she slipped ; malum

avery

The pale boy furrowed his eyebrows, because, who the fuck was Avery?

"Come on, let's get you to bed."

The boy's mother stopped him at the staircase. "Michael, we are not having a drunk stranger in the house. We're calling the police."

"Please, can we wait until morning?"

"He could kill us by morning." His mother exclaimed, stressing her dirty-blond bed hair.

The dyed redhead smirked. "With an attitude like that, you're never going to have any friends." He mocked, pulling the drunk boy upstairs.

Michael had dealt with drunk people too many times to count. Aspirin was already put on the bedside table, next to a half-empty (or was it half-full?) glass of water. He pushed the drunk boy onto the bed and walked out grouchily.

He went into his own bedroom and put himself under the covers, asleep in minutes.

***

Calum woke up, startled. He looked around. What the fuck was he doing in Avery's room? She was dead. He looked around, seeing AW + CH etched into the corner of the room. He got up. Everything was different. Cardboard boxes were stacked up in the corner, each labelled.

"Ave . . . Avery?" He said, nervously.

"You never stopped talking about her, you know?"

He turned around to see a boy sitting on top of a stool eating cereal and he literally did not understand how he didn't see him before. He furrowed his eyebrows. "What?" more to the point, what the fuck?

"You came here drunk last night, screaming your head off. I had to make Mum not call the police."

None of this was helping his hangover. He walked over to the bedside table and took the pills. "How long ago did you move here?"

"Like, a week ago."

Calum nodded. "Cool. I'm gonna go now."

Michael furrowed his eyebrows, putting his bowl of Froot-Loops aside. "Where you going?"

The Maori never answered, and headed downstairs, rushing out of the house. He wasn't there to make friends. He was there to see his girlfriend his drunk mind forgot was dead.

He ran back to his apartment, ignoring Mali yelling at him for not even texting him the night before. He sprayed himself heavily with deodorant so nobody could smell the drunk on him and walked out again.

Where was his bag?

It then clicked that he must've left it at the bar. He shrugged, because he could carry everything he put in his bag, anyway.

He ran to school, late to homeroom, but not late enough for it to matter. His teacher rolled his eyes, but marked him down anyway. He stopped short when seeing somebody was in his seat. It was that kid.

That guy that moved into Avery's place. Too shocked to do anything, he just stood there. He bit his lip, figuring that giving him the cold shoulder would help the boy not get a bad name on his first day of school.

"Get out of my seat." His expression was different from his voice. His voice was stern, warning almost, but his face read that he was relaxed. "Go and sit next to Luke, and you'll be good." He mumbled again.

Michael, confused as fuck, got out of the seat and went over to sit next to the boy called Luke. The blond greeted him, and then automatically said straight after some shit about Calum. Michael didn't ask about it.

Throughout the next two lessons, Michael watched as everybody took the seat the furthest away from the Maori, like he was the most repulsive thing ever. He turned to Luke, who had been having a deep conversation with Ashton about what he was going to do next year.

"Why does nobody sit near him?"

"Because he's a fucking freak." Luke spoke with such distaste that the redhead never wanted to ask again. He concluded that he would ask Ashton next time.

He put his head down and sketched out a few things. A bird that hung around the window, dying flowers that were on the teacher's desk, Calum. As soon as he realised he was sketching him, he stopped, not wanting the other two to think he was weird.

The boy looked so lonely, though. He had a full table to himself, but the seats looked like they had been abandoned for a while. Tentatively, he stood up, and walked over. He sat down in the seat opposite to Calum's.

"You should go back to your table." The tanned boy said, not even looking up from his work.

"This is my table."

Nothing else was said.