For the Love of Justice

Chapter Three | First Days

Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore. - L. Frank Baum



* * * *



Let me just explain a couple of things about starting a new school.

That part in movies when the new girl is nervously walking through the halls whilst every single student on the premise is staring at her, does not happen.

Firstly, because it would be physically impossible to be at such a vantage point where you could be visible from every classroom, hallway, field and cafeteria.

Secondly, who was seriously that interesting to stare at? Maybe Miley Cyrus with her new hair do and thug outlook on life, but I was far from Miley, both style wise and on the thug level.

And thirdly? High school students really didn't give a flying toss about a new student. If they didn't associate with them directly, or have an outright interest on what you might look like or wear, then you may as well be just another kid waiting for the bell to ring at 3pm.

I suppose that's why I had been so relieved when I'd reached the main office that morning, because not a lot of people had paid an outright interest in me as I walked into school grounds. Sure, there were a few stares, but they had lasted as long as three seconds before those people had been staring at someone else.

That, and I had actually already made a friend over the past couple days of unpacking. Aria McNeill and her parents were our neighbours, and she'd been kind enough to let me come with her to school so I wasn't lost or overwhelmed.

Aria was sweeter than candy, honestly. She was like one of those lollies that was soft on the outside as well as the inside. And she was gorgeous, which at first I was kind of like 'oh great, I've met one of the barbie girls of school', but she was far from it, actually.

"Hey, you got your paperwork?" Aria said, appearing beside me again suddenly as I exited the office.

"Uh...yeah, but this map might take some getting used to." I laughed, a little nervously, but her reasurring smile but me at ease again.

"Just stick with me. If you survive today, then you'll be fine for the rest of the year."

"Wait, what do you mean 'survive today'?" I asked, anxiety hitting me directly in the stomach again. "I thought you said the students here were nice."

"Well," Aria dragged out the 'e', her pretty face scrunching as she tried to form a sentence to sooth my worries. "I may not have mentioned something earlier."

"What?"

"Your sisters a detective, right?" Aria asked as she started to lead me out into the busy white hallway.

"What does that have to do with anything?"

"Then she'd know all about the gang here." I started to frown. Nothing about this conversation was making sense. Yes, Spencer was a detective. Yes, she probably knew about the gang here. But what did this have to do with my first day and whether I wouls survive it or not?

"The gang has deep roots all around town, Indy." Aria continued, grabbing my schedule from my hands and leading me towards wherever my locker was. "You'll notice the students who are involved instantly. I'm not one who supports judging someone by first glance, but staying away from those students might be in your best interest."

I nodded slowly in response, taking in this information. I was going to listen, obviously. Making friends here was a priority, but I also was a careful person, gangs weren't on my list of top things to get involved in.

"Thanks for the heads up." I grinned. "But how will I know which students are who?"

"Trust me," Aria said, her dark, almost black hair swishing over her shoulder as she turned her head to look at me. "You'll know. It's sort of like an invisible divide between them and other students."

"So it's like the Greasers and the Socs from The Outsiders?"

"In a way, yeah."

"Great," I muttered, storing that information away for later. For a moment, the boy from the hospital flashed through my mind, and I wanted to ask Aria about him. Whether she knew someone who would match his description. She could even be a friend, or he could be a part of the gang kids she'd just been telling me about.

Or maybe he didn't even go to this school.

I shut my mouth that had opened in preparation of speaking. I wasn't going to ask. That little part of my first few days here was going to stay between me, myself and I for a little while longer.

"Hey Aria, can you show me where my homeroom is?" I asked her after she'd successfully tracked down my locker.

"Sure, you're in the same class as me anyway. Let's go."

I smiled, squaring my shoulders to get ready for the day ahead of me. Things like gang students and mystery guys and worries could wait until after at least third period, right?

The thing I thought of as we walked into homeroom however, was the haunted, grey eyes of the stranger who had kissed me.

And like everytime they flashed into my mind, I briefly wondered if he curious about who I was, too.



* * * *



"Could you have taken any longer? What were you doing, putting on makeup?" Jag's voice assaulted me the second I climbed into the backseat of Archer's truck Monday morning. Sending him a scowl, I slammed the door behind me, in no mood for the assholes sarcasm right now.

"You're voice so early in the morning is really unpleasant."

"So is your face, but you don't see me pointing it out."

"Sometimes I wonder why you and I are friends." I groaned, closing my eyes and leaning against the back seat head rest. I heard Archer's laugh from the drivers seat, the truck beneath me humming to life as we pulled away from my house.

