It wasn’t her most sensible idea, staying late at school alone. Not when Calli knew the drug dealer had already tried to approach her via other students once before. She had seen the Year 11 boys on numerous occasions in the corridor since and one of them made the shape of a pistol and held it to his head in a veiled threat.
But her biology teacher requested she stay behind and he was not the kind of man to disobey. “I want you to think about doing Scholarship exams at the end of next year,” the tall, bearded male said authoritatively, placing his bony backside on the side of the desk and folding his arms. Calli sat at the desk nearest to the front of the class, feeling a little perplexed.
“I’m not sure I...”
The teacher raised his arm, the curly red down on his arms looking orange in the sunlight which streamed through the wide window. “Don’t talk crap!” he reprimanded her. “You’re one of my top students and if you don’t get distracted,” he raised his eyebrows comically at her and Calli blushed, hearing Declan’s name unspoken. “I think you can have a crack at some awesome competitions next year. To be honest, you’re ready now. I’m just not sure of the age regulations. I might check them out.”
“It’s not my ability,” Calli hung her words out, not sure how to make the teacher understand. She looked at him for help, appealing with eyes filled with pain. The man ran his freckled hand through his mop of ginger hair, feeling awkward. Calli tried again, “My home circumstances are...complicated. I’m not sure where I’ll be this time next year, let alone...” She left the sentence unfinished.
Realisation broke through the fog of confusion on the teacher’s face, but the best he could come up with was, “Ah, I see.” His voice was tinged with disappointment as he saw his statistics plummeting and the prized head of department job moving further outside his grasp. Calli could potentially be his ticket to success, her and that boy genius he had seen her cuddling up to.
Calli stood up to go, pushing the chair away with the backs of her knees and offering a wistful smile in consolation as its metal legs scraped across the floor boards noisily. “If I’m here, Mr Pearce, I will definitely do the scholarship exam. I promise.”
He smiled at her sadly and nodded. Calli heard him sigh heavily as she closed the door behind her.
The school corridors were deserted apart from a cleaner, busily vacuuming the floors with a machine strapped to his back. Calli smiled at him and tried to avoid colliding with the sucker end of the pipe as she collected her books and locked her locker. He moved away, the sound of his vacuum making conversation impossible. A prickling feeling, like a thousand ants creeping across Calli’s chest made her stop dead suddenly, just inside the front doors to the courtyard and a sixth sense tapped out an urgent code to her uncomprehending brain. Calli felt unsafe. She chided herself to stop being so foolish and forced her eyes to rake the courtyard through the glass doors. Seeing nobody outside, she sighed and pushed the left hand door open, feeling like an idiot.
Outside the air was fresh and a cold breeze was washing across from Antarctica. Calli pulled her blazer closer to her body and paused as she heard the cries of a sports team carrying on the wind. She thought instantly of Declan, knowing his team was practicing lifts with a rugby coach from the local Waikato side. A sense of safety descended over her, feeling the pull of his masculinity across the space between them. Instead of walking home, Calli set off towards the back fields and the protection of Declan’s strong arms. She never made it.
The man snuck up quietly from behind, amazingly light footed for someone of such enormous build. He snatched at Calli’s ponytail, yanking her cruelly backwards and taking her breath away with shock. The school bag flew from her arm and the knife was at her throat before she could react. “Quietly now, girlie.”
His breath felt hot and fetid against her cheek and neck and as it wafted across underneath her nose, it smelled of garlic and stomach acid. Terror stopped her from retching, but the stench was enough to make her jerk her face away, receiving a sharp tug on her hair in punishment. He turned her around, keeping his hand wrapped through her hair and hard against the back of her neck, the knife resting snugly between the front of her shirt collar and her skin. Calli had expected the man from the bush, at least sporting a gimpy arm from the bullet wound. She had forgotten about his partner.
The man’s thick dark hair, unruly and wild on the mountain track, was now pulled harshly back from his forehead and fixed in place with some kind of gel or hairspray. Despite the playful wind, which gusted and then stopped as though not sure what it wanted to do, not a single hair broke ranks on his head. Under different circumstances, it may have been comical. He darted his piggy eyes left to right and then made a decision. “We’re going back over there now, girlie. Inside so you and me can have a little chat!” He punctuated his sentence with an accidental arc of fine spittle, which forced a lump into Calli’s throat.
