***The characters referenced in this story are Sixth-Formers, aged 18, or they are teachers. No character is any younger than 18***
The three weeks of detention begin on the Tuesday.
Detention consists, in this case, of after-school detention for an hour in one of the English rooms, part of the Main Block. In this case, room M18. Sephalla is there when I arrive and we're overseen by Mr Mayhew, who takes register and then has nothing to do. There's no work, nothing due, just a pointless punishment. A waste of all our time. And Mr Mayhew disappears after the first ten minutes, leaving me with my (former?) bully.
Sephalla is, aesthetically-speaking, no different today. Her makeup is the same, her outfit the same, that kind of pseudo-slutty gothic chic, and she's every bit as outwardly intimidating. But she plays on her phone, a few seats to my right, and stays quiet. The only sound is the artificial and actual blurring of her delicate yet sizeable fingers working away on the touchscreen of an upsized, monster-suitable smart phone.
It feels awkward, being alone with her. There's palpable tension and not least because, glancing over at her, I find myself with something like butterflies in my stomach. "You're pretty cute." Did she really say that, or do I remember it wrong? Did she really mean it? Did anything actually happen yesterday between us?
'You going to stare for the whole hour, or...?' Sephalla says, not looking up.
'Sorry.'
She sighs, shoots me a brief look, and rolls her eyes. 'Jeez, you're pathetic.'
Great. Back to business.
'I thought you weren't gonna bully me?'
Sephalla chuckles. 'Oh, come on!' She kicks backwards, forcing her chair out, and leans one arm over the backrest, angling towards me. Her immense chest, in a cleavage-revealing black shirt with some monster band on its front today covering her belly, bulges impressively. 'I ask you a question and you apologise. Give me a break, dude. How is that not pathetic?'
I find myself staring into the depths of her oily black chest, then meet her beautiful searing gaze, and turn away with a blush. She's intimidation personified. Scary tall, scary strong, scary scary, and scary hot as well.
'Am I really that bad?' she says. Sephalla raps her knuckles on the desk, and puts down her phone. 'Do you just suck at talking to girls?'
'You give off a lot of mixed messages, man.'
She shrugs. 'Can't exactly disagree with that.' She raps her knuckles again. For a while that's all she does, idly fidgeting, making noise. Eventually, Sephalla says, 'Did everyone read my black book?'
'Are you asking if I did?'
'Did you?'
I nod.
'And?'
'It's not really for me to say.'
Sephalla snorts. 'Oh, yeah? Stop being a pussy, Jake. Did it offend? Did it upset? Did it scare you, or make you dislike me even more? Did it make you laugh? Did you enjoy the fact that everybody's laughing about me now?'
'I thought it was kind of sad, actually.'
When she says nothing, I find it in me to turn to her. The nightmare is staring at me, studying me, waiting silently for what, an expansion on that suggestion? She doesn't look angry, merely...I don't think my response was expected.
'Sad how?'
I shrug. 'Sad, dude. Sad because it's someone's inner thoughts and fantasies, not light reading for a laugh. But maybe I'm just not a cunt.'
She does this really little laugh, a half-note, half-heard, and smiles funnily. 'You're too soft.'
'Because I don't hate you?'
'Because you have every reason to hate me, yeah.'
'Do you want me to hate you, then?'
She frowns. 'It'd be less embarrassing.'
'Embarrassing? You don't seem to be shy and sheepish all of a sudden. You're still in school, after all.'
After a pause, Sephalla says, 'If you wrote dirty stories about a real person, and they read them, and their first response was to think it a shame that the stories got out...wouldn't you be embarrassed?'
She turns away and picks up her phone, returning to whatever distraction previously held her attention. It hits me, dawns on me, that yes, it wouldn't be ideal. To be angry would provoke a response, to at least feel justified that your fantasies should remain fantastical. To be smitten, I suppose, would be ideal.
But to be in a sense apathetic? Is that what I've been? Or more importantly, as that what I seem to have been?
'Why on earth would you want me to impregnate you?'
Sephalla visibly swallows and blushes, and for the first time perhaps ever -- maybe excluding those brief intervals yesterday -- seems genuinely vulnerable. Exposed somehow, she stares paralysed at the phone's light, fingers hesitant, posture suddenly rigid like a statue. The nightmare is gone, replaced by a facsimile of herself. Frozen in time.
'You'll think I'm weird.'
'Already do.'
She rolls her eyes. 'Wouldn't you...wouldn't you want to?'
'Knock you up? Dude, I don't want kids.'