Total pages in book: 124
Estimated words: 118125 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 591(@200wpm)___ 473(@250wpm)___ 394(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 118125 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 591(@200wpm)___ 473(@250wpm)___ 394(@300wpm)
He wasn’t avoiding the faculty lounge.
Never.
...or too sleepy to drag himself back up to his classroom to eat there.
Alone.
For some reason, right now, he just...really didn’t want to be alone.
He let his mind unfocus as he leaned against the wall and nibbled at his sandwich, washing it down with sips of coffee so hot they nearly scalded his tongue—but at least the caffeine was percolating in his brain, pushing him a bit closer to actual alertness. Maybe that was why he finally wandered toward Chris, at one of the long tables beneath the tall windows with their peaked shapes and tiny segmented panes. Chris was practically holding court; people gravitated to his friendly warmth and magnetism so easily, and many of the boys on the football team and from various other little sub-groups that people always seemed to need to define their identity all clustered around as if the only identity they needed was their admiration for Chris.
He seemed at once gently oblivious to it and cautiously aware of it, and Rian couldn’t help but notice how Chris was careful to pay equal attention to everyone around him, not ignoring a single boy who tried to get his attention. He really was a good kid, Rian thought. Kind. Honest. Forthright.
So seriously, what was he being so sneaky about?
What was he hiding, and why?
Rian still hadn’t thought of any way to get an answer out of Chris without crossing this ridiculous intangible line of What Shall Not Be Spoken, laid out by the Grand Poobah Walden himself. But as his gaze drifted over the table, he found himself caught on the boy sitting at Chris’s right side, just two seats over. His name was Merry; that was what jumped to the forefront of Rian’s mind. Merry. One of those names that he just knew came from having celebrity parents, though Merry apparently attended under a false last name so Rian wasn’t quite sure who had given him that unusual moniker.
What he was sure of, though, was that Merry wasn’t doing particularly well in Rian’s third-period junior class.
Which meant it wouldn’t be suspicious at all if he asked Merry to stay after school one day so he could talk, and try to get to the bottom of what was going on. If there was something Chris was involved in that was distracting him from practice, it could be behind Merry’s inattention and lack of focus, too. Merry and Chris weren’t overly close from what Rian had observed, but if he could recall correctly, fishing back through idle memories of impressions and captured moments...he’d seen Merry in the group of boys who went off-campus with Chris over the weekends, more than once.
Birds of a feather.
Maybe Merry and Chris would squawk together.
Not today, Rian thought.
He’d want to talk to Damon first, and maybe Damon—
He groaned, and pressed his forehead to the rim of his coffee cup.
It was really, really annoying how with almost everything today, his first thought went to Damon.
It makes sense, he told himself. This is both his problem and yours. It has been since he came looking for you. Chris is your student, too...and it’s easier to keep Damon in the loop than catch him up after the fact.
That’s all it was. Really.
He pushed the thought away as the bell rang, though, a fifteen-minute alert warning students to start cleaning up and teachers to get ready to return to class.
Rian nipped the rest of his sandwich down, tossed back the last of his coffee, and made his way back upstairs to his classroom with a renewed sense of purpose making his shoulders straight and letting him lift his chin high.
The rest of the afternoon passed uneventfully; in last period, Chris seemed back to his normal cheerful, determined self, completely focused on etching out the last fine details in the dry clay prior to the first bisque firing that would get the wisteria sculpture ready for proper painting. He didn’t even seem to notice Rian watching him.
But as soon as class ended, he was gone, barely stopping to wash his hands in the sink before he snagged his backpack and escaped out the door before anyone else.
And Rian had a feeling he wouldn’t find Chris anywhere in sight, when he went down to the football field.
Still...
He felt a sinking sense of disappointment when he was right.
Beyond the back of the school, past the little rowing pond they liked to call Whitemist Lake—or, more often, Isabella’s Lake, after the legend of the girl in the lake who granted lovelorn wishes—and through the trees was a little paved path of crushed white shells, worn and embedded smooth into the dirt by the passage of many feet. The afternoon was brisk and bright, the cool wan autumn sun reflecting off the white of the shells to turn them silvery, as Rian slipped down the path and through the last fringe of trees that tapered down toward the bottom of the hill.