Beautiful Red Hair

Him

Beautiful red hair
One year earlier. 
I was running late for school. The school bus had yet another day decided to drive away just before I got to the station. So now, I was walking down the avenues. The sun was shining and heating up my skin. My red hair was all in twirls as it always was. I carried my heavy backpack on one of my shoulders since I thought it looked ridiculous carrying it with both straps on. I felt a bit awkward walking down the streets alone, I did not know what to do with my hands or if I should look happy or sad or maybe frustrated? I always looked over my shoulder. But as I was walking awkwardly along the street, continuously throwing suspicious looks over my shoulder, someone bumped into me hard from the side. I fell to the hard asphalt and scraped my hands and arms as this someone landed on me.
"Whoa! Watch yourself!!" I screamed at the person that had landed on me.
"Shit!" the person cursed.
It was Rory, with his blonde curly hair. He was wearing the typical jock jacket in the colors of Clearwater high school. He stumbled up to his feet as quick as he could and then proceeded to rudely yank me up of the sidewalk, then pushed me in through a door that rang a bell when we went through it.
"Hey! What the hell!?..." I yelled at him after he had pushed me up against a wall in the café we had just entered. 
"Could you just be quiet for a second please?" he then said to me rather rudely.
He looked nervous and sweat was running down his forehead. He had dragged me to the very corner of the café where you would not be seen by a by passer  passing by, looking through the window at the costumers trying to mind their own business. 
"Why should I be quiet!? Are you crazy somehow??" I whispered angrily.
He did not answered or even looked at me, it was as if I wasn't even there. He just tried to get a glance out the windows of the coffee shop. I was thinking that he might be searching for something, or someone.
"What are you starring at?" I asked, starting to lose my patience.
He didn't answer.
"Alright, I've had enough of this" I said and started to turn around the corner of the wall he had pushed me up against when he grabbed me by my arm.
"Wait!" he said and dragged me behind the wall just as a couple of guys turned the corner of the street.
We peeked at them from behind the wall in the coffee shop. They all looked very angry and were looking all over the street. Looking for the blonde stranger, I assumed. As soon as they gave up searching and headed back the way they came, the guy started laughing. I looked strangely at him and when he saw my unimpressed face he immediately stopped and started to scratch his head.
"Eeehm... sorry for kind of using you as a cushion to land on..." he said sincerely.
I tried to stare angrily at him, I wanted to be angry at him, but when I saw the genuinely sorry face on his face, I could do nothing but laugh at him.
"Wha... what did I do wrong? Do I have salad in my teeth?" he asked confused.
"What the hell was that??" I asked him behind all my laughter.
"I don't know!" he said and started to laugh with me. "It was stupid"
"Oh no! You literally slammed in to me in the street, pushed me inside a building and then held me against a wall, against my will. I am pretty sure that's kidnapping" I said jokingly.
He stopped laughing and all of a sudden he looked nervous.
"You're not going to report me to the police now are you?"
"Maybe, depends of what you have done" I said smiling.
Suddenly he looked proud
"Well... I might have stolen the locks of those guys lockers and put new ones on them, which only I know the combination of" He said and smiled a big smile of his, a smile that made me melt.
"Really? And that is why you had to kidnap me?" I smiled, just as I had done during the whole conversation.
"Yeeeahh..." He said unsurely. "I mean... those kids are pretty tough...".
"Well what did you do to the locks?" I asked starting to find this whole thing a bit amusing.
He didn't answer at first but instead reached down his pockets and let the locks slip out onto the floor. I couldn't stop laughing.
"You my sir... are a genius!" I said as he smiled.
"More like a full on Einstein if you ask me" He answered cockily.
"Aha! You are a narcissist. That explains why you go to Clearwaters" I said laughing.
"Hey!" he screamed in self-defense.
I looked at the guy standing right in front of me and thought that I had never seen a happier more confident person in my life. With big green eyes and a big white smile. I had never seen anyone so happy.
