Faithful

Chapter Three

I stared straight ahead of me, eyes wide with horror as fear crashed through my entire body. I opened my mouth to scream, but no sound would come out. I had to swallow back bile as it started to make its way up my throat.

What had he told them? Had he told them about – No. I choked on the air that I was breathing in. He wouldn’t have, would he?

I punched the locker in front of me, causing the whole thing to start shaking. The sound of the crash rang through the empty corridor, making me flinch away from it. The noise rebounded off the walls and came thundering back to me several times over. When the noise finally died down, I started running to where I hated to go but needed to be, ignoring a teacher that poked his head out to see what the noise was.

I ran blindly through the halls, my breathing getting heavier and heavier.

I stepped into the warm office room and walked slowly up to the counter, shaking my head lightly. The secretary smiled at me sympathetically as she saw me coming. I raised my eyebrow at her and she nodded slowly before bowing her head for a few seconds. I blinked. What was she doing?

"Your here to see the principal?" She asked me sadly when she looked back up.

I met her pale blue eyes and tried not to raise my eyebrow again. "Um, yeah...” I told her. My voice was quiet and too thick with confusion for her to understand me. She looked at me questioningly. "Yes I am," I repeated. She glanced at the phone that sat parallel to her computer before she looked back up at me.

She pointed at the plush couch behind me and told me to take a seat. I hesitantly walked over to it and sat down, my body falling into the soft fabric. The school was somehow rich enough to afford a nice lounge, yet they couldn't even fix up the classrooms. How typical. Apparently they wanted the office to look good so future mums and dads would like it. And that isn't fiction, that’s an actual fact that I managed to pick from the principal brain during a meeting one day. They wanted the new adults to think the school was nice and the place was well groomed. If only knew what it was actually like, they'd probably run off screaming with their hands covering their eyes.

I glanced up at the secretary in time to catch her staring at me from behind her modern framed glasses. She smiled again before turning back to her computer. She had never smiled at me before. In fact, most of the time I got sent here, she glared at me. She hated me almost as much as I hated the principal. Why the sudden change of heart? Had something happened? Had she found out something about me? I gulped and quickly dried my eyes again. There was no way I was crying.

I could have easily picked her brain and found out exactly what she was thinking, but I didn’t really need to. The violent waves of sympathy that were rolling off of her and into me were indication enough that she had found out something. But there was no way that she could have found out.

Nobody else knew beside the doctors, my dad and myself. Why the doctors would tell was lost on me. Why dad would tell was even more confusing.

He'd promised me he wouldn’t say a word. He'd wanted to tell people but I had forced him not to. He had probably told his work mates soon after, but he didn't work anymore so he no doubt had nobody to tell. Even in the state that he lived in these days; he wouldn’t break a promise to me, would he? I mean, when he doesn't think too much about what happened, he's fine, he's a normal dad. But the days they he doesn't think about the accident severely outweighed the days that he does.

Which got me thinking. If he was having a bad day and somebody asked, would he or wouldn't he tell? If he was moody and upset, and somebody asked, would he give up pretending and just tell? What if he was drunk and somebody at the bar asked him? Would he let it slip out accidently, not say a word, or boisterously tell the whole pub?