The Beauty of Death

Chapter 2: The Discovery of Nothing

To my surprise, the next few weeks had gone by without any incidents. Well, none with Jessamine anyway. I had actually managed to keep my cool around her.. Which consisted of me avoiding all eye contact and leaning as far away from her as possible. The one time she did try to talk to me, I just pretended like I was zoned out and shrunk farther into my corner. She decided to let me be after that. At least until the day I ended up covered in a slushie.

It happened on a Monday. The day that everyone hates getting up from their pleasurable weekends and takes it out on the world. I was usually more cautious on Mondays and stayed farther away from the population as possible, but my luck was just shitty. My morning had gone alright though; I was only shoved into a few lockers on accident and had been called on in class once. The slushie incident happened during lunch and turned the rest of my day into hell.

There were only a few people left in the lunch line, with most of the kind-of-edible food gone and the cardboard-looking leftovers remaining. I never ate at school since I didn't feel like having uncontrollable abdominal pain for the rest of my life, so being in the lunch line was merely a rare occurrence for me. Being shoved into hard and metal objects made you work up a sweat. The line was moving slowly and I had finally gotten to the register with my overpriced and room temperature water, which meant I was hastily shoving money at the lunch cashier and mumbling for her to keep the change.

That meant I had not been making eye contact, and had not been looking up like a normal person. And also unlike a normal person, a jock in a varsity jacket had been walking backwards in my direction with a large cup filled with my doom. In what felt like a moment happening in extreme slow motion, the jock and I collided as he was turning around. Slushie had been sprayed all over my body. I could even feel in unmentionable places, to my discomfort. Of course the other jocks just laughed and I stood there like a deer caught in headlights, until the voice of an angry angel had snapped me out of my frozen reverie. 

"Can't you learn to walk forwards like a normal person? Gosh! Look at what you did! And that could have been me! If you had gotten that gross crap on my clothes, I swear.." Jessamine had said, glaring angrily at the now dumbfounded group of idiots. I hadn't noticed her being only a few feet away and almost in spray range, but now my face was almost as red as the slushie in my hair.

"Are you alright? Do you need me to help you carry some of your stuff so you can go to the nurse? Or to your locker," she murmured in a softer and friendlier tone to me. I had just nodded and peeled the backpack off my shoulder, handing it to her shakily and trudging my way to my locker. I could faintly notice the sloshing sound my shoes made as we walked out of the cafeteria, but I ignored it as Jessamine decided to strike up conversation with me.

"So, I'm Jessamine. You can call me Jess or Jessie, though. Jessamine is always such a handful to say and I get pretty sick of hearing it. Oh, look at what that imbecile did to you. Are you okay? God, people should really watch where they're going.."

I mumbled an incoherent response as we stopped in front of my locker, her holding out my bag at arm's length so she wouldn't get anything on her fancy clothes. She noticed that I didn't really talk much, and quieted her chatter until I had successfully opened my metal death-trap and pulled out my gym clothes. I took the bag from her hands, emptied the semi-wet contents into the locker, and shut it with a loud bang. All the while working up courage to thank her and say a coherent sentence.

"I.. Um.. Thanks for ah, helping. Appreciate i-it," I said, my voice sounding squeakier than I had wanted it to. She had just smiled, flashing those brilliant, white teeth at me. "Aha! So you do speak. Well, it was no problem. I'll wait here for you to change and we can go back to the cafeteria together, okay?"

That had not been expected, but I had just nodded my head in agreement and hurried my way to the bathroom. It hadn't taken me long to wash myself up and peel the soaked clothes off of myself, though it did take a bit to work up the courage to walk back to Jessa- Jessie. Eventually, I did, and she had kept to her word, waiting for me while leaning against my locker. That smile flashed at me again and she linked our arms together. That had made me blush as we made our way back to the cafeteria, and it had made her notice. Her laugh had filled the halls, giving me a sense of security. But I should have known then that that was how she roped in her victims. 

She made them feel special and like she was safe with them, until she was done with her play toy and had decided that it was time to dispose of it and move on to the next one. If only I had known..