Moving behind her body and standing far too close, her assailant pushed her toward the building and made her open the door herself so he could force her through. Calli groped blindly in front of her, her head pulled backwards against her neck and her view solely of the dirty ceiling and the bits of wadded up paper stuck at intervals along it.
He pushed her into the wall of lockers face first, not caring that she felt her lip crack and her front teeth go through her tongue in shock. Calli cried out and hated herself for the pitiful sound she heard herself make.
That’s not me! It was as though somebody else had made the pathetic mewl which issued from her broken lip and her rational mind kicked in with indignation. There were cameras over this area. She was surprised Declan’s fight with the Year 11’s hadn’t yet been flagged, thinking themselves lucky. Now as she considered someone’s lapse in checking the after-school tapes, she realised with horror that nobody would even know a Year 12 was murdered right here until they found her body. It was her own thoughts more than the man’s actions, which defeated her most thoroughly and Calli counted her blessings and try to make peace with God as she contemplated the end of her life.
The man spun her round and pounded her back into the lockers. He leaned in particularly close to her face, their chests touching and him clearly getting a thrill from their proximity as he kept hold of her hair. “Me and Nick are in big trouble because of you. My boss is not happy and that makes us unhappy too. We all lost out big time because of your messing around in our business and somebody is going to pay for the damage. That somebody is you, girlie.” He looked her up and down lasciviously and Calli felt the bile rise up in her throat again. “And how are you going to make the first payment?” the man asked her, his breath sour and revolting, coming in waves across her skin.
“Sod off!” she managed as the knife slid around her throat. Calli felt the sting of the blade, a sensation like a paper cut. It hardly compared to what she had done to herself and it galvanised her somehow. A familiar rush of adrenaline coursed through her veins and inwardly the girl rejoiced as the feeling of power and control numbed her emotional self. She focused on the pain, inner and outer and drew strength from it.
She screamed, not sure where the deafening sound came from, but figuring it had been inside her for a very long time. The man at first showed shock, struggling to cover Calli’s mouth with his fleshy palm. Carpe diem - seize the day. Calli pressed the self-destruct button fully and despite her sore bottom lip, clamped her teeth hard down on the layers of fat just underneath his fingers, holding on like a terrier and feeling the flesh tearing in her incisors. He yanked her head back so hard it felt as though Calli’s ponytail would come off in his hand. She felt the spiteful pinch as numerous individual hairs tore free of her scalp near the nape of her neck, serving only to make her clamp down harder on her attacker’s hand. She sensed her teeth coming together over a layer of skin and fat, determined to bite fully through. The fat man let go of her hair and used his force to spin Calli away from him. The action made her open her mouth slightly and let go of his fingers.
“Bitch!” he swore at her, stepping slightly backward, examining a line of blood on two of his fingers. The skin was forced into an unnatural peak, undoubtedly painful. Calli’s breath came in short pants of anger mixed with anxiety and she could feel her lip swelling inside her mouth. The man glared accusingly at her, dark, dirty stubble littering the pocks from an old acne problem. “You are so dead!” he threatened, nursing his painful digits.
Her back pressed hard against the lockers, Calli’s keen eyes surveyed the corridor, already formulating an escape plan. This man was dangerous. He had no boundaries and would hurt her without regret. He lurched for her with his other hand, seizing her slender throat in his podgy fingers and squeezing, rage issuing out of his brown eyes. Calli brought her knee up hard and contacted with the man’s groin, causing him to groan out loud and bend his body in a natural desire to protect himself. Calli brought up the heel of her right hand hard, knowing she didn’t have the room available for a fist and a proper swing. The man’s nose bent against her hand and they both heard the sickening clunk as the gristle suffered under the impact. This time, the man bellowed like a bull.
“What’s going on?”
The voice sounded incredulous and to Calli’s disappointment, was that of a fellow teenager. Instantly she dismissed him as a source of help. “Come near me again,” she hissed at the man, now slumped in half and not knowing which body part to grip hardest. “And I will kill you!”
Calli pushed past him hard, feeling his body weight shift alongside her as the man struggled to stay on his feet. Collecting a generous mouthful of spit, she pushed her way through the left hand door to the outside and released it onto the tarmac playground, relieving herself of any blood or skin belonging to the drug dealer. The thought made her feel instantly sick and she vomited a little with the next jet of liquid she flung at the ground.
