drowning

i

" you don't drown by falling in the water, you drown by staying there "

-

JUNE

"Late again, I see, Ms. Harvey?" my math teacher commented, as if it wasn't blatantly obvious that I had missed half her class at this point. I wondered if she'd ever stop asking, but with my luck the phrase would be ingrained in my mind by the end of the school year.

"Better late than never, as I like to say, Peters," I replied, and tried to slip past her desk towards the back of the classroom. It wasn't a secret that she had become my least favorite teacher this school year, and she didn't bother to hide her obvious disdain towards me as well. It was a mutual feeling, truly.

"Well, you can continue to say that on your way to detention after school. Come get your slip." I sighed, turning back towards her, ignoring the snickers from the goody two-shoes cheerleaders that sat front row of my math class. That's the third detention this month, and I doubted that number would be stopping any time soon. I took the pink paper from her outreached hand, and made my way to the back of the class. "Maybe if you would stop being late then we wouldn't have to keep meeting like this."

"I wish we didn't have to meet at all, to be frank," I snootily responded under my breath. When I got back to my seat, I kicked my chair out and slouched back, all while avoiding the obvious stares of everyone around me. What else was new? I looked up from my phone, after sending a quick text to Kodi, letting him know that school was going to hold me later than usual today, to see that the lesson was already zooming by. I took out a notebook and pen, and began my note taking.

After the boring, dragged out six hours of teenage hell I had just suffered through, I was looking forward to going home. Except that wasn't the case, thanks to kind ol' Ms. Peters. Because of her, I now got to look forward to being stuck in a room full of some of the most idiotic and obnoxious kids every high school naturally houses. I like to think that I'm not that bad of a student; at least I acknowledged that I was breaking the rules, rather than trying to be sneaky about it. Surely these kids should understand by now that if you're gonna be smoking on campus, the cameras are gonna catch you. Idiots.

"Juniper Harvey?"

I drew my gaze away away from the classroom window and to the front of the classroom, where the no doubt miserable teacher stood calling the names of every 'delinquent' that was taking up his oh-so-precious time. With a simple hum and nod, he continued calling a few more names before announcing his leave to the teachers lounge. He threatened us all with extra detention if we did anything other than 'sit and think about our actions,' before the slamming the door shut. I'd come to learn that the teachers on detention duty didn't actually care all too much when it came to watching their students, and they definitely weren't going to stay around to supervise.

I was seated in the back, so I got a clear view of about eleven other students sitting around with the same bored expressions on their faces as me. There was a small redheaded girl sitting closest to the door; she seemed like a freshman, the way she dressed and how she kept her head all the way down in her books clearly gave it away. I assumed she probably wasn't on par with the rest of the kids that belonged here, but who am I to make accusations?

To the left of me, a row up in seats, was your residents 'baddies.' The ones who got caught smoking, occasionally left a little vandalism on campus, and caused enough fights to put our school in the record books. You had to be living under a rock not to know about them, especially in the gossip-filled school we all attended.

Harry McNamara, who was tall and brown-haired. I don't think he ever went a day without smiling, somehow. I've never seen anything ruin his mood, and I often wondered how he kept it up for so long. Conveniently, he was actually my neighbor, living just across the street from me and my brother. Once upon a time, he and his older brother used to come around to the house a lot, playing video games until the early hours on the morning. But that was years ago, back when Kodi was still in highschool. Now, all I ever saw of him was when he'd speed off to school in the morning, or when he played football with his brother in their front yard. Sometimes he waved, but for the most part I ignored him. He wasn't necessarily a bad kid, aside from the occasional argument with a teacher, or ripping down of student council-made posters, so I wondered why he hung out with the group of people who surrounded him now.