Page 9 of Flagrant Foul (Totally Pucked #3)

Teddy “T-Dog” O’Reilly

Then

By the time the ninth grade got underway, being fourteen had taken a turn.

Other than hockey and being home with Nathan and Sev, life was the worst. My parents, who’d I’d always thought were pretty great, had become incredibly annoying.

They didn’t understand anything and were always convinced they did.

Especially my mom. I loved playing hockey, but I was a weedy kid, and I was positive I was one bad practice away from being dropped from the team.

Being dropped was my worst nightmare. I worried about it all the time.

I loved being part of a team. I more than loved it. I needed it.

I had a thing about being included, or more accurately, excluded.

My mom said I was oversensitive to it. She said I perceived rejections, whether or not they actually happened, and when they did, I made them into a way bigger deal than they needed to be.

She was always saying shit like that. It was one of those things she didn’t understand at all but thought she did .

She thought she knew everything about me, but what she didn’t know was that the penny had finally dropped, and I’d realized I was never going to like girls the way Sev and Nate did.

I didn’t know why I was the way I was. I liked girls a lot. I had friends who were girls. In many ways, I got along with them better than I did with the boys in my class. It was just that when I was with them, the air never moved slowly like it did when I was with Sev. Never. Not once.

At school, kids picked up on my queerness despite how hard I tried to hide it.

The first time it happened, my entire body went cold.

I felt naked in the worst way. I was convinced I had a fundamental flaw that was written all over me in invisible ink—shine the right light on me and letters on my skin spelled out things about me I didn’t want people to know.

I went out of my way to hide it. I was careful about how I dressed and spoke.

I watched how Nate and Sev did things and did my best to emulate them.

It didn’t help.

It started with whispers and laughter that fell silent as I got closer and turned into pointed fingers and stares. I ignored it at first, pretending I hadn’t heard them, but it got harder to ignore the longer it went on for .

It went on for ages.

It didn’t get better with time. It got worse.

It got so bad that I finally told Nate—and by that point, I was all too aware that ratting and getting your brother to fight your battles for you wasn’t cool.

Still, I knew I had to do something. Hateful words had knitted themselves into a dark cloak that draped over me and blocked out the light.

I knew it wasn’t good for me. I knew something was wrong.

I knew I was someone who needed sunshine.

I needed to feel the sun on my face, not only the moon.

As the days went by, the cloak grew heavier and heavier until it was knotted around me and weighed me down so much it felt endless. Hopeless. Inescapable.

I started thinking about ways to get out from under it that scared me.

So, I sat on Nate’s bed late one night, not making eye contact as I spoke, and told him I was being bullied and didn’t know how to make it stop by myself. Nathan was calm as he listened. He nodded once or twice and put his arm around my shoulder.

“Don’t worry,” he said with an easy smile. “Everything will be fine, you’ll see.”

The tendons in his neck didn’t relax for over an hour .

I went to bed that night feeling hopeful for the first time in a long while.

Telling Nate what I was going through was one of the most humiliating experiences of my life, but I was glad I’d done it.

I should have done it earlier. I knew he’d have a word with those assholes, and that would be the end of it.

Only, it wasn’t.

It made no difference at all. If anything, telling Nate made it worse. There was a murkier undercurrent to the way I was treated. A sneer. A threat. A promise of violence that scared the living shit out of me.

I wasn’t sure whether Nate told Sev what was happening to me or not. I asked him not to, and Nate was usually good about things like that, but I noticed that Sev had begun watching me in a way he hadn’t before. Head bowed, face tilted away slightly, black eyes fixed on me.

An up-nod and “You okay, Bear?” all but replaced “'Sup” as his method of greeting.

I made a point of laughing and smiling more than usual to hide how I was feeling, but inside, I was crumbling.

Anxiety dug its claws into me in the night, ravaging me until I woke with black circles under my eyes .

Dread and despair greeted me by name in the mornings.

Sev had been staying at our house for a while.

His family situation wasn’t great, and from time to time, he’d turn up at our house with a bag and wouldn’t leave for a couple of weeks.