“Calli, answer me!” Stuart’s tone was urgent and shocked. “What was that all about?”
Calli stooped to pick up her abandoned bag, retrieving it from the centre of the courtyard where it waited patiently for her return. She paused for a beat while she considered how to reply to this naive, untainted human being. “Nothing,” she said finally. This boy could never understand the mess she had gotten herself into.
“Don’t lie!” He was persistent, Calli would give him that credit at least. “There’s no way that was nothing! You beat him up!”
Calli turned towards Stuart and laughed, causing her lip to split open even further. It hurt and she winced. “You’re so funny,” she told the bemused boy in front of her. “It was the other way around but I held my own, eventually.”
Stuart shook his head, appalled at the way Calli rubbed the back of her hand across her bleeding mouth. He didn’t seem to know how to deal with this unusual girl, who broke across every stereotype rule he was used to. “I’m telling Declan,” he said like a petulant schoolgirl, turning on his heel and shifting his rucksack onto his shoulders more firmly.
“No!” Calli’s shout betrayed her instant desperation. She went after Stuart and gripped his arm above the elbow. “No! Don’t you dare!”
Stuart looked down at the blood stained hand clinging to his jumper and seemed repulsed. But he was too gentlemanly to break Calli’s grip. Calli looked wild, her hair hanging out of her ponytail and blood trailing from the cut on her lip. The way her teeth had pierced her tongue made speaking painful and caused even more blood to stain her lips and turn her front teeth pink, but the blood which ran from a cut on her neck was probably the most shocking.
Calli composed herself. “You can’t tell Declan,” she said, slowly and steadily, enunciating her words as though the boy was thick. “I made him a promise and this is part of me keeping it.”
Already Stuart’s head shook from side to side in denial. He didn’t believe Declan would ever be involved in something of this magnitude. Calli became desperate as the boy’s conscience overrode anything she could possibly say. He was going to tell Declan, there was no doubt about that. The consequences would be disastrous. Calli knew him well enough by now to understand the only option open to Declan would be to go next door to Simon and confess everything; that he accompanied Calli in the bush, shielding her from discovery and if she was very unlucky, Declan’s sense of honesty and fair play might lead him to spill everything. Simon would hit him, Calli knew that for sure. He was a man on a knife edge right now and he wouldn’t be able to resist taking out his frustration on the guilty teenager. He will kill him, Calli thought to herself. Not to mention the fact that I promised him, I would never let anyone know he helped me.
Intensity of feeling made Calli threatening and she tightened her bloody grip on Stuart’s arm and leaned close into his face, despite the fact he was almost a head taller than her. “I don’t expect you to like me,” she hissed. “But I’m with Declan and he does. He’s asked me to go to church with him on Sunday and I was seriously thinking about it. You do this and you will wreck everything and Declan will be in a whole heap of trouble, more than you could ever imagine.” Calli waited a beat for Stuart to catch up. “And you know what? You can forget me ever coming to your demented little cult, ever!”
Stuart’s mouth opened slightly in disbelief. She had him pinioned between the proverbial rock and a hard place. He wanted her to go to church, they all did. It was as though they had no facility for coping with girls like Calli, no manifest on how to deal with her raw worldliness and unpredictability. The safest thing to do with her was to convert her, clone her into one of them and discard the old before she could taint and muddy them with the awful pain that resonated from her. She challenged and confused them and Stuart visibly recoiled from her touch, as though he might catch some of the awfulness of the life force running through her veins. The teenager was terrified of being the one to stand in the way of destiny, Calli could see it in his eyes. “I promise,” she whispered. “If you say nothing, I’ll come to church on Sunday.”
Stuart gulped and made what he knew to be a stupid decision. “Ok,” he said, with a guilty look towards the rugby pitch and the sound of many heavy footed males pounding across the paddock. Declan was coming.
Calli let go of his arm, wiped her hand down her school skirt and walked away, leaving the boy staring after her in agony. She didn’t see the drug dealer, but wasn’t in any kind of mood to face him anyway. A miserable depression descended on her head, fogging up her senses and clouding her judgement. At the thought of the filthy man pressed up against her, rage lit like a fire in her heart and she promised herself if she saw him again; she would kill him. I’m trouble, her heart whispered relentlessly to her brain as she walked briskly home to Alison’s safe castle. I’m nothing but trouble.