Authors: Clarissa Carlyle
“No, I’m fine. Stop doing the creepy caring teacher act.” Alex folded her arms across her chest and stuck her chin out defiantly.
“I’m not the one acting,” Mr. Simmons told her. “There’s only us in here. You can stop pretending to be head cheerleader and just be yourself.”
“Excuse me?” Alex asked, incredulous at the accusation.
“I saw you at the game,” Mr. Simmons told her. “You couldn’t have looked less enthused as you sat on the sidelines. Hardly your typical head cheerleader. Normally girls in your position are just oozing school spirit to the point where it’s nauseating.”
“Maybe I just felt ill!” Alex tried to defend herself but heard her voice faltering. “Perhaps it was my period or something!”
Usually male teachers could be stunned into silence by the mention of a woman’s menstrual cycle, but Mr. Simmons was undeterred.
“Perhaps you don’t really care about your football team,” he suggested, watching her intently.
“Am I here to have my school spirit put on trial?” Alex remarked angrily.
“No.”
“Then can we just get this over with? I need to get home.”
“Big plans?” Mr. Simmons asked.
“Oh, huge, I get to look after my brother all evening while my mom works her second job.” Alex sighed wearily and then straightened in her chair, realizing that she had said too much. She’d never before confided in someone about her home life, and it shocked her that she’d made such a revelation to Mr. Simmons, of all people.
He seemed to notice her unease and didn’t press her on the topic any further.
“Well, I threatened calculus, and I always make good on my threats,” he told her, tossing her a calculus textbook, which had been perched on his desk.
Alex grabbed it and surveyed the cover. She knew the book. She’d done the problems it contained before, not that she was about to tell him that.
“Have you done much calculus?” he asked her.
“Some,” Alex answered vaguely.
“Could you give me a practical example of its use?” Mr. Simmons asked.
“Race car driving,” Alex responded without missing a beat. “Calculus is used to determined fuel used over distance and speed as the variables are constantly changing, which makes other mathematical formulas unreliable.”
“Yes. Very good.” Mr. Simmons smiled.
Alex opened the book and began to browse through the problems inside. She realized after a few minutes that she was smiling to herself and felt an unusual sensation. She felt comfortable. It was the first time she had felt comfortable since joining Woodsdale High four years ago. It was the first time she had felt like herself.
Mr. Simmons watched her go through the textbook, delicately turning the pages, and found himself intrigued by her. On the outside, she was the obnoxious cheerleader who cared about no one but herself. But beneath that there was more going on, and he was determined to unlock the secrets within Alex Heron.
“Why don’t you leave early?” Mr. Simmons suggested when they were forty-five minutes into the detention.
“Really?” Alex asked, surprised. She was supposed to be there for an hour and a half.
“Yeah, I think you’ve learned your lesson.”
“We’ll see,” Alex responded cheekily.
“Have a nice evening with your brother,” Mr. Simmons added casually as Alex was almost out of the door.
She froze and turned back to him. Her heart caught in her chest. She’d said too much, she knew that, and now he could potentially ruin everything.
“I lied,” she told him flippantly. “I was hoping you’d take pity on me and let me finish early.” She smirked at him.
“My mom is actually in Paris right now, in France. She’s a buyer for Prada.”
“That’s an impressive job,” Mr. Simmons mused. “Do you miss your mom when she’s away?”
The question made Alex’s façade falter. She’d not been asked whether she missed anyone for a long time, and the suggestion made her feel light-headed. She gasped slightly but managed to regain her composure.
“I’ll see you in math tomorrow,” she told him politely, unable to answer his question because she didn’t even allow herself to know the true answer to it.
“What does your dad do?” Mr. Simmons asked as Alex was about to leave.
Her body turned to stone upon hearing it, and she felt her hands begin to shake.
She turned slowly to face him, her eyes misting up with tears.
“Never speak to me about my father,” she told him, and then she fled from the classroom, her frantic footsteps echoing down the empty halls.
****
Alex ran out of the school, out past the parking lot, and continued to run hard for five blocks until her breathlessness kicked in, causing her to abruptly stop, clamping a hand to her chest as her lungs heaved.
Bending forward, she placed her head between her knees, panting. As she waited for her breathing to stabilize, she realized that she was shaking. Alex tried to calm down, tried to shut Mr. Simmons’ question about her father out of her mind.
“Focus on the present,” the advice from her psychiatrist echoed in her mind, even though it had been four years since Alex had heard it.
She smelt the air. It smelt hot and heavy, carrying the scent of burned rubber and exhaust fumes. Looking around, she took note of the street she was on. Somehow, in her haste she had bypassed her usual walk home, where she would walk past and enjoy the nice homes of suburbia, and was instead headed towards a more dilapidated part of Woodsdale, a part of town that she didn’t recognize.
The road was sparsely populated. There were apartment buildings, but many of them appeared to be abandoned, their windows boarded over. A couple of cars were parked in the street, but only one looked driveable. The others were missing key elements, like tires or side mirrors.
