Page 12 of Heartless Heathens

“Maybe just a few minutes.” I mumbled to myself before I closed my eyes and gave up fighting the swirling vortex of doom that spun around my head at warp speed.

Ididn’twanttobe here about as much as Sonny, but I wasn’t half as vocal as he was about the damned situation. Felix was stoked to be here, and it was rare my little brother got excited about anything since our mother was killed. He wore this mask, so that everyone still saw him the way they expected him to present to them. We both carried our pain differently.

Outside, he was the happy Escura, the positive one, the one everyone could count on to lift their sorrows and bring them a morsel of joy in this fucked up world we now lived in. But inside, he was just another sad little boy who grew up feeling the pressure to make those around him happy, thinking it would keep him from feeling so lost and alone.

It didn’t.

But we had each other, and that counted for something.

The two hour ‘Faith and Dedication’ lecture Frollo stuck me in was slowly chipping away at my soul, and it had only been two days since the term started.

I walked through the crowd of students gathered at the door after class ended and they parted for me easily as if I was contaminated with the same virus that had killed off most of the world.

“Can’t tell if you enjoy it or if you hate it.” A blonde girl walked side by side with me and I lifted an eyebrow at her bravery. Most of these kids thought you’d go to hell just by bumping up against one of us. “Reesa,” she said, extending her hand out to introduce herself.

I raised my eyebrow higher.

“I thought this was an all-male campus?” I asked, not hiding my surprise.

“It’s not, there’s just very few of us that are stupid enough to take this risk.” She shrugged.

Well that caught my attention.

“Risk?”

“Frollo doesn’t really bother to keep his dogs on a leash,” she said, tucking her hair behind her ears.

There was a story there, I was sure of it. Though I wasn’t sure I was the person who’d care to ask about it.

“So what do you want?” I turned around once I realized she was still following me through campus.

“I’m just curious.” She practically sang it out. “About the chapel. It’s been off-limits for the last three years I attended NPC, then you guys come in and take it from Frollo.” She grinned like she had the hots for seeing the headmaster suffer just as much as we did.

“What are you curious about then?” I asked her.

“The ghost, I wanna know if she’s real,” she said and I scrunched my eyebrows in the middle, confused at what the fuck she was talking about.

“What ghost?”

“You bought the chapel but you don’t know anything about the ghost in the bell tower?” she asked like I was the stupid one here.

“I’ll let you know if I hear anything.” I gave her a deadpan stare, but she reminded me of one of those mangy little street dogs. The kind where if you accidentally dropped a french fry in a restaurant it would think it was for him, and then you were fucked with taking care of that thing until someone blessed you with running it over.

“Fuck off Reesa. We’re not friends.” I didn’t enjoy being so blunt, but it was way too fucking early in the year to have a stray stuck to me.

Actually that was wrong.

I did enjoy being blunt.

The mile walk felt like only a few blinks. It took a long time to be able to predict when an episode would hit, but as I got older, I could sense them. I got better at being able to find the warning signs so that I could find somewhere safe to get to until it was over. I took deep breaths, slowing my heart rate down as much as I could in hopes that I could push this one away.

I never could.

I rushed to my room as fast as I could possibly go, not bothering to check who was home or to alert anyone of my presence. Pushing the door open, I saw strands of silver and black hair cascading like a waterfall of liquid mercury, the head it belonged to doing its best to crawl out of my bedroom window.

I lunged forward grabbing a handful of hair. I pulled her back into my room, her yelp and cries of pain too loud to ignore but my vision was already going black and it was too late.

And there was no one to protect her from me.