Exotic - Chapter 45: Chapter 45
You are reading Exotic, Chapter 45: Chapter 45. Read more chapters of Exotic.
It became immediately clear that Truman High had been wasting precious time and resources on biannual fire drills because the second an un-forecasted alarm was sounded, every one of its three thousand students went into full survival mode. Three thousand panicking teenagers deciding it was every individual for themselves in unison did not make for the most orderly of exits.
"LINES! FOLLOW YOUR LINES!" Mrs. Cher was shouting, as a stampede to the door swept me from the scene of the crime. "FIND A HEAD AND FOLLOW IT! DON'T PUSH AND SHOVE!"
Her commands didn't hold a candle to the whooping of the alarm, and people continued to push and shove as they pleased. The swell of bodies all but carried me out into the harsh sunlight of the late morning as students spilled out across the pavement. The evacuation spot was the soccer oval, but I doubted anyone remembered that and I hardly had the authority to remind them.
So camp was set up just past the science block, way too close to a building that could have been on fire for all they knew, as teachers herded out the stragglers. The building continued to shriek its distress. The hand that had set it off felt slick with sweat, knowing I had potential landed myself in hot water for my stunt, but I couldn't make myself regret it. I could see Aidan, milling around on the outskirts of the crowd, kicking up gravel. Caleb was nowhere to be found.
I'd secured myself at least a little more time before another confrontation went down, and by that time Caleb would hopefully be able to brush him off like an insect. Jesus, knock it off McCaffrey, you're never going to play soccer again with that attitude.
I just needed him to talk to me.
Teachers were trying and failing to sort kids into their homerooms, looking desperately to one another for support. Some students milled around with their phones out, the sudden evacuation nothing but a minor disruption to their scrolling. Some were filming wide panning shots of the crowd. Some older students had taken off across the road the second they'd seen the outside, sprinting with the hustle that was usually reserved for prison breakouts, not truancy.
Someone calls my name softly from behind, and I turned, hopefully. It was Aaron.
"Well, it seems my plan was wholly unnecessary. On another note, the presently non-existent Truman Gay-Straight Alliance has fourteen new members, so... " he marvelled back at the wailing cafeteria building. "What god did you sacrifice your firstborn to for that kind of luck?"
I grimaced. "I seem to make my own luck these days."
Aaron gaped. "It was you? Miles! That's grounds for... like... super expulsion."
I didn't need reminding. But there was enough on my plate; my future at Truman High, which was looking less and less appealing by the second, was the least of my concerns. "Desperate times and all. Look, I need to find Caleb. Can you keep order from being reached for like... ten more minutes?"
Aaron quirked an eyebrow. "If I was anyone else, I might tell you I've reached my favour limit for the day."
"Well thank god you are entirely yourself," I took his cheeks in my hands and squeezed as he screwed up his face in protest. "I will spend the rest of my life making it up to you. If I come out of this alive, you will never have to so much as lift a fork to your precious mouth again."
Aaron extracted himself from my grasp and frowned, visibly bewildered. "One, gross. Two, help me kickstart Truman's first GSA and we'll call it even."
It was such an earnest request that I couldn't even fathom a one-liner to depart on. Or maybe the anxiety of my current situation was starting to cut off oxygen to my brain and my centre for witty remarks was the first to shut down. I gave him a commercial thumbs up, and when he spoke next, his voice was an octave higher, eyes blown wide.
"The boys' bathroom? Are you sure?" he stage-whispered to me, hand flying to his chest in melodramatic alarm. "They're not native to Australia... well if you were sure... I guess it could have come up the pipes?"
Eyes zeroed in on us from all around as prying ears caught the latter half of Aaron's performance, and voices were immediately raised as people digested and then regurgitated this information to anyone who might not have caught it. The volume of the crowd lifted in alarm, as people began to speculate on Aaron's vague statement; in high-school currency, it was as good as gospel.
I mouthed 'thank you', he shook his head at me wearily but fondly, and I broke away from him to begin my search.
A quick check of my phone showed a missed call from Lauren, received some time during the frenzied evacuation. She had probably figured I'd managed to talk to her brother by now and wanted to know what had gone down. Caleb still hadn't responded to my messages, but there was a checkmark below them that told me he'd at least seen them. I could only hope he'd take me seriously and had headed to the spot I'd requested, rather than think I was just desperate to snare his attention back by any means necessary. If he truly thought I was that pathetic, I determined to tell him to go fuck himself after I was done apologising and begging for forgiveness.
I fired another one-off.
if you needed any more indication this is serious, that was me.
please trust me on this.
I ducked and wove between the chattering crowds, cursing the difficulty of getting a crowd to part for anything less than six feet tall. Luckily, the weight of my backpack created an excellent battering ram, swinging back and forth on my shoulders like a pendulum. I kept my head down and my apologies concise as I trampled over feet and sent middle schoolers flying. When I was spat out on the other side, I broke into a sprint, before being quickly reminded why I rarely did. Strutting the weekends away in high heels left wicked blisters.
