Worth the Trouble ✓

33 | detonator

EVER SINCE SOPHIE SHOWED UP in Carsonville, she's been getting on Brittany's nerves at every opportunity.

She stages acts of defiance every chance she gets, even when it's profoundly stupid, even when those actions come with consequences for her and her friends. Sophie comes from some worthless town in California, so she has no clue about the Carsonville Academy and its culture, its politics, its queen. She has no idea that if she doesn't bend for Brittany, she'll break.

And yet, this time, in a nondescript school-wide assembly on a sleepy Friday afternoon, I felt compelled to help her. I was sitting with my homeroom class in the auditorium, whose walls are notoriously thin, when I heard light footsteps going up the backstage stairwell.

Coupled with the fact that Brittany asked each and every Monarch to watch out for Sophie, my instincts told me to check the noise out, and then I found her jostling the locked door to the projector booth, clearly intent on hijacking the assembly. Up to trouble, again.

See, I should have called Brittany the moment I saw Sophie trying to get into the sound booth. She would have stopped whatever Sophie was planning, dead in her tracks. But I didn't. Instead I helped her, picking the door open.

Why the fuck did I do that?

I should not have opened the door for Sophie—as soon as the door to the school's auditorium sound booth clicks open and Sophie rushes inside—that is the only thought that enters my mind. My disbelief, directed mostly at myself, shoves away everything else, and I flee down the stairs before she even has time to thank me. I need to get out of here.

I have plenty of time to ruminate on my actions on the way to Haywood Park. The inescapable truth is that Sophie makes me totally illogical. Totally reckless. She awoke a side of me that I thought had long been destroyed; the childish, carefree side. She came into my life, and suddenly my dreams of Suki stopped.

Being around her makes me feel like I'm fifteen again, before I became a boyfriend, a father, a bully. When I spend time around her—in our Home Ec. class or on the bus—I can easily imagine the past three years never happened.

Or that they happened in a different way.

I never fell in love with Suki. Cassie was never conceived. Being away from the two of them never tore my heart out. Brittany never tunneled her way into my darkest secrets. I never became her puppet, dangling on an unbreakable thread of weakness and shame.

The unsuccessful distractions I used to chase—alcohol, weekend partying, summer getaways—with the Monarchy pale next to Sophie. Perhaps it's that her dark brown eyes look exactly like Suki's, or that she has the same quick-witted, bookish aura about her. Even her name sounds similar, but it's more than that. Sophie is the first person in years that's looked at me without fear. Without thinking I'm merely a tyrant, or a freak, or a loner. I can make her laugh—despite her best attempts to stifle it—and I can make her irritated. She colours me in, instead of dulling me into black and white like everyone else.

So I helped her. That's what the person I used to be would have done. The person I used to be would never bow down to Brittany, parade around the student body, and claim a throne at the top of the social ladder. The old Terrence would raise hell. A part of me loves that I can watch Sophie do it instead. (The rest of me is owned by Brittany.)

As if on cue, my phone rings in my pocket. Brittany's frantic, murderous voice pierces me. "Are you seeing this?"

"Seeing what?" The leaves crunch underfoot as I get as far away from the Academy as possible.

"Don't play dumb: this video that Olsen and her band of geeks are playing!"

Unfortunately for Brittany, I'm not playing dumb. I know all too well the rampage she's going to embark on now that my suspicions—Sophie was seeking to cause trouble in the assembly—have been confirmed. And in case it comes to light that she had help, I want some degree of plausible deniability. "I'm ditching assembly today."