"Oh please, who else would put up with you?" Jag scoffed, turning to face me. When my eyes met his, he winced, mocking a concerned expression. "Maybe you did need that makeup. You look like hell."

"Archer, can you pull over so I can throw him out of the truck?"

"Sorry man, I really don't want to be late to my first day of school." Archer laughed again, shaking his head. "But you can do what you like with him once we get there."

I felt my lips quirk upwards slowly, letting the tenseness in my body evaporate a little. I had been dreading school returning for weeks now. It wasn't that I was scared to go back, it was more the emotionally draining side of facing all of the people who used to be my friends everyday.

Sometimes, sitting in a class full of people who avoid you for the same reason you avoid yourself gets really tiring.

Plus, it was never nice seeing Samson these days.

What was worse then seeing him, was having to sit in a room full of other students and Samson. The elephant was always, always in the room when we had classes together, the other students pretending not to notice but making it painfully clear of the history and the tension between us.

"Sometimes I wonder why I'm friends with you two." Jag grumbled, folding his arms across his chest. "All you do is abuse me."

"I have never laid a finger on you." Archer argued, clearly enjoying the new found and fast friendship the three of us had struck up.

"Verbal abuse is a real thing, Archie, it's not a made up thing adults say so their children don't look like little pussies when someone says something mean to them. You feel me?"

"I feel you, man."

I laughed. Archer had literally slipped in effortlessly to mine and Jag's routine. Ever since the night we'd dragged him home to my house, we'd all been joined at the hip.

Partly because we liked the guy so much, but also partly because he understood. Archer had known all about the accident, he'd heard the towns talk, read the newspapers, you name it.

But he'd never judged me, not like the rest of the town. He was one of the rare few who hadn't blamed me, and even though I would never admit it, that had helped me trust him more than I trusted most.

The reason Archer had been so wild that night at the fight club had been a mystery too, until he'd told Jag and I a few days later, obviously finally calm enough to spill on the topic.

And it hadn't been pretty.

'My sonofabitch father', as Archer had put it, was a bad man, in short terms. He had grown up sheltered from a lot of what the man had done, because his mother had tried to keep him away from that side of his father during his earlier years. Everyone thought Archer had grown up with it all, and I suppose, in an artificial way, they were right.

He had the truck, the house, the looks and the superstar jock status in town to seem like the perfect, All-American football star the town knew and loved.

But when you put his father in the mix, it was a whole other story.

"He was one of those men who put pressure you all day, every day. I had to be perfect at everything I did, always, because a son who was not the top of everything was a failure in his eyes. He thought that if I was perfect, then I would be strong, like a real man would be." Archer scoffed, one hand running through his blonde hair as he continued to speak. "I didn't know about him beating my mum until a few years ago, and trust me, I was furious. It was the first time I remember ever really seeing alarm in my dads eyes when I cornered him one day in the kitchen, about to lay into him for even thinking about touching mum."

"I thought he had stopped beating her, I honestly did. The bigger I grew, the less and less I saw of it. I guess that's where I had been naive, because dad hadn't grown scared of me, he'd just grown smarter. The other night, I got home and I walked in on him throwing mum into the coffee table. I just lost it."

Archer shook his head, his eyes lifting to meet mine. "I don't really remember getting to the warehouse, I just know that I had to hit someone, anyone, and it couldn't have been my dad, because if I had hit him that night, I wouldn't have stopped."

"Marley, you still with us back there?" Archer's voice broke the memory of him telling Jag and I about his father, and I looked up to see we were parked in the student parking lot at school, the truck turned off and Jag and Archer staring at me intently.

"You okay, dude?" Jag asked, his joking manner gone and replaced with the concern he only ever really showed with me or Archer.

"Yeah, I'm good." I said, opening the trucks back door as I grabbed my backpack from the seat beside me. "Better get this show on the road, right?"

I heard two other doors slamming behind me, and the beeping of Archer's truck locking. Two other shadows met mine on the apshalt, one either side of my own, and I glanced up to look either way, Jag and Archer grinning at me as we walked.

"Why do I feel like the bearded lady at the circus?" Archer whispered the moment the other students noticed the three of us. "You weren't joking about the staring, were you?"

"Welcome to Southlake High School." I muttered under my, breath, looking around me as we walked towards the doors of school. I met the eyes of the students brave enough to stare back, feeling my comfort blanket fall over my face in the form of blankness.

They could stare and whisper all they wanted, I wasn't going to cave under the scrutiny.

"Still want to hang with us?" Jag asked in his usual amused, cool voice, his dark eyes slicing through the other students as they skillfully avoided us, well, me, whispering to their friends the minute they thought we wouldn't hear.

