2.3 | Notorious ✓

03 | surreptitious

0 3

s u r r e p t i t i o u s

If you had told me that someday, I'd be sitting with Callum Wright during lunch period, I would've laughed out a lung. Yet there I was that day, sitting on the low wall with Callum barely five feet away from me.

The silence between us settled comfortably, since Callum wasn't that much of a talker, and I was busying myself with unwrapping my turkey sandwich. Noticing that he wasn't eating anything, I tore the sandwich into half and offered it to him.

"Want some?"

He glanced over at the turkey sandwich. After a slight moment's hesitation, he took the sandwich from my hand and began to eat, but not before picking out the thin slice of lettuce, and depositing it on the sandwich wrapper.

I stifled a smile. So Callum Wright didn't eat his vegetables. Well, for a tough guy like him, I never would've guessed that he had an aversion to something like that. The more time I spent with Callum, the less intimidating I found him. He was just a regular boy, like Jason, like Dave, like any other guy I knew.

"Can I ask you something?" I blurted, unable to stop my curious nature from prying.

He merely glanced at me. "What?"

"Why don't you stay home like the other kids?" His eyebrows shot up and I hastily continued, "Half the school's practically after you. If you stayed home and just avoided Hell Week altogether, it'd be a lot easier, don't you think?"

He didn't look at me. Instead, he kept his gaze focused on a particularly rough patch on his jeans, his calloused thumb smoothing the patch over and over again. "It's just not the way I am," he murmured, at last. "If I can dish out bullying all through the year, I can very well handle a week of it myself."

"Then just stop with the bullying already," the words left my lips before I could stop them. "Things around here would be so much simpler if you and your friends stopped with all the meanness."

He laughed at that, his laughter almost sardonic, and I felt a shiver down my spine. Thus far, I knew two sides of Callum that existed. The sweet, caring one that had watched out for me all these years. And the one that was absolutely merciless and relentless and cold-hearted.

The latter side of him was something I had only heard of from the guys. Having never actually been bullied by Callum, I was hardly a fair judge of this whole thing. Clearly, I had a myopic view of the situation, but so did Jason and the rest. They had never seen Callum at his best, I'd never seen Callum at his worst.

But, as he continued speaking, his tone harsh and vehement, I realised that I was about to.

"Your friends are trying to fight fire with fire," Callum said, almost mockingly. "They think that by getting back at me and my friends, it'll stop us from ever screwing with them again. Only it doesn't work that way."

"Then how does it work?" I couldn't help but ask.

Even though his words made me worry for my own friends, there was something undeniably intriguing about his mentality. I had only seen things from Jason's point of view. But Callum was a complete closed-up mystery.

"They're bound to get burnt," he replied, calmly, his words an echo to what I had said to Henry the day before. Perhaps Callum had managed to see things in perspective far better than my friends had.

I sighed, and stared down at my half-eaten sandwich. "I just don't want my friends to get hurt."

Callum was silent for a long moment, and when he spoke again, he no longer sounded over-confident or arrogant. Instead, his voice held a measure of apology in them. "I'm sorry, Scout, but I can't promise you that."