Authors: Clarissa Carlyle
“There are worse things than being labelled a brain,” Mr. Simmons continued.
“Trust me, Mr. Simmons,” Alex began, her voice cold. “I’m aware of just how cruel and wicked this world can be, and in relation to such things, name calling is most certainly nothing at all.”
“Do you want to talk about it?” Mr. Simmons asked delicately.
“Talk about what?” Alex questioned, but she could feel her hard exterior beginning to chip. Her true self and all the baggage she struggled beneath was threatening to break through. It didn’t help that the incident at the 7-Eleven still burned freshly in her mind.
“Whatever it is that makes you so angry.”
“I’m so angry?” Alex retorted, knowing full well that she was. Each day she had to control the rage building up inside her. She was angry that her father was dead, she was angry that her family had lost everything, she was angry that everyone else’s life seemed so happy and carefree when all hers ever seemed to be was hard. She missed her old life, in her huge house where she’d had her own bedroom, which even had its own bathroom.
If she closed her eyes, she could still remember her old room. The four-poster princess bed in the center of the room, covered in pale green and pink bed sheets. Everything had matched, from the curtains to the bed linen, even the wallpaper and carpets.
She’d had a dressing table and a four-door wardrobe, all in solid oak. Just before the shooting, her father had installed a chalkboard wall for her, where Alex would sit and write music or do advanced mathematics for fun. On the wall, she’d stick up pictures of her friends from school and scribble down messages and dreams. It didn’t match the feminine tone of the rest of the bedroom, but Alex felt like it was the strongest reflection of the woman she was becoming, and by installing it, her father showed that he recognized that in her.
While her mother wanted Alex to be a prim and proper lady, her father noticed the books she was reading and the music she was listening to, and he encouraged her to be her own person.
He’d even bought her a record player so she could sit and listen to some of her favorite music on vinyl discs. Her favorite was the album
Rumours
by Fleetwood Mac. But all those things had been sold. Alex was allowed to keep a fraction of the contents of her wardrobe and the record player, but in time that too had been sold to help pay the ever-mounting bills that seemed endless.
Alex wanted to go back to her old bedroom. To put on one of her favorite records and look out at the garden. She loved to sit by the window and watch the trees in the backyard sway in the breeze. Everything was so peaceful there; it was sanctuary from the craziness of the world. But now she had nowhere that was her own, no place she could run and hide in when she needed solace.
Her innocence, her privacy and her dreams had all been taken from her by the pulling of a trigger. It shocked her to think how one bullet could do so much damage, not just to the body it landed in but to all those connected to the person who fell.
“I’m angry because life isn’t fair,” Alex admitted to Mr. Simmons, casting her eyes down to the desk, not wanting to meet his gaze.
“I’m sure a lot of people your age think life isn’t fair,” he told her gently.
“But most people didn’t see their dad get shot in front of them when they were fourteen,” Alex admitted the truth, feeling the warmth of tears running down her cheeks.
“I’m sorry.” Mr. Simmons’ mouth fell open in shock. “I…I had no idea. I assumed you were just trying to fit in.”
“I am.” Alex’s lips began to quiver. She tried to stay in control, not wanting to cry here in her math classroom. But she was powerless against the wave of emotion that suddenly engulfed her. She lifted her hands to her eyes and began to weep.
Mr. Simmons was immediately by her side, wrapping comforting arms around her. Alex fell against his strong shoulders, grateful of the support.
He held her as she wept and shuddered, waiting for her sobs to die down to just soft muffles.
“I’m sorry.” Alex eventually pulled away from him, wiping at her eyes.
“It’s okay.” Mr. Simmons remained close.
“Your shirt is all wet,” Alex noticed.
“It’s okay.” Mr. Simmons shrugged. “It’s you I’m worried about.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to break down on you like that. I just, I don’t know. I put so much energy into pretending it didn’t happen.”
“Do your friends know what happened to your dad?”
“No.” Alex shook her head and then laughed. “Doesn’t really say much about our friendship, does it?”
“Why don’t you tell them?”
“Because I want to fit in. I don’t want to be the girl everyone pities.”
“I don’t think they’d pity you; they’d just feel for you,” Mr. Simmons told her soothingly.
“No, they’d pity me.” Alex sighed. “They’d pity me because money talks, even here in high school. They say we live in a world committed to free speech, but the truth is that whoever has the most money gets to shout the loudest. If people knew the truth, about me and my family, they wouldn’t respect me anymore. I’d become a nobody to them.”
Mr. Simmons pulled a chair up so he could sit beside her. She noticed how good he smelt, like coffee and cologne. He leaned up next to her and placed a comforting hand over her own. His skin was soft yet more rugged than her own, suggesting he did outdoor activities when he wasn’t teaching.
He looked deep into her eyes, and Alex felt her heart flutter.
“Do you want to talk about what happened with your dad?” His voice was so soft yet so deep at the same time. Alex felt the hair on the back of her neck bristle in titillation. She knew she had to calm her impulses, and so she decided to tell him about her father and what happened four years ago, knowing he was the first person within Woodsdale High who would have heard the truth.
