Leave Her Hanging: A Noir Thriller

Chapter Eleven

Mr Harvey sat me down next to his desk and left. He returned a couple of minutes later with an ice pack and a box of tissues. I took both and pressed the ice pack against my cheek.

“Thanks,” I mumbled while I dabbed at the blood with a tissue. Jeremy hadn’t got me bad, but he’d broken the skin at the corner of my mouth and my jaw felt like it’d been run over by an eighteen-wheeler. I had a nice bruise right in the middle of my stomach, too. Sitting and standing wasn’t fun.

“Care to tell me what that was about?” Mr Harvey said. His bald head glinted under the classroom light.

“Just a misunderstanding,” I said.

“Uh-huh.”

“Yeah. I misunderstood the strength of his right hook. He misunderstood my willingness to fight dirty.”

“This isn’t funny, Jack—”

“Spade,” I corrected.

“I know you’re upset about Ella’s suicide…”

I looked at the wall behind him and kept my face still.

“…but this isn’t the way,” he continued. “You’ve got to get your anger under control. I can keep this one incident away from the principal, but if you keep at this, you’ll have more than expulsion to worry about.” He shook his head. “The police already have their eye on you, don’t they? You don’t want to give them any more reason to look at you.”

I wasn’t liking this understanding, consoling talk. A bit of shouting, a week’s detention, suspension, that sort of stuff I could deal with. I already had enough guilt without Mr Harvey heaping more on top. And the worst thing was I honestly didn’t want to disappoint him. Mr Harvey had been the one to stick up for me after the thing with Ella’s dad. He was the one who made sure I had a school to come back to this year. Now I’d been back less than a week and I was already bloodying my knuckles.

We were both silent a few minutes. I studied the scrapes on my hands.

Mr Harvey was the first to break the silence. “You probably won’t believe me,” he said quietly, “but I know what it’s like to have violence follow you around. I know what it’s like to strike that first time out of fear or anger. The rush. The sickening feeling that comes after. And then later, when you decide it wasn’t so hard after all.”

He sighed, looked out the window at something far away. I stared at him out of the corner of my eye. I’d never heard him speak like this before.

“Most people have forgotten how to be violent,” he said. “Their violence is petty office sniping and passive aggressive comments to their spouses. And once you know true violence, you begin to realise how much power you have over them, now that you’re freed from those societal shackles. But it’s not as easy as you think. Trust me. It draws you in and then wears you down, turns you into someone you don’t want to be.”

“I didn’t start that fight,” I said.