Toto and the Boys III: Dannie

Chapter 11

A piece of the past…

Troy was in a grumpy mood that morning. His mother woke him up too early because she and his father will be going to the farm they just bought a few weeks back out of town. Since they never had a servant and he never had a nanny, his parents had to drop him off to school before anyone else.

He stayed up all night going through the cycle of studying and falling asleep and waking up. It was exam week and he should have listened to Danica’s suggestion last week that he should have started studying by then instead of bugging her about stupid formulas he was sure he would never be able to make use of in the future.

As he walked inside the classroom with a frown on his face, he was surprised to see a form hunched on a chair at one corner of the room. His frown deepened. He slowly walked closer, taking note that the ghost stories circulating around the school was just pure fiction. But before he could stop it, his foot bumped against one foot of the chair beside him and the metal screeched against the wooden floor of the classroom, causing the hunched figure to move.

He was about to turn and ran as far as the entrance where the school guard was when he identified the form to be Danica. “Danica?”

She looked unkempt, not like her usual look. And her eyes looked tired.

“What are you doing here this early?”

She had a guilty look on her face before panic set in. “Don’t tell anyone.”

“That you’re very punctual?”

She blinked. “Yeah,” she stammered. “Yeah. I was here very early.”

“How early?” he tested.

“Very. Why are you here at this hour anyway?”

“I have crazy parents.” He walked closer to her. “Why do I get the feeling that you stayed here all night?”

“What?” She asked, her reaction of shock too late to be genuine. “Of course not.”

“You’re lying. You’re not a very good liar.”

“Then stop asking questions you know I’ll never give the right answer to.”

He shrugged and turned to walk to his chair.

“Brady,” Danica called.

“Yeah?” he asked as he opened his bag.

“Don’t tell anyone.”

He lifted his head and looked at her for a long time before he slowly nodded. She looked okay. No bruises or anything. What happened? “Of course.”

“Thanks,” she uttered in a low voice.

“Wow, that’s a first. You thanked me,” he tried to jest.

“Because it’s the first time you did something I should be thankful for.”

He just laughed and took out his notebook. It was time to cram.

PRESENT DAY

“Were you serious about what you said?” she asked, breaking the silence between them. They had been traveling for a few hours now and the darkness was not helping with their speed. Troy was trying to be careful.

“About what? I said a lot of things,” he asked, peering closer to my windshield as another vehicle approached from the opposite direction.

“About unfriending me,” Dannie baby said.