Tightrope

I Had a Plan

The plan came to me the following Monday.

It was my third class that day. English. I'd missed it for the rest of the week—I'd been forced to skip it for physical therapy each day, which was a shame. It had always been my favourite class; Mr. Prendler was a brilliant teacher and the subject fascinated me because I loved to read. Not in the same way Kaelin did; she'd explained it to me once, the way the characters and the stories felt so real to her, the way that it made her feel, an unimaginable high when everything in the story reached a crescendo. I just found reading calming.

There was one downside, however. It was my class with Hartley.

We hadn't had another class together since we were little. Our rivalry was well known, and considered by the teachers to be a distraction to both Jace and I, and everyone else who was forced to listen to our sniping. They probably weren't wrong. I think the final straw was when we'd both thrown a chair at each other on the final day of Year 4. We'd both missed.

But English. Well, if I was good at English, Jace Hartley was excellent. He wasn't particularly gifted in any other school subjects as far as I knew, a steady C student, but when Hartley got ahold of a pen? Yeah, the boy could write.

And since there was only one advanced English class, the school administration was forced to put us together, with a harsh warning that if we stepped too far out of line, we'd both be dropped into an on level class. We hadn't been dropped yet, because we were both experts at toeing that line. Arguments and passive aggressive taunts aside, we were model students.

Plus, I think Prendler found us entertaining.

"Good morning again, Lena," he said as I came into the classroom. "Nice to see you made it into school."

I grinned at him. "Well, thanks for the advice on how to make it into the building."

"The wheelbarrow method didn't seem like it was going to be particularly effective." He gestured to a seat at the front of the class. Ugh. "Take a seat. The class has missed you. Been very quiet around here."

I gave him an awkward thumbs up. "I'll be sure to remedy that."

I took my seat and tucked my crutches under my seat. I was the first person in the room; my previous class had been only next door.

A steady stream of students began to pile into the room. Most of them waved at me. We had all shared this advanced class for years, a motley bunch of people with a shared talent for English. There were kids I'd missed, kids I'd forgotten were in this class, Kaelin (who always walked into the room with her head buried into her phone, reading on the iBooks app so she looked slightly less nerdy), kids so pretentious and insufferable I'd forcibly blocked them from my memory. And finally, coming behind them all, Jace Hartley.

His face lit up when he saw me, a sure sign of horrible things to come. So I turned to face Kaelin, who always sat to my right. "Oi, get your head out of your book."

Kaelin looked up, wearing a sheepish expression. She knew I hated it when she ignored me in favour of a book. "I was texting Cady," she lied.

"Cady doesn't text."

Kaelin looked confused. "She doesn't?"

"She likes ignoring people."

"Huh."

I shook my head in amused exasperation. Kaelin was one of the most oblivious people alive.

Jace fell into the seat on my left. "If you need entertainment, I'm around."

I glared at him. Adam Lopez had sat to my left for five years, and while he wasn't much of a conversationalist, he didn't inspire murderous fantasies. I was going to walk out of this classroom in handcuffs.