“Growing up, we had everything,” she began whimsically. “We used to vacation all over the world and go skiing in the winter. Our family always seemed to have money. My dad was always so generous too, constantly buying me and my brother gifts. Once, he came home with a brand new bike for us both, which he’d bought on a whim. He was great like that, always making us feel special.
“I went to Gormell, which is a private school. You’ve probably heard of it. My brother and I were both enrolled there, and we had an amazing education. They nurtured us, and at fourteen I was quite happily solving complex calculus problems.”
“Impressive.” Mr. Simmons nodded approvingly.
“I used to love math,” Alex admitted shyly. “It was easily my favorite subject. That and music. I find comfort in the structure of it.”
“Me too.” Mr. Simmons smiled.
“So there I was, doing great at Gormell. There was talk about me one day going to Princeton, just like my dad had done when he was younger. I played the violin, I had friends, life was pretty amazing. Looking back, I see that it was beyond amazing, it was wonderful, perfect even. I had everything, and I didn’t even realize it.”
“And then.” Alex paused, not sure she could continue. She felt Mr. Simmons squeeze her hand tightly in reassurance.
“Mr. Simmons,” she began to try to vocalize how she felt.
“Call me Mark,” he suggested, and Alex felt herself blush. Knowing his full name made him seem less like a teacher and more like a guy.
“Well, Mark, then my dad walked into the wrong 7-Eleven to get me a soda, and some asshole put a shotgun bullet through his brain and destroyed my entire world.” Alex tried to sound flippant, but she shuddered as she spoke.
“That’s terrible,” Mark breathed softly beside her.
“The worst part was that I was there. I still have nightmares about it, how his body dropped to the floor, and I knew he was dead, gone forever.”
Alex was silent, feeling emotionally exhausted from reliving the most painful moment of her young life.
“Did they ever find the guy who did it?” Mark asked.
“Yeah.” Alex nodded numbly. “Not that I care. Finding the guy didn’t change anything. It didn’t suddenly give me closure.”
“So what happened after he died? Why did you leave Gormell?” Mark asked gently.
“After my dad died, like after we’d been through the funeral and all that other horrible stuff, the really bad things started to happen. My mom didn’t really discuss it with me at the time. I guess I was too young to fully understand it, but she discovered that we had no money. In fact, my dad had been in a lot of debt. A real lot. So much so that we were forced to sell our home and everything in it, and even then we hadn’t paid everything off.”
“That must have been difficult to come to terms with,” Mark sympathized.
“It was like it wasn’t just my dad who was gone, it was everything that had ever been connected to him. His car, our house, it was like every trace of our life with him was suddenly being taken away. There was nothing to hold on to.”
Alex rubbed her forehead wearily with her free hand. She’d never spoken to anyone about how she felt in those turbulent months after her father’s death, not even her mother. She’d locked up her feelings, determined to be strong for her mom.
“And so we had nothing. We were forced to move into a trailer,” Alex admitted shamefully.
“A lot of great people come from humble beginnings.” Mark tried to alleviate her apprehension over where she lived.
“I had to join this school, and I guess it sort of helped to deal with everything if I forgot who I was and invented a new version of myself. I stopped playing violin, stopped working hard in school, and became this other person.”
“So no one here knows you used to go to Gormell?”
“Nope, not a clue,” Alex clarified. “Because if they knew, I’d stop being Alex Heron the cheerleader and become Alexandra Heron the outcast. And I don’t want that.”
“I appreciate how desperately you want to fit in,” Mark told her. “You’ve been through something truly awful, but I don’t think throwing away your future is the best solution.”
“I’m not throwing anything away,” Alex argued. “My future is already planned out for me. After high school ends, I’ll have to get a job to help my mom pay the bills. College is just one of the dreams that died along with my dad.”
“Have you talked to your mom about it?”
“No, I don’t talk to her about anything like that. She just gets upset.”
“I’m sure your mom wouldn’t want you to forsake your future for her. You should talk to her about it.”
“It’s too late now anyway,” Alex said, her voice small.
“How is it?”
“I’ve screwed up my grades for the past four years. There’s no decent college that would take me now.”
“What if I could help you get into college? Like a decent college, like Princeton?” Mark suggested.
“Like Princeton?” Alex regarded him with suspicion. “How could you help with that?”
“I went there myself. And if you’re as gifted with math as I think you are, then I reckon we could make a case for you to apply for a scholarship under extenuating circumstances,” Mark told her, speaking quickly as his enthusiasm grew.
“I don’t know,” Alex sounded doubtful.
“Alex, if your dad could see you now, what would he think? Would he think you were risking your future happiness?”
Alex couldn’t speak; she’d always tried to push out of her mind how her father would judge her current situation. She hated the thought that she’d somehow lost her way and let him down. Growing up, she’d only ever wanted to make her parents proud.
“Can you help me?” she asked Mark, her eyes welling up with fresh tears.