'Murderer' He Whispered

8

The ear-cursing sound of metal scraping against the tiled flooring below made everyone in the crowded classroom cringe, especially Megan Smyth, who rubbed her exhausted eyes against her finger tips, trying her best to eliminate the deep bags under her darkened eye sockets before fixing her woolly yellow and green striped scarf tighter around her neck.

Brushing away the strands of her long, blonde hair that hung so low that she was almost sitting on the ends, she squinted up at the blackboard in front of her that held scribbles and spider diagrams of philosophical nonsense that she couldn't care less about. 

"You're a smart girl, Megan. If you get an extra class onto your GCE, then you can get a scholarship into one of those high colleges!"

Megan rolled her eyes, shoving her mother's overbearing words out of her already stressed out mind as she glared up at the clock accusingly, willing time to move faster.

As more students piled into the room that was slowly growing hotter by the minute, Megan suddenly became too aware of her surroundings, just like she did in every Philosophy lesson. She didn't care about the class, meaning she didn't know a single person in there, even though she'd been coming to lessons for two whole months now since the school term began again.

Scanning the young faces around her, chattering away to each other before the lesson started made her stomach curdle like bad cheese. She suddenly felt small and invisible, wishing the ground below her would swallow her whole, only freeing her until the lesson was over.

Reluctantly, keeping her eyes fixed downwards to avoid making awkward eye contact with anyone, Megan unbuckled her brown satchel back and tugged out her notepad that was worn and bundled with hundreds of sticky notes and extra pages stapled in, making the small notepad look like one of those large, ancient looking Bibles that were once owned by members of royal families who were long gone years ago, now kept in large glass containers in museums.

She flipped through the crumpled pages one by one as her frantically scribbled down notes flashed through her tired vision, before a pounding bang thundered next to her, causing her to yell out in panic as she almost fell out of the small, metal chair.

The light chattering across the room came to a sudden halt for what felt like a lifetime as all eyes fell on her, burning on her skin like splashes of boiling hot oil from a pan as she begged everyone to stop staring at her.

"Oops, my bad" a deep voice suddenly called out to everyone, sounding right next to her.

Blinking in confusion, Megan cast her eyes upward, spotting a tall male student, holding up his hand apologetically as he showed everyone a sheepish grin before sitting down, a pile of study books stacked in front of him on his individual desk next to Megan's almost empty desk.

Suddenly forgetting about the eyes that were fixed on her, Megan scanned the boy beside her as he sorted through his multiple notebooks and textbooks that made her jaw drop to the floor.

And I thought I had a lot of books.

Not being able to even count how many he had, Megan fully expected this boy to be a posh, snob head know-it-all, wearing a constant pout on his perfectly shaped and probably even balmed lips with neatly combed hair and a brand new uniform that was measured perfectly to fit his body size. 

However, as she studied him, she was shocked to see a student that looked just as stressed out and tired as she was, with holes worn into the sleeves of his woolly jumper which he'd slit his thumbs through, a tie that was almost completely torn off, tears wearing into the knees of his dark trousers, and a long, messy brunette fringe that hunger over his gentle, green eyes.