Darling & Foster

Eleven

Dentenion was quiet, and I don't know what I was expecting. I guessed that it would be like in the books or movies, a large group of rebels and misfits shoveling drugs onto desks like farming staff and passing around alcoholic beverages while select people grunted. 

But it didn't meet my expectations.

At all. 

A girl with red-rimmed glasses and blonde hair suffocated in a tight bun was at the front, playing with chalk, and scraping the room with her eyes, like she was looking for someone and that's the most rebelious act I saw. There was quite the lot of us, actually, and no one seemed to pay her much attention.

It was still;quiet;crisp. And those aspects made it very hard for me to feel the least bit threated or anxious here, the sun brewing lazily through the window and roaming the earth in a tired haze, casting itself dreamily across the floor, making shapes with shadows. 

My head drooped and my fist caught it up, my eye-lids fluttering to stay awake. 

Then, to occupy myself, I scanned for Foster and I saw no sign of him, which made me think he really did ditch. I envied him a little. While I watched girls fidget with the bobby pins in their hair and boys conjure up eye-rolls, he was probably doing something amazing. 

Then the door slicked, and snapped, and popped and I cringed because that broke the silence. That rusty, metallic hinging sound of an old door opening, stabbed my eardrum. 

A foot met my eyes then a body, and them, finally, a face. A battered one, with more red marks than before and a swollen eyelid, the body hobbled to the back of the room and was soon out of sight. My heart fluttered a little and I looked away, suprised that my heart even just did that. It kind of hurt, actually. I placed my palm to my chest and made a face.

Is that normal? 

For about three minutes, I was glazed in worry that I was having some kind of heart attack, but soon everything become realistic again, and Foster was gone and I discovered that I was being ridiculous. 

The silence soon got clumsy and shuffled and it wasn't like before anymore, people were slowly migrated to the 'behind me' section of the room, it lasted some moments before I didn't see a single person in front of me. Then there were giggles and snickers and whispers and all the secret-agent type communications when something shady was going on. 

I craned my neck to take a discreet look at the scene behind me. 

The girl with the red-rimmed glasses was sitting at a long table in the back, faulty lighting shone over it, shuffling something.. money. 

Is that money?

She was looking awfully professional placing it into her purse and watching intently as the queue shortened and the people went by, with sly looks on their faces, their jackets pulled oddly tightly around them for the summer temperature. I was surprised they were even wearing jackets in this heat. 

Then there was another queue standing in front of someone else. The girl and the other person shared greedy expressions and pocketed the money, giving something else out in return that I couldn't put my finger on, I furrowed my eyebrows. 

A boy went past me and I saw it, the thing that was sold to him. I couldn't exactly believe it.

The queue soon ran to it's last person, revealing the other mysterious character and the stock-full basket on the table of what they were selling an absurd amount of. Once the last person left, I rubbed my eyes. 

"Are you really," my jaw hit the floor, "are you really selling cigarette's, Foster?" I spat from my seat. 

A smirk blossomed onto his pink, bruised lips and a cigarette leaked from it. 

"In the bloody detention room!"