Luckily, no teachers seemed to catch me limping out of sight. I rounded the building and took the stairs up to the school entrance two at a time, bursting through the front doors with fervour. The blaring alarm was an assault on my ears, without a crowd of people to soak up the sound or double-paned glass to muffle it. With my hands clamped over my ears, I stalked doggedly down the corridors, in the direction of the emergency exit Caleb had dragged me through all those weeks ago. I didn't mean to bookend our relationship so neatly; it was simply a place I knew we wouldn't be interrupted. Unless someone actually used the emergency door, which was 100% more likely to happen in the midst of an actual evacuation. God damn it.
My phone buzzed with an incoming call, and I jerked it up to my face, breathing hard. The siren was giving me a migraine. I hit answer the second I saw the name Proust on the screen, but I knew in my heart it wasn't him. I hadn't saved the number Lauren had given me under Caller ID yet.
"Miles," Lauren began talking sans greeting which wasn't a good sign. She sounded panicked, voice strangled into a falsetto. She said something else, but I barely made it out over the deafening alarm. Just a jumble of words, 'number', 'please', 'don't, 'fuck'.
"What?" I yelled over the phone. I began to jog to the nearing emergency door, plugging my left ear with one finger. "Can I call you back? I'm kind of in the middle of something."
"Listen!" she insisted instead. "The number I gave you. Please. Tell me. You didn't. Use it."
"What?" I repeated, not because I couldn't hear her but because I was baffled by what she'd just said. "Of course I did."
She let out a groan. "Shit. Miles, I'm so goddamn sorry. I was distracted, and I was trying to text you under my desk because we're not allowed phones in class, and his name is right underneath Caleb's, and I just..."
My hand was on the bar of the emergency door and I was shoving through, hardly able to process what she was saying in competition to the pounding in my head. She wasn't the sort to ramble; I was concerned by what possibly could have caused her to trip over her words. "What are you telling me?"
On the other side of the door, I glimpsed dark hair, blue eyes, a tall and skulking figure, and my heart lifted for only a second. Before I realised that all those features didn't necessarily add up to the person I was looking for. The person that stood where Caleb should have been had their arms folded, face indescribably pissed, phone flipping gently in his fingers.
"I'm telling you I fucked up," I could hear Lauren's distress. "That's wasn't Caleb's number."
The emergency door slammed behind me with a resounding bang.
"If it isn't Elena Gilbert herself," Jake Proust said with considerable venom. In the shadow of the building, he somehow looked seven feet tall. "We need to talk."
"LINES! FOLLOW YOUR LINES!" Mrs. Cher was shouting, as a stampede to the door swept me from the scene of the crime. "FIND A HEAD AND FOLLOW IT! DON'T PUSH AND SHOVE!"
Her commands didn't hold a candle to the whooping of the alarm, and people continued to push and shove as they pleased. The swell of bodies all but carried me out into the harsh sunlight of the late morning as students spilled out across the pavement. The evacuation spot was the soccer oval, but I doubted anyone remembered that and I hardly had the authority to remind them.
So camp was set up just past the science block, way too close to a building that could have been on fire for all they knew, as teachers herded out the stragglers. The building continued to shriek its distress. The hand that had set it off felt slick with sweat, knowing I had potential landed myself in hot water for my stunt, but I couldn't make myself regret it. I could see Aidan, milling around on the outskirts of the crowd, kicking up gravel. Caleb was nowhere to be found.
I'd secured myself at least a little more time before another confrontation went down, and by that time Caleb would hopefully be able to brush him off like an insect. Jesus, knock it off McCaffrey, you're never going to play soccer again with that attitude.
I just needed him to talk to me.
Teachers were trying and failing to sort kids into their homerooms, looking desperately to one another for support. Some students milled around with their phones out, the sudden evacuation nothing but a minor disruption to their scrolling. Some were filming wide panning shots of the crowd. Some older students had taken off across the road the second they'd seen the outside, sprinting with the hustle that was usually reserved for prison breakouts, not truancy.
Someone calls my name softly from behind, and I turned, hopefully. It was Aaron.
"Well, it seems my plan was wholly unnecessary. On another note, the presently non-existent Truman Gay-Straight Alliance has fourteen new members, so... " he marvelled back at the wailing cafeteria building. "What god did you sacrifice your firstborn to for that kind of luck?"
I grimaced. "I seem to make my own luck these days."
Aaron gaped. "It was you? Miles! That's grounds for... like... super expulsion."
I didn't need reminding. But there was enough on my plate; my future at Truman High, which was looking less and less appealing by the second, was the least of my concerns. "Desperate times and all. Look, I need to find Caleb. Can you keep order from being reached for like... ten more minutes?"
Aaron quirked an eyebrow. "If I was anyone else, I might tell you I've reached my favour limit for the day."
