Deerstalker - a Sherlolly story

A Disappearing Act

“Nice to meet you too, Molly.” Sally said in the same cool voice. “Come on, I’ll show you around.”

Before Molly knew it, Sally had taken her under her wing. She showed Molly where they had classes, what you could and could not do with certain teachers, but most of all she informed Molly on all the gossip about her classmates. By lunchtime, Molly could probably tell every dirty detail – secretly filling up bras in 8th grade and  cheating on girlfriends included - about the lives of every student she had met that morning. Fortunately, Sally turned out to be not only a good source of gossip, but also of friends. Thanks to the extremely self-assured girl, Molly was suddenly eating lunch at the busiest table in the cafeteria.

“So, why did your parents decide to move here?” Meena, a girl with dark-brown curls and braces asked Molly. When they had arrived at this table, she had immediately decided to sit next to her. Compared to Sally’s other friends, Meena was a bit more tranquil (and less intimidating).

“Well, my dad wanted….”

“I’LL SMASH THAT MASSIVE BRAIN OF YOURS !” Molly was interrupted by shouting from behind her. She was certainly not the only one surprised by the loud threat, as the whole  cafeteria went quiet.

“COME ON THEN, SKINNY BOY!” As she turned around, Molly saw that the yells came from an exceptionally large boy. His two similar sized friends stood beside him, as he challenged a very pale and thin student to a fight.

“Oh, I really would not advise you to start threatening me,” The slender boy, whose black curls formed a stark contrast with his pale skin, started to say in a  patronizing voice. He seemed surprisingly unimpressed by his massive opponent. 

“You see, it might make me give away a little secret about you. Like the fact that you slept with Claire, who just happens to be Jake’s girlfriend. Oops! There it went!” As soon he spoke the words, madness descended on the cafeteria.  A girl sitting at a table in the back, suddenly burst into hysteric sobs.

“What the hell?!” one of the large boy’s friends yelled at the boy he stood behind just seconds ago. He looked like a time bomb made of rage and left hooks and he was about to explode. “I WILL KILL YOU!”

The boy, apparently called Jake, swung his massive fist right at his friends face. The other boy ducked and hit his opponent in the stomach. A load groan escaped Jake, but he stood tall and tackled his friend. When both boys were on the floor trying to crack eachother’s  skulls,  the headmaster came rushing in.

He grabbed the back of Jake’s shirt, forcing him to stand up, and yelled: “MY OFFICE. NOW. BOTH OF YOU.”

In spite of all the commotion, Molly’s eyes found the pale boy. She noticed him quietly slipping away towards the back door. Just before he exited the cafeteria, he looked back once more. Expecting no one to see him, his eyes immediately darted to the one person that did.  His gazed pierced through her and a small smile formed on his lips. He winked at here and left so fast after that Molly was not even certain it had happened.

“What did just happen?” Molly blurted, she could still feel her heart pounding in her chest.

“Oh, that happens quite a lot around here. Thanks to that freak,” Sally let out an annoyed sigh.

She did not seem very shaken over the strange and aggressive incident, nor did anyone else at the  table. Molly even heard Meena start to chat with the boy on the other side of her about some new song she just heard.

“What do you mean?” Molly asked Sally. Molly started to wonder if this whole day was just a creation of her paranoid mind, expressing her anxiety about going to a new school in some doom-scenario filled dream. Maybe if she pinched herself really hard, she would just wake up lying under her pink bed sheets.

“Well, you just met our school’s favorite freak. Mr. Sherlock Holmes,” Sally started to answer, her voice filled with overly dramatic contempt. “There’s something seriously wrong with that kid. It is as if he enjoys being beat up, because he keeps asking for it.”

“You… you mean the boy with the black hair?” Molly tested carefully, trying not to show her desperate interest.

“Yes, that’s him. He is always causing trouble, it’s getting tiring.”

“Why? He did not seem to have do anything wrong just now. Well, except for…” Molly wanted to hear more about this mysterious stranger, but at the same time felt the inexplicable need to defend him.

“Exactly!” Sally interrupted her. The subject of Sherlock Holmes (fortunately) seemed to really get her going. “He is constantly blabbing, telling all these things about everyone. He has probably ruined at least one relationship of everyone in this school. And he enjoys it! He loves seeing people hurt! He gets off on it!”

“Also, he is really strange, ” a red-haired girl Molly had forgotten the name of added. “I mean, how can he know all those things? He’s probably some sort of creepy stalker.”

“A psychopath, that’s what he is.” Sally concluded, just as the bell rang. 

The rest of the day Molly tried really hard to put everything that happened during lunch out of her mind. Still she could not concentrate on anything her new teachers told her, because she felt like those cunning blue eyes were still watching her.