"We're not the three fucking musketeers for nothing, right?" Archer replied, bumping knuckles with him. "But seriously, do they always stare at you like that?"

I nodded, making sure my blank mask was still on my face. "How would you look at the guy who killed the schools sweetheart?"

Archer's face contorted in a grimace at my blunt words. "Fuck, Marley-"

"Heads up," Jag said in a low voice. "That little prick just turned up."

I felt myself tense again momentarily, before instructing myself to relax. Turning in the direction where Jag was looking, I lifted my eyes, spotting Samson almost instantly as he walked onto school grounds with a carefree grin on his face and a few of the football guys flanking him.

High schools golden boy. What a fucking joke.

I wanted to walk away, I really did. All I had to do was walk inside and go to homeroom, but for some reason, my feet wouldn't leave the ground where I stood. That familiar anger that I always battled with when I thought of Samson boiled hotter, starting in my stomach as Samson approached, obviously too wrapped up in his perfect little life to notice me yet.

That guy had been my best friend since kindergarten. And the minute something bad happened, he deserted all of that to save his own ass.

When Harlow and dad had found out I hadn't actually been the one driving the car that night, they had tried to understand why I hadn't told the police that it wasn't me.

I didn't, partly because they already believed that I had, so saying Samson had would have just caused more bullshit and heartache and Jamie's family really didn't need that. They had already been distraught when they discovered Jamie had died, the last thing they needed to hear was the fact that Samson, her boyfriend, had been the driver.

The other part of the reason as to why I hadn't spoken up was because sometimes, when Samson glanced at me, he got this look in his eye. It was guilt, in there somewhere, slowly eating him up, and I got a sadistic sort of enjoyment out of watching him suffer from his own demons. When he had that guilt in his eyes, I could see the weakness in him, and that was the petrol that fuelled the fire in me.

Comsuming him from the inside conflicted a lot more pain on him than actually saying it outright. He could deny it to other people, but because I had kept his promise from that night, because I had stuck to the story that I had been driving, he couldn't deny it to himself.

And one day, that guilt was going to kill him.

Maybe I was a bad person for wishing that on him.

But then again, he'd helped ruin my life, why shouldn't I have a little fun in watching his fall away too?

Jag was tugging on my arm when Samson finally saw me, standing at the top of the steps, right outside the doors to school. His steps faltered, but only slightly so it wasn't noticable to anyone other than me, and I watched his face drain a little in colour, getting a kick out of making him feel uncomfortable.

"We should get to class." Jag muttered in my ear, tugging on my arm again. "Come on man, he's not worth it."

"You're right." I said back, still staring at Samson even when he dropped his eyes to the ground, unable to hold eye contact with me any longer. "He's not."

And just like that, I flicked that switch that turned me off from the stares and the whispers from the other students. The anger, that deep, never ending anger, still boiled under the surface, but it was easy to ignore as the days went on.

Ignorance was bliss, in my mind.

"We all got the same homeroom, right?" I heard myself asking as we walked through the hallways towards the classrooms, just as the bell rung overhead.

Sighing, Archer nodded. "Yeah, with Mr. Smith?"

"Ah, the much loved chemistry teacher." Jag grinned, an amused glint in his eyes. We reached Mr. Smiths class, and Jag grabbed the door handle, twisting it and pushing it open as he locked eyes with Archer and smirked. "This man loves me more then my parents do."

"And by that he means not very much." I murmured, stepping in after Archer as Mr. Smith's voice attacked us from his desk.

"You've got nerve, Jag, showing up late on your first day back. Did my lectures of respect and puncuality not have any effect on you whatsoever last year?"

But I stopped listening to Mr. Smith's droning voice the second my eyes met a pair of very, very, shocked green irises sitting beside Aria McNeill.

Fuck me.

It was the girl from the hospital.

This could get interesting.



* * * *



Chapter three is hereee! Sorry if it's messy, I needed to get the introduction sort of chapters out of the way so the plot can truly start to take place now...I hope you like this chappie! I've got major, exciting things for this story, and there will be lots of Harlow and Flynn + Sophie in this book too, so if you read FTLOTL and you're missing those guys, then they'll be here too!

:) Let me know what you think!

x

Oh, and if you haven't noticed, I've been putting quotes at the start of each chapter that I think can relate to Marley's story (: And if you don't get this chapters one, it's kind of like he's back at school so his world's changed again, so he's not in Kansas anymore, ya feel me.

I just liked the quote, alright? And The Wizard Of Oz. Shoot me.