This was the part of town that people actively avoided. Behind it lay the trailer park. Alex would be home in as little as fifteen minutes if she pressed forward and braved the streets ahead.
Continuing to focus on the present, Alex felt the gnawing burn of thirst scratching at the back of her throat. She reached into her backpack only to remember that she’d finished her bottle of water in fifth period.
Glancing around, she spotted a 7-Eleven on the other side of the street. If she walked home through the dilapidated vicinity ahead, she’d have time to quickly pop in and grab a drink. It wasn’t the most comforting idea she’d ever had, to walk through a bad part of town at dusk, but she desperately needed a drink. Her legs began walking over to the store before her mind had a chance to make a decision.
As Alex approached the 7-Eleven, she noticed how eerily familiar it seemed, as though she was having déjà vu.
It was the way the store sat at an angle that she noticed; it wasn’t even with the street. Also the parking lot, it was unusually small with only five places. Five seemed an odd number of spaces to allocate to a store, when upon further inspection they could easily have accommodated at least seven.
Alex entered through the glass doors, her mind still bemused by how she recognized such strange, small details like the number of parking spots out front. Three of which were currently vacant.
The store was brightly lit, and Alex squinted in the sudden garish light. She scanned the various shelves, looking for something to drink. Each branded product leapt out at her in neon packaging, trying to lure her into purchasing it.
Glancing up, she noticed the refrigerators on the far wall and headed over to them. The double-door fridges were full of a variety of beverages from simple water to bright green-colored liquid, which promised to give Alex twelve hours’ worth of energy. Fumbling through the change in her purse, Alex noted that she could only afford water. She opened the glass door and reached in and grabbed a bottle. It was icy cold to the touch, sending a chill from her hand right up into her spine.
“Brrr.” Alex tried to shake off the cold as she closed the door. She turned and headed towards the cash register, where there was just one checkout clerk on duty, a middle-aged man with a kind face.
Alex managed to smile in a friendly gesture as she approached, but her smile quickly fell away. She recognized the approach to the cash register. She had seen the way the aisles fell back to reveal the checkout area before. She’d been in this 7-Eleven some years ago, but then why couldn’t she remember it?
Pausing on her way to the register, Alex forced herself to think. To remember how she knew this place, and then it came to her with frightening brutality, causing her to crumple to the floor, casting her water aside.
The bottle rolled away from her as Alex crouched on the floor, covering her head with her hands. She remembered being in that store, she remembered going to get a drink from the fridge and taking it up to her father, who had been waiting at the cash register. Only she never had the chance to give it to him.
A fourteen-year-old Alex had carried her bottle of Coke up to the register, smiling broadly, but she froze when she saw her father, who motioned for her to stop and lower to the ground. It was only when she saw the man with the shotgun that she realized what was going on.
Alex and her father had been driving back from a music recital when she complained to him how thirsty she was.
“We’ll be home in a minute,” her father had told her from behind the wheel of his silver Mercedes.
“But I’m thirsty now, Dad,” Alex had protested.
“You can have a drink when you get in.”
“But Mom only has iced tea in the house.”
“And what would you like?” her father asked.
“A Coke,” Alex told him cheekily.
“A Coke?” Her father mulled over the suggestion. “I suppose you did play exceptionally well tonight, Alexandra. I’ve never felt so proud to see you playing violin.”
“So can I have a Coke?” Alex asked innocently.
“So long as you don’t tell your mother, you know how she harps on about how it can rot your teeth.”
Mr. Heron pulled up into the absurdly small parking lot of the 7-Eleven, which sat on the fringes of what was dubbed a ‘bad area.’
“Jeez, do they have enough spaces?” he scoffed, stepping out in his designer suit, his daughter dutifully following him, wearing the uniform of the private school, which was located just outside of Woodsdale.
Alex had eagerly run straight over to the drinks section, desperate to enjoy her illicit bottle of Coke. The fact that her mother had made it contraband in their five-bedroom mini-mansion made it all the more desirable to a teenage Alex.
She reached her blazer-covered arm into the fridge and picked up the nearest bottle of Coke. Then she paused briefly to see if there were any other snacks she could pick up, any other sweets she could talk her father into buying for her. During this time, the doors to the 7-Eleven opened and closed as someone else entered, but Alex didn’t look up. Nor did she notice how the atmosphere within the shop suddenly changed.
Satisfied that she wanted only her Coke, Alex turned and headed towards the cash register. Her father was already there, probably buying mints or his own secret vice, cigarettes. He turned and spotted Alex and waved her down to the ground, his expression intense.
In fearful confusion, Alex obliged, dropping her drink. The plastic bottle rolled away from her, fizzing up the contents inside.
Glancing back to her father, she spotted the man standing beside him, directing a shotgun at his head. The store clerk looked terrified and kept reiterating that the man with the gun could take whatever was in the register.