Unfinished Business

CHAPTER 10: SLEAZEBAG ETHAN'S AT IT AGAIN

After school ended and the building was empty, I had plenty of time to kill. There was no way I was going to see my family (no thank you, no thank you), so I didn't have much to do anyway. I ended up outside the history classrooms, pacing back and forth and catching snippets of private conversations I definitely wasn't supposed to hear. 

I wanted to indulge in some "me time," (meaning just slacking off and leaning against a wall) but I knew full well that wasn't going to happen. No, I had to walk around and worry. That was definitely the best course of action here, and it definitely wasn't going to eat up a huge chunk of my stupid day. Once my pacing, thinking, nail-biting and fretting session was over, I knew that I had to follow Willa to meet up with Ethan. 

That's right. Ethan. Fucking Ethan. The person she wanted to help us? Yeah, it was him. The creep that kinda-sorta stalked me in sophomore year. I was hesitant to call it a stalking. He followed me home a lot, constantly showed up in places where I was and he wasn't supposed to be, and wouldn't stop trying to get me to say yes to dating him. My parents said I should, anyway.

Keep in mind, this was the guy who climbed into the pit during the intermission of a play to confess his love to me, embarrassing the shit out of me in the process. This was the guy who missed his post-intermission sound cues because he got stuck in the pit after the bass player got situated in her seat. This was the guy who stepped on my good French horn mouthpiece and dented it so badly that I couldn't even put it into the lead pipe of my goddamn instrument. This was the guy who broke the clarinetist's stand by stepping on it and forced her to hold one of her four clarinets on her lap for the rest of the night. This was the guy who stepped on a bag of ice the English horn player was using to ice his wrists during his few breaks, messing up the painted-black floor of the pit and my good spit rag in the process. This was that Ethan. It was that guy. 

It should be obvious by now that my nerves were frazzled and I was pissed. I didn't think I was going to come down from that any time soon, either. There may have been something wrong with my brain. Maybe I was just naturally angry, though. They always taught me at church that everything about us-- every vice, every virtue, every talent, every pitfall-- was already chosen for us pre-existence. 

I had been messed up for hours, ever since Willa told me what she planned on having us doing. I cornered her in the hall during lunch to do some planning. She was willing to oblige, granted that she was allowed to pretend to be on the phone. Her conclusion was that Ethan had to help us. 

"He's the only person in this school who knows anything about the undead. Even if it is his weird folklore project thing, or the roleplaying game he's trying to make-- he's better than nothing. Have you seen that book he's been carrying around?" 

"What, the big leather one?" 

"Yeah. He picked it up a week or so ago. He said he's compiling a list of every monster in the world, or something. We were-- he was-- talking about it during a break during rehearsal. If anyone knows how to really take down this thing, it's him."

I bit my tongue and didn't tell her that literally anyone would be better than Ethan. I'm sure she could see the bitter expression on my face, and that was enough. The entire reason that I climbed to the upstairs dressing room and traversed the rickety, old, out-of-code catwalks circling the Little Theater was that Willa had faith in him. I had faith in her. Her trust had to mean something. 

So, at exactly three, I climbed the stairs. And I bit my goddamn tongue. Nobody needed to see an undead girl in this goddamn drama classroom.

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