Chapter 7: Mr. Chaucer

My fever breaks as the last sweat trickles down my brow. Bubbles form around my pours like crystallized beads. My palms drip with the remaining sweat from my skin.

I twist the cap off my water bottle. It's hard to grab the top of the bottle when my hands are wet from my fever breaking. My mother rips the bottle from my hands and opens it. The water hits my mouth, tongue, and throat. Its refreshing coolness heals the rest of me.

Mom and I don't speak to one another. I'm still embarrassed by her despite my fleeting illness. I have every right to be mad at her. She took my senior year away from me. The KAT trio will tear me to shreds when I return.

"Why did you block me from your social media? I didn't do anything wrong, did I?"

Mom doesn't understand that her actions have caused a backslide in every social event, school function, and senior event from here until graduation day. It's not an exaggeration. It's a fact.

The vultures won't let me live it down. The loser senior with braces has a reputation for taking pictures with the bus driver. I didn't care what they all thought, but now I can think of nothing else.

Did Jeremy Davis mean what he said to me back on our first day by the tree? If I changed my clothes and dressed another way, could I be pretty? Could I be admired and make friends if I stopped being quirky?

Does society expect us to stuff ourselves so far down that we will never come up for a breath of air? Is showing our true colors really so dangerous?

I am scared to face Jeremy. He was so friendly that first day. But, going to school and tutoring the boy with scars on his arms for a semester will take all the patience in the world.

Did he really burn down the Vineyard Church on Second Street? In 5th grade, we had our musical on the stage. Three years after that, I graduated the 8th grade on the platform of that church.

Our town is small, and we are a tight group. Sooner or later, the truth of Jeremy's pyro-maniac behavior will catch up with him. There are only so many suspects to go around in a small town like ours. We might have a large high school with a vast student body, but that's only because everyone in this town goes to the one school provided for miles.

I sometimes feel like a genie in a bottle. But, like a genie is trapped by the space of his bottle, so am I trapped in the hallways of Ashmore Highschool. Only time itself can rub the lamp, set us free, and send us out into the world.

But Jeremy Davis, the boy who was friendly to me for a day, has more coming to him than he knows. He doesn't know it yet. But as my peer student, I am going to make him work. Work until his grades improve and help him graduate. I hate his guts for how English class turned out the other day.

But a boy with severe scratches and bruises up his sleeves has something to hide. I still find it rather odd that I have never met him before. Fate brought us together in Brit Lit to duel it out with words and pen.

I'm a fan of stories and how they transport us to another world with the passport of imagination. The words are the journey that takes me away often from my reality. But, unfortunately, the reality is anything but easy. I get bullied by the KAT trio or ridiculed online when I let reality happen.

Our parents had it easier, and their parents before them. Now bullying is done online with video uploads, secret identities, and hidden usernames. My grandpa got pushed into a locker by a bully once. But it was never uploaded on YouTube for his future grandchildren to watch and stare at.

The internet is eternal. The lies of the inter-web are dark and hold our most hidden secrets. At a moment's notice, any asshole anywhere can find my deleted I*******m video. It might say the video is no more. But we all know the truth, that data lives forever. The world of code is ever-flowing in the spaces that I didn't even know were there.

If I were to predict the future, my gut feeling would tell me that by February, the KAT trio will somehow find my bus driver photo and repost it everywhere. It's what they do. It's who they are. They destroy lives for the sake of popularity, comments, and sex.

I'm good to wait on fame, fortune, and sex. Those things all sound dangerous to me. Whenever I read about celebrities, their lives are hectic, and people bully them daily. We are unaware of the harm it does to them because we don't know them. I've never met Miley Cyrus, and yet we gossip about her personal life.

Why is bullying celebrities considered normal? And bullying John Doe considered harassment and or a crime? Everyone, everyone should be free from bullies.

What about you, Jeremy Davis? Are there people in your life who bully you? Is that why you cut yourself? Did you write the note? And if so, do you really have it in your soul to die? Would you want to kill yourself?

Have you thought about what that would do to your family? Your friends at school? Do you have a friend Jeremy? Do you need one?

I know tutoring the detention reject will take a lot out of me. He is the Geoffrey Chaucer of Ashmore high, forever watching everyone. But sometimes, I wonder who is watching him?