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And if I ever meet the guy who did it, I'll propose immediately. Because this is some divine fucking justice.
“Atlas.” Professor Morrison clips my name out from up front, drawing my attention to him. “Come get your paper. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this one.” His smile is sincere, but I don’t move a single inch out of my chair.
“What?” Surely I fucking heard wrong. Is there another Atlas in the class I didn’t know about? There has to be... right?
“The Killer Clown, Hector Valenzuela. Really interesting case. I hadn’t even heard of that one before. Nice work bringing light onto an obscure subject matter.”
His praise has everyone looking at me and my dumbfounded expression. I’m like one of those opossums whose only defense mechanism is to shut down and play dead. If I go still, maybe he’ll confuse me with a body in a morgue. Maybe I’ll become invisible.
“I’m sorry, what?”
This has to be a mistake. How...?
“Come. Get. Your. Paper!” Nathan growls out through teeth clenched so hard, it must be painful for the stitches on his weak-ass jawline. The turd.
I hop to my feet, and I’m standing at the front of the class in seconds. And there it is.
Taped together and splattered with what I can only assume is blood is my cover page. Worn and beaten pages are behind it, and yet despite its state, I can make out the A+ right there.
“Nathan apologized for how careless he was with your assignment, Ms. Ortega.” The professor shoots Nathan a glare like he’s absolutely disappointed in his TA. Then he turns back to me with an expression he’s never given me before. Fuck. It almost looks like pride. “But he was right about me needing to read this myself.” The professor’s beaming smile doesn’t calm my thrashing heartbeat. “We thoroughly enjoyed it, didn’t we, Nathan?”
Nathan coughs, his hand covering his ribs as he tries to just take a solid breath. “Yeah. Good shit,” he half mumbles, half dies coughing. He doesn’t even sound sincere. It sounds like he had to force the words out along with every breath.
Through the confusion, I smile. I have no fucking idea why Nathan had a change of heart when he’s obviously still a dick, but I’m so happy right now, I don’t even give a fuck. The red A+ on the paper is all I can look at.
I take it in my hands and head back to my desk. Class resumes as normal with Professor Morrison assigning the reading material before we have to leave. Meanwhile, I’m still clutching the paper in a dream-like state until a soft hand touches my wrist.
“Hey, I googled your serial killer,” The guy with the mustache tells me.
I blink, slowly coming back down to reality. “He’s hardly mine. He belongs to the world, you know.”
He chuckles quietly and I’m still high off of this bizarre change of events. Should I send Nathan flowers? Like a, hey sorry your face is permanently disfigured for life but thanks for being a decent fucking human being and giving me the grade we both knew I deserved all along? Maybe I should send him a plate of actual good food. Some chicken soup and Vaporub for his troubles.
“You’re that girl, right? Atlas?” he asks, and then my smile drifts away.
“Yeah? Unless there’s another Atlas in this class that I haven’t met?” My name isn’t very common on either side of my heritage. In all my life, I don’t even think I’ve met another Atlas before. I push my messy hair back from my face and try not to think about the last time a guy lingered around me like this.
High school. It was in high school. Before they took my mom away. Before I actually knew how to act around people. Before the only compliment I ever got was, “You have such a pretty face.”
I swallow hard and try to find the normalcy of just talking to a cute guy. His eyes are a light brown that match his perfectly combed hair and perfectly styled mustache, and god, why does his minor attention make me want to be back in my little apartment already? Let me crawl back into the morgue like the introverted zombie that I am.
Attention makes me uncomfortable. Like ants are crawling beneath my skin. I try to avoid scratching at my arms with the effort it takes to pay attention to him and not sink into myself. The tone of my high school therapist circles my thoughts with words like anxiety and PTSD and night terrors.
I shove away those thoughts and force my breathing to calm. I pretend I’m okay.
I am. I’m okay,I tell myself over and over again.
“You’re the girl everyone’s talking about this week. The one the hockey player sent Nathan to the hospital over, right?”
It feels like a record screeches with how quiet the room gets. It takes me a moment to catch up on the fact that the professor has already left us to our own devices. As well as the fact that several people are standing to leave, but stopping as those words are said. People are lingering, their gazes heavy on me where I’m stunned to my spot.
“What are you talking about?” My brows furrow with a hitch of my breath that I can’t maintain.
He waves a hand in my direction, and somehow that gesture reminds me of Anna. “Rowan Stone? He beat his own teammate’s ass on the ice because of you.”
I blink again, as if anything he’s saying is supposed to mean anything to me. “I don’t know who Rowan Stone is,” I say pointedly. “And I seriously doubt that. If Nathan got his ass handed to him, it’s probably because his pretentious, racist ass deserved it.” I say that last bit loud enough so said pretentious, racist ass can hear me from across the room.
It’s then that the room feels frozen in place. A pressure builds in my chest and steals away every tiny clip of breath I manage. Professor Morrison and even Nathan himself are staring at me and this random guy, and oh my fucking god, why is everyone looking at us?