"Well thank god you are entirely yourself," I took his cheeks in my hands and squeezed as he screwed up his face in protest. "I will spend the rest of my life making it up to you. If I come out of this alive, you will never have to so much as lift a fork to your precious mouth again."
Aaron extracted himself from my grasp and frowned, visibly bewildered. "One, gross. Two, help me kickstart Truman's first GSA and we'll call it even."
It was such an earnest request that I couldn't even fathom a one-liner to depart on. Or maybe the anxiety of my current situation was starting to cut off oxygen to my brain and my centre for witty remarks was the first to shut down. I gave him a commercial thumbs up, and when he spoke next, his voice was an octave higher, eyes blown wide.
"The boys' bathroom? Are you sure?" he stage-whispered to me, hand flying to his chest in melodramatic alarm. "They're not native to Australia... well if you were sure... I guess it could have come up the pipes?"
Eyes zeroed in on us from all around as prying ears caught the latter half of Aaron's performance, and voices were immediately raised as people digested and then regurgitated this information to anyone who might not have caught it. The volume of the crowd lifted in alarm, as people began to speculate on Aaron's vague statement; in high-school currency, it was as good as gospel.
I mouthed 'thank you', he shook his head at me wearily but fondly, and I broke away from him to begin my search.
A quick check of my phone showed a missed call from Lauren, received some time during the frenzied evacuation. She had probably figured I'd managed to talk to her brother by now and wanted to know what had gone down. Caleb still hadn't responded to my messages, but there was a checkmark below them that told me he'd at least seen them. I could only hope he'd take me seriously and had headed to the spot I'd requested, rather than think I was just desperate to snare his attention back by any means necessary. If he truly thought I was that pathetic, I determined to tell him to go fuck himself after I was done apologising and begging for forgiveness.
I fired another one-off.
if you needed any more indication this is serious, that was me.
please trust me on this.
I ducked and wove between the chattering crowds, cursing the difficulty of getting a crowd to part for anything less than six feet tall. Luckily, the weight of my backpack created an excellent battering ram, swinging back and forth on my shoulders like a pendulum. I kept my head down and my apologies concise as I trampled over feet and sent middle schoolers flying. When I was spat out on the other side, I broke into a sprint, before being quickly reminded why I rarely did. Strutting the weekends away in high heels left wicked blisters.
Luckily, no teachers seemed to catch me limping out of sight. I rounded the building and took the stairs up to the school entrance two at a time, bursting through the front doors with fervour. The blaring alarm was an assault on my ears, without a crowd of people to soak up the sound or double-paned glass to muffle it. With my hands clamped over my ears, I stalked doggedly down the corridors, in the direction of the emergency exit Caleb had dragged me through all those weeks ago. I didn't mean to bookend our relationship so neatly; it was simply a place I knew we wouldn't be interrupted. Unless someone actually used the emergency door, which was 100% more likely to happen in the midst of an actual evacuation. God damn it.
My phone buzzed with an incoming call, and I jerked it up to my face, breathing hard. The siren was giving me a migraine. I hit answer the second I saw the name Proust on the screen, but I knew in my heart it wasn't him. I hadn't saved the number Lauren had given me under Caller ID yet.
"Miles," Lauren began talking sans greeting which wasn't a good sign. She sounded panicked, voice strangled into a falsetto. She said something else, but I barely made it out over the deafening alarm. Just a jumble of words, 'number', 'please', 'don't, 'fuck'.
"What?" I yelled over the phone. I began to jog to the nearing emergency door, plugging my left ear with one finger. "Can I call you back? I'm kind of in the middle of something."
"Listen!" she insisted instead. "The number I gave you. Please. Tell me. You didn't. Use it."
"What?" I repeated, not because I couldn't hear her but because I was baffled by what she'd just said. "Of course I did."
She let out a groan. "Shit. Miles, I'm so goddamn sorry. I was distracted, and I was trying to text you under my desk because we're not allowed phones in class, and his name is right underneath Caleb's, and I just..."
My hand was on the bar of the emergency door and I was shoving through, hardly able to process what she was saying in competition to the pounding in my head. She wasn't the sort to ramble; I was concerned by what possibly could have caused her to trip over her words. "What are you telling me?"
On the other side of the door, I glimpsed dark hair, blue eyes, a tall and skulking figure, and my heart lifted for only a second. Before I realised that all those features didn't necessarily add up to the person I was looking for. The person that stood where Caleb should have been had their arms folded, face indescribably pissed, phone flipping gently in his fingers.
"I'm telling you I fucked up," I could hear Lauren's distress. "That's wasn't Caleb's number."
The emergency door slammed behind me with a resounding bang.
"If it isn't Elena Gilbert herself," Jake Proust said with considerable venom. In the shadow of the building, he somehow looked seven feet tall. "We need to talk."
End of Exotic Chapter 45. Continue reading Chapter 46 or return to Exotic book page.