❝she was the girl, who bit the horizon, who peeled the stars from the sky and put them on her tongue, the girl who was hungry for the universe, who craved magic and saw the broken boy for who he truly was- a broken boy.❞
Beca...
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Chapter 7
To Kill A Memory
Ellis
For the past few weeks, we've settled into a routine that was almost normal. By 'we', I meant Jem and I. By 'routine', I meant that every time our court-appointed punishment was on the brink of occurring we'll meet by the toilets we've cleaned together on the first day and wordlessly allocate different things we could do. One day I'll file the administrative offices while he moped the floors of the locker room, the next we switched. And by 'almost normal', I was insinuating that I've really beginning to enjoy the battles of wits, an inevitable factor every instance we collided together.
The past few weeks he had been calling me 'Porcey' and it irritated me more than I'd like it to. Hell, I'm even starting to prefer the Dwarf nickname he came out for me in seventh grade. It annoyed me for two reasons; the first because I can't figure out what the hell Porcey meant, and every time I inhaled a deep breath and tried to pretend that I didn't care, he knew that I did. He wanted me to ask him what the nickname meant, and he knew I knew he wanted me to ask. I didn't break yet, though.
I couldn't help but think about the moment we had at my house as I was leading him out of my house when we stood on the porch, waiting for him to walk away. He was looking at me in this fantastically weird manner, as if he was memorising the details of my face, trying to photograph me in my mind. The silence was daunting but it was necessary. Everything was always punctuated by silence. We hunt for the right words in silence.
But it seemed for a moment we didn't have to be enemies. We didn't have to fight. We could talk like normal people. We could be friends even. Until the deviation from normalcy was shattered by the fragments of fear of breaking the cycle of our screaming, crying and yelling.
The insults and complaints Jem pierced me with was taking it's toll, sucking the life and happiness out of me. His words would smack me in between the eyes and they would start to hurt, watering sometimes and threatening to spill tears.
His snark would echo over and over again:
Prude. Frigid. Uptight.
Sometimes they ached, sometimes they don't. But their main purpose of them was filling the detached void with negativity and gifting me with the ability to cut Jem's legs off with as many comebacks as I can.
He was off to his tangents of pranks again. Last week during an assembly, a bucket of whip cream fell on one of our most despised teachers- Mrs Welk- and ensured the whole student body to laugh while I kind of felt sorry for her. The other day they've disabled the school bell so we accidentally had an extra period of P.E. He was back to his old immature, childish ways.
Because of the added community service, lately, I've realised the fatigue of studying extra late and the work was starting to grip me like a snake. I would arrive home late, around six or seven, have dinner until eight, practised my piano until nine and it wasn't only until ten I was able to commence on the massive pile of AP classes' homework, finished until one in the morning and crawled back into bed.