If memory serves me right, he’d been around for longer than usual at the time.

I didn’t mind. I loved having him around, but it meant it was harder for me to talk to Nate in private and tell him I was still being bullied.

It had been a long succession of shitty days, but the day in question was worse than usual.

I’d embarrassed myself by not knowing an answer when Mr. Prentis called on me in math.

The entire class laughed. Maybe not the entire class, but that’s what it felt like.

Like there were eyes on me, thinking the worst of me.

Kids I’d grown up with who hated me for something I couldn’t help.

I made my way to my locker that day a little later than usual because Mr. Prentis had held me back to go over my work even though I’d assured him I didn’t need help.

The hallway was all but deserted by the time I got there.

My anxiety climbed as I walked, crawling up my arms and legs and driving a spike through the base of my skull.

I’d been cornered at my locker many times, so I was aware of the danger that lurked there.

I was more than nervous. I was frightened.

No one was around, but my locker was close to a storeroom, and kids had waited in there to pounce on me before.

That day was no different. As I entered the combination into my lock, they peeled out of the storeroom, and it started.

Slurs and sneers. A leering gap-toothed smile appeared in front of me, spewing hate.

Behind me, two others approached. They were close to me.

Closer than usual. Closer than ever before.

Fright turned to fear. Real fear. Fear so real it gave me time to appreciate that I’d never felt fear before in my life. I thought I had, but I hadn’t. My heart attempted to beat out of my chest. My breathing grew shallow. My arms and legs turned to lead.

What happened next was completely silent. Sudden and soundless. So quiet, I didn’t hear a thing. There was no harbinger of violence. No heavy clunk of shoes on floor tile. No soft throaty voice heralding his arrival.

The leering smile in front of me vanished abruptly, evaporating like steam wiped from a mirror, and was replaced by one of complete shock.

Pupils dilated so sharply that I saw them widen, and before I was able to work out what was happening, Jimmy Saxon, the kid in front of me, went hurtling through the air.

He hit the locker behind him so hard that the back of his head dented the door and he crumpled like his strings had been cut.

Sev moved like nothing I’d ever seen before.

Like water. Like fire. Like a warrior who’d woken from another time but remembered exactly who and where he was.

No, not a warrior. A wolf. A lone wolf. A pack animal unafraid of attacking on his own.

He moved so fast and with such precision, I barely noticed his arm draw back.

I did see his punch land though.

He hit Nick Jeffries, one of the kids who had been standing behind me, in the solar plexus, folding him in half so definitively it almost looked surgical. Nick dropped like a stone, spluttering and wheezing as he curled into a ball next to his friend.

Sev looked like nothing I’d ever seen before.

He looked nothing like himself, and everything like himself.

His hair was fanned out behind him, black silk that flicked like a whip.

His eyes were narrowed and focused, blacker than black, homed in on his targets like he was a predator and they were his prey.

Sev’s teeth were exposed, lips pulled back in a snarl.

His nostrils flared, and he made a low sound I’d previously only heard from animals.

His target was Seth Bower. Seth was the worst one of the group, though he usually had the least to say. He liked standing back and watching the carnage he caused. Laughing as he orchestrated misery for his own entertainment. He had a fucked-up thing for it, I think.

Sev reached for him as though he were reaching through one of my dreams. His movement was fluid. Decisive. Dangerous.

He took Seth by the throat. A big hand wrapped perilously around a neck that suddenly looked fragile, lifting him clear off his feet. Sev held him against the dented locker and gave him time to appreciate the situation he’d found himself in before starting to apply pressure.

“Think you’re a big man, huh?” Sev’s voice was different from usual. Raspy and raw. Alive with the promise of bad things.

It scared me, but I liked it.

He didn’t give Seth time to answer before he continued, broadening his address to include the two on the floor.

“This is the last time you talk to Teddy without something breaking. Something of yours. Something important. Something like a skull or a rib or a femur.” He stopped to take a breath, and when he exhaled, it came out with a low rumble.

“I don’t care how many of your bones I have to break, but I promise if you bother my friend again, next time, I won’t be this nice. Got it? ”