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I go numb all over. “That wasn’t there. They must have put it in there—”
Headmistress Baxter’s amber eyes flash at me. “What is the meaning of this?”
I feel control slip away from my grasp like ice.
“He’s lying! Look at what’s written on the inside!”
With a sigh, Headmistress Baxter fixes a pair of glasses against the bridge of her nose. She doesn’t even unfold the arms, peering down at the paper like it’s a huge favor to me. After reading it, her lips tighten and she folds it back up.
“Miss Weir, have you never heard the phrase ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones’? It famously ends with the moral lesson that ‘Names will never hurt.’ Perhaps you’d do well to remember that.”
I gape at her, watching as she pockets the deconstructed airplane.
This can’t be happening.
How is Headmistress Baxter taking the side of a play-acting twelve-year-old overme?
Yeah, sure. The seventeen-year-old new girl is about to wreak havoc by tossing paper-wrapped stones at kids.
“Why can’t you see that they’relying?”
The boy simpers pathetically, adding in a loud sniff for good measure.
“He’s not lying, miss. It was a truly vicious and unprovoked attack,” the young boy beside him says. “She just went for him!” I notice him glance at Rory after his little speech, as if hoping for validation. Rory’s mouth raises slightly, his eyes glittering.
“It’s not often I have to say this on the first day of a new school year but it appears I have no other option. Detention, Miss Weir.”
I’d assumed nothing could harm me after the harm I’d done to myself back home. I’d assumed my heart had been broken already from all I’d endured. Instead, the final pieces within me that had been clinging desperately to one another splinter and snap off.
“What?” It’s barely a whisper. I’m standing in front of a table filled with boys, being chastised by the only female teacher in the school. You’d think maybe —maybe— she might have been more sympathetic to my side? Might have looked a bit harder to find some kind of discrepancy in their story? A little bit of solidarity?
I lift my eyes to Rory, certain he has something to do with this. His legs are stretched out in front of him and his arms are folded like this whole charade is beneath him. His expression is as cold and frozen as any snowflake but there’s the perpetual hint of a smirk. A crown wouldn’t look out of place on his tilted head.
“With an incident like this, a mark on her personal record seems appropriate, Headmistress,” he suggests in a silken tone that raises my hackles. “For the safety of our students, of course. Or must I remind you that bullying isn’t tolerated at Lochkelvin?”
I — uh…What?
Ignoring his ridiculous words, I find myself surprised every time Rory speaks — it’s not the soft, lilting Scottish accent like the majority of the students here. It’s more clipped and perfectlyEnglish, with the occasional hint of a Scottish twang, as if he’s spent too long at Lochkelvin and is trying to fight it away.
It doesn’t matter what he sounds like, however, when his words are so damn messed-up.
“Quite right, Mr. Munro,” Headmistress Baxter agrees. “I’m afraid I have no other option but to note this in your personal record, Miss Weir. Violence against students will not be tolerated.”
“No other option,” I repeat blankly, staring at Rory.
Baxter looks as though she’s had enough of me. “Go to your seat, and let this be a lesson to you.” She struts away, her boots stomping over the ancient flagstone tiles.
A lesson to me? What’s the lesson, exactly?
Rory’s smirk is still firmly on his face.
He mouths at me the words on the paper plane, his eyes glittering darkly.
Fly back home, Yank bitch.
That right there.
That’s the lesson.
