puzzlement, Grandpa Jon with a mixture of anxiety and deep concern.

Mom, who was making coffee, eventually said, "What's wrong?"

"Nothing." Even without Berechiah's compulsion keeping me silent, I wouldn't know where to begin with this one. "Don't bother me," I snapped when she went to say something else.

She'd raised a brow.

I was like that for a good stretch of the day: hot-blooded, uncharacteristically cranky, and beat to the bone. I didn't bother hiding my scowl, I bumped into shoulders in the halls, I slammed my locker a little too hard, and my responses... Well, they were a little more curt than usual. Not enough to earn myself another visit to Mr. Reyes' office, but some teachers noticed, and looked a little weirded-out by the teeth in my voice.

I also flinched whenever I caught a glance of Helena or Marjorie, either in the halls or the classroom. They both looked normal — so far — and neither of them sought me out or really looked my way whenever I spotted them. So far...it was holding.

But Quentin was nowhere to be found — remembering yesterday's episode, I despaired to think of what had happened to him between after the Seawatchers had cleaned up.

My tutoring session with Thomas was also riddled with tension. He was about as interested in completing the War Games 3 worksheet as I was today, and that was to say not at all. He looked at the paper, tapped his mechanical pencil, and jimmied his leg, but I was certain our thoughts were in the same place: yesterday, and what had happened between when Berechiah had whispered in our classmates' ears and now.

Every now and then, though, he would give a halfhearted answer to one of the questions. All of them, including the latest one, were wrong: "What about Trina? She would go up front, right? And Brick would follow up with—"

"Trina would flank," I interrupted. "They're both the same mass, there's no point in doing any other kind of formation." I dug my fingers into my scalp, feeling something inside rapidly reaching a boiling point. "F*ck's sake! I just said that! Weren't you listening?"

Thomas arched a split brow at me — it was a good thing we were in the library study room, else I would've been getting a look from Ms. King as well. He tapped his pencil twice more against the wooden table before leaning back into his seat, enough that the front legs of the chair left the floor. He crossed his arms and looked at me directly.

I turned away, feeling my face heat up. "Sorry," I muttered.

He shrugged. "Sounds like you're as done with this sh*t as I am." As if to make his point, he slid the worksheet and pencil back into his open bookbag. "Can we talk about Marj? I wanna talk about Marj. Seen her today?"

"Yeah, during class change."

"She look alright? Resting-bitch-face and everything?"

"Yeah." So had Helena — in fact, when I'd passed her in the hall, she'd given me a friendly pat on the back and thanked me for giving her the idea for the Pokémon partner beautification project. I wished that I could've gotten a better look at her face, but from what I'd seen... There'd been nothing else. No hesitation. No wonderment. No confusion. No...anger. No sign that she remembered what had happened yesterday afternoon.