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Noelani’s mouth opens, then immediately closes. “Oh, no, nothing really. Just with the lockdown and the punishments. Everyone’s going a little stir crazy, aren’t they? Hopefully Principal Ford will let us out of here soon and we can all burn off some steam. It’s long overdue.”
Her voice is a little too nonchalant. Why do I feel like she’s not telling me something? I take a closer look at her out of the corner of my eye, but there’s no sign of deception there. Only a bright smile that stretches from ear to ear.
“Ahh, my god. I can picture it now. Shopping. Coffee. Proper coffee.Realcoffee. Urgh! And a trip to the movies. The Jump! I can’t wait to go to The Jump with you!”
“What’s The Jump?”
“Oh, it’s just this place we like to hang out. It’s kind of on the way back toward Seattle. If we ever get out early enough on a Friday, we could go on a road trip somewhere, too. Do you have your passport? Maybe we could go to Vancouver and—”
Pain explodes in the back of my head. It feels like a bomb going off inside my skull. It’s so unexpected and out of the blue, that I drop to my knees, clutching my hands to the point of the pain, gasping, gasping, trying unsuccessfully to pull in a breath.
Something hard clatters to the ground beside me. My bag? My phone? I don’t know. For a second, I can’t see anything. My vision darkens, shadows creeping into my peripherals.
“Oh my god, Sorrell!” Noelani’s anxious cry is loud and close. Her hands are on me, patting me down. The world around me sharpens back into focus and her terrified expression fills me with an inexplicable anxiety.
Thrum, thrum, thrum!
The pain in the back of my head isn’t going away. It’s getting worse. Arrrgh, it feels like my skull’s splitting open!
“It’s okay, it’s okay. Shhh. Lean forward. Let me take a look.”
I don’t know what she wants. I don’t need to lean forward. The pain isn’t coming from the back of my head. It’s coming frominsidemy head, and it—ahh, it fucking hurts!
“Not cool, Sebastian!” Noelani roars. I’ve never heard her shout before. She’s not one to raise her voice at all. She sounds like she’s about to go nuclear. “What the fuck were youthinking?”
I can see her properly now. She sits back on her heels in front of me, and when she lifts her hands to brush my hair out of my face, they’re covered in blood. I shy away from her, my pulse racing.
She won’t look at me. She’s looking at someone behind me.
“I was thinking that I’m sick and tired of this bullshit,” a male voice growls.
I put my hand out to steady myself, feeling dizzy, nausea rolling through me, but my hand hits something smooth and cylindrical. A can of coke?What?there’s a huge dent in the bottom of the can, and the other end is pushed out, the metal bulging. It’s hissing, the seal broken, a thin jet of soda fizzing out of it.
“I’m sick of everyone pretending. I’m sick of being punished because ofher.” The venom in the voice has me spinning around. Too fast. I nearly black out all over again. Five feet away, Sebastian folds his arms across his chest, his face a mask of anger.
“What thefuck?” I begin to piece together what’s happened. The coke can, busted and leaking all over the floor. The splitting headache that now’s settling in behind my eyes.Sebastian threw the fucking can at my head, and he hit me right on target. “What the hell are you talking about, Sebastian?”
He looks at me, disgusted, regarding me as if I’m something unpleasant that he just scraped off his shoe. His jaw works, like he’s chewing on his words before spitting them at me. “You, Sorrell Voss. You’re a fucking problem, and I’m sick of pretending like you’re not.”
“How the fuck amIa problem to you?” I gingerly place my palm against the back of my head and my hand comes away even bloodier than Noelani’s. I can feel it now—the steady, hot stream of blood running from the open gash on the back of my skull, trickling through my hair and down the back of my neck. There’s a lot of it. My stomach rolls.
Sebastian sees the slick crimson color of my hands and his face hardens further. He flares his nostrils. “Everyone’s walking around, acting like they know nothing, but it’s obvious,” he spits.
“Obvious? What’s fucking obvious? Nothing’s obvious to me.”
“Seb.” A strange note laces Noelani’s tone. I can’t tell what it is, but it sounds like warning.
Sebastian rolls his eyes. A small crowd has gathered around us now to watch the exchange go down. Most of the other students skirt around us, however, heads down, clearly pretending that they haven’t seen anything. Assholes. “I’m done with it, Lani,” Seb sneers. “I’m fucking over it. This year was supposed to be fun for all of us and look what we’ve been doing.”
“SEBASTIAN!”
The roar comes from the other end of the hall. The blood-soaked hairs on the back of my neck stand to attention at the sound of the pure rage held within it. A tall guy standing next to Noelani blanches, hiking his bag higher on his back. “Oh, fuck. I wasn’t here,” he mutters, and then takes off toward the English department.
“Sebastian West, you’re fuckingdead!”The crowd parts, forming a pathway, and Theo comes into view, hurtling down the hallway at a run. His hands are fists. His black long-sleeved shirt strains across his chest as he pitches up in front of us; he looks like he’s about to destroy Sebastian, but he comes to me first, where I’m kneeling on the floor in a pool of my own blood; he ducks down so that we’re at eye level.
“You okay?” he asks.
“I think so.”
