dreaming |fillie au|

|thirty nine|

|thirty nine|
bruises
5 days later : wednesday

Millie's POV

He's the class clown, even had that labeled in the yearbook. He was hunched over his desk and only talking to Finn. That's unusual.

Yeah, that's right. Finn finally returned to school this week but Jack hasn't been here since last week. It wouldn't be something to think twice about other than the fact that Jack is a totally changed person.

"What's up with Jack?" I spoke into Finn's ear at lunch that day.

He raised his eyebrows like he was surprised to see me sitting next to him despite the fact that I had been sitting there for 10 minutes.

"I don't know." He shrugged and spoke in a dull bit high pitched voice.

In history, he plopped down next to me and I nudged him with my elbow. The bell rang a bit ago.

"Where have you been? History has been awful without you making jokes." I whispered and Mr. Heaton was unphased, still deeply interested in his mundane presentation.

"I had a migraine."

"Ooh, sorry that sucks. I grabbed your work so you don't fall too behind and I can help you with it if you want."

"Thanks, Nerd." He mumbled. When he smiled, his bottom lip hardly cracked but blood was seeping from a split in them.

As if possessed by some sort of odd power, I reached over and wiped the hypnotizing scarlet liquid from his lips.

My eyes were glued to the metallic red while he looked on in perplexity.

"Sorry. That was so out of line."

But he couldn't care less, more interested in something else, "I thought you were queasy about blood."

Quickly, I wiped the small dot of color on my black sweatshirt.

"I'm getting better."

"You're inside, you know. You can take your sunglasses off now." I giggled although immediately regretted the insensitive comment.

"Or are they for your migraine?"

"Oh yeah. The bright lights hurt my head if I'm not wearing them."

"...So that is why capitalism was beneficial to the economic aspects of the Gilded Age..."

"Where are your jokes, Grazer? I can't take this class anymore. He's so monotone." I whispered and he chuckled next to me.

With no additional response, I looked over and Jack's profile side was exposed. It took a great deal of squinting and even then I didn't know if I was seeing correctly.

A bruise below his left eye and another one upon his left cheek behind his sunglasses. It was a deep shade of purple I had never seen on a person before.

"Woah. What happened?"

He understood what I was looking at and rested his face in his hands as to block my vision.

"Nothing."

"Did someone hit you?" I peeled his hand away from his face.

"Shhh." A girl in front of us snapped.

"I think we found someone nerdier than you." He smiled towards the girl.

"Jack, I'm serious."

"It was me being a dumbass, I ran into a door." He shook me off of him.