AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Relief to get away from my house.
Relief to be off the bully radar.
Relief to get away from my father.
Relief to be able to breathe for seven hours of the day.
I was used to coping alone, being alone, sitting alone, eating alone… You get my drift. I was forever alone so my latest predicament—or should I say, the latest development in my social status—was an unexpected one.
They say there’s solidarity in numbers, and I was a firm believer in this.
I felt better when I was with my friends.
Maybe it was a teenage insecurity, or maybe it was a result of my past, but I liked that I didn’t have to walk to class on my own anymore, and that I always had someone to sit with or tell me if I had something in my teeth.
Their friendship meant more to me than they would ever know, giving me a support system that I desperately needed and a buffer in times of panicked uncertainty.
At my old school, I was so stressed and anxious during my lessons that I fell behind a lot in class and had to work late into the night most nights to catch up. Without the constant threat of attack from my peers, I was keeping up in my classes with little problem, inhaling my lessons like crack.
I even managed to pass most of my pre-junior cert exams, with the exception of math and business studies. No amount of studying seemed to help with those subjects. But I had scored my first A since first year in science, so I took comfort in that.
During lunch, I had the girls to sit with—not a pity seat with my brother and his buddies, but an actual group of people.
I’d never had this level of normality before. I’d never felt safe.
But I was starting to.
And I had a feeling he had something to do with it.
Johnny Kavanagh.
I mean, he had to, right? I didn’t have that kind of power, so that left him.
It wasn’t a coincidence that the whole event had been erased from everyone’s minds.
I had seen him plenty of times since that day, having passed him countless times in the hallways between classes and in the lunch hall during break, and while he never approached me, he always smiled at me in passing.
To be honest, I was surprised he smiled at me at all, considering my mother’s reaction toward him outside the principal’s office that day. I didn’t know whether to apologize for her behavior toward him or not.
Mam had overreacted to the point of being borderline threatening toward him, but then again, Johnny’s actions had resulted in me spending a night in hospital and a further week at home with my father, so I decided against apologizing. Besides, I’d left it too long.
Approaching him now, after almost four weeks had passed by, would just be weird.
Through my friends—and the hushed whispers and rumors from girls in the bathroom—I had learned all kinds of details and information about Johnny Kavanagh.
He was in fifth year—something I already knew. He was originally from Dublin—again, no surprises there. He was incredibly popular—okay, so I didn’t know that but it didn’t take a genius to realize that, what with him being surrounded by students all the time. He was a massive hit among the female student body—again, a blind man could figure that out. And contrary to his terrible inaccuracy with the ball and his blatant maiming of me, he was supposed to be very good at rugby.
He was the captain of the school rugby team, and with that status came popularity, girls, and some fierce pull with both the faculty and the students.
I had no clue about the ins and outs of rugby, since our family revolved around GAA, and I cared even less about the popularity ranks at school, considering I was usually dumped at the bottom, but the way the girls at school portrayed Johnny Kavanagh sounded nothing like the person I met that day.
According to the girls, he was aggressive, intense, and a complete snob, with a body to die for and a horrible attitude. They made him out to be a cocky, rich rugby head who was obsessed with sports, played hard on the pitch, and fucked harder off it. Evidently much older girls were his thing.
Okay, so it was quite possible that he did in fact do all these things, but it was hard to piece that information together with the person I’d met. My memories of that day were still cloudy, the events leading up to my accident still hazy, and the ones afterward a jumbled mess, but I remembered him.
I remembered the way he had taken care of me.
How he had stayed with me until my mother came. The way he had touched me with big dirty, gentle hands. How he talked to me like he wanted to hear what I had to say. And then listened to my rambling like it was important to him.
