How About Seven? ✔

7. Toys Come Alive

"What do you mean you got detention?"

I pinched the bridge of my nose, exhaled and explained in dry tones. Leila rolled her eyes.

"Emrys Parker. Well it figures. Half of the school pranks are done by him but he's never caught red-handed, so the teachers can't really do anything. I'm quite surprised he got caught to be honest. It's never happened before."

I thought back to us standing in front of the gym showers, and him not being able to go in because I was a girl. Oops.

Our last class had just finished and we were walking down the hallways. A blonde jock came up out of the blue and asked, "Hey Hayley, do you know where Kaylan is?"

I stared at him like he'd sprouted yellow tentacles. "Why in blazes would I know where Kaylan is?"

"Aren't you - "

I held up a hand firmly. "I'm going to stop you right there. I am not Kaylan's girlfriend, and I have no wish to be Kaylan's girlfriend, so you can stop bothering me - and go ask Brandy instead."

"D-uh. Okay." He walked off.

Leila snapped her fingers. "Oh by the way, it wasn't Kaylan during lunch. It was his two guy friends who came to ask why Kaylan didn't come to school."

Cue eye roll. "And they approached me for that? Is the whole school going crazy? I didn't even know he was absent."

"But do you know?"

"Know what?"

"Why he's not here?"

I shot Leila a look and she giggled. "I'm teasing. Chill!" We reached a junction and went separate ways. "Good luck with the detention!" she called.

Detention. The action of detaining someone or the state of being detained in official custody, especially as a political prisoner. In this case, the punishment of being kept in school after hours.

Boring. But not as bad as what I had feared.

Mr Michael - the teacher - had decided that detention was to be spent cleaning up his drama club's store room. The whole place had a dim musty smell, and was a tangled mess of torn costumes and dislodged props.

"How are we going to clean all this by four?" Emrys said in dismay after the teacher left us to it. "This is pure cruelty this is."

I picked up Ariel's tail, that had two holes burnt near the end of it. "Well maybe you should have thought of that before you did whatever it was that you did."

"Ha! If it wasn't because of you I wouldn't have been caught. And I was provoked alright?" His voice became quiet, sullen. "He said something I couldn't forgive."

I put down the tail, curious despite of myself. "What?"

His words were an outburst. "He said men wearing skinny jeans was a disgrace! A disgrace! He said skinny jeans undermined masculinity. Excuse me? How dare he utter such blasphemy!"

Times like these one should just go