I missed school that day. Mr. Rory, as his name turned out to be, didn't have the balls to return to his school and I... well I had straight A:s and would survive missing one day of school. We hung out for the whole day and probably got in a little bit of trouble by doing it. I think Rory took me across the whole town and showed me all these beautiful places I had never ever seen before. And we just didn't have a care in the world. At least so I thought. I guess that we kind of became a thing after that. We would meet at my house, in the park, at each other's schools during lunchbreak. Even though we had to sneak each other in since our schools football teams were the biggest rivals in town. We had a great three months together. Even though it didn't last for so long. I would have hoped that we would still be able to remain friends after I broke up but, that never happened. Breaking up was the hardest thing I had ever done, I really liked him.... A lot. But it had to happen. For three months, the only thing I heard of him was by rumors, and not that great rumors. I heard things like: What happened to Rory? Or: Damn, it's not going so great with Rory. I heard that he had started smoking all kinds of weeds and that he had been kicked out of his own home. At first, I didn't believe them, he used to be so happy. But since he never talked to me anymore I guess I could do nothing but believe them. Only three months after we had broken up came the worst rumor of all. But this time it didn't come from a student who likes to gossip. It came from that awful sound. It sounded like an explosion. Nevertheless, it was no explosion. It was the sound of gunfire. In that moment, everything went quiet for me. I watched all the students in my school run for their life in slow motion. I was shocked. Everyone was screaming, they were running, crying. Some of them where just frozen though. Just like me. However, they were not as lucky as I was. Couse someone had decided not to leave me frozen in the middle of the gunfire. Someone knocked in to me and dragged me in to the library. It was Rory. He told me that everything would be okay. He told me that he would make it safe again. What he did there I did not know, but what I thought I did know was that he was not the one doing the shooting. Not at all, he was always so happy. I hardly got to look at him, hardly got to say anything to him that day before he ran out of that library door. He had tucked me under a table and just left me there without an explanation. He had looked different though. His hair had been greasy and he had been covered in mud. But I wished that would have been the way I was to remember him. Like someone I loved, someone that would make me smile when I thought of him. The public may have not known about us, but together we were like a finished puzzle. But those words. "I will make it safe again" would be the last I ever heard of him. And the last words that I had said to Rory Andrews were doomed to be the awful words "I don't love you anymore". Staying under that table, not knowing if he was alive, if I was going to live or if any of my friends were dead. Those were the worst hours of my life. That awful, awful sound filling the corridors of my school. The school that I had grown up in and learned to take my first steps into the adult world in. All of my friends that I had grown up with were screaming outside of that thin library wall. The shooting ended after, what the police says, only twenty minutes. I know that that's a long time, but it felt like it was going on for so much longer than only twenty minutes. It felt like hours and hours. Hours of waiting to crawl out from under that table, hours of not knowing who was okay and who was not. Hours of not knowing who I had seen for the last time that morning. Finally the police broke through the library door and dragged me out from under that table. I was in chock, they knew that and was taking me to the ambulance. As I was dragged out of the library together with the others that had hidden there, I saw the bloody mess. There were holes everywhere and in everyone. Blood splattered everywhere. Teachers and students. Alive and dead. How could they do that!? Just decide to drag out the remaining students to see their dead friends and teachers scattered all over. To walk the corridors and feel guilty that they survived and not them. It was awful to see them all like that. But that wasn't the worst thing. Remember how I said that I wished that I would have remembered Rory like that. You know, all greasy. Well, that is not how I am remembering him anymore. In fact, that guy I saw while being dragged out to the ambulance could not have been Rory. How I remember my happy, beautiful friend now, is him being arrested, with a gun in his hand and the blood from the people he had killed in his hair. Beautiful red hair he had called it. I just couldn't understand why and still to this day I can not. The police says that he was part of this Nazi gang. That he had had drugs in his system for days. Not been attending school or ever been seen at home since four month back. They say that that's when it all started going downhill for him. I had not known. We were still dating four months ago. I hadn't even noticed. All those times he told me he was going home he really wasn't. Every time he smelt like smoke it wasn't his parents cigarettes that smelled. The reason we never met at his school anymore, the reason we never went home to him. And all those times he told me he was studying, really he was hanging out with a bunch of shaved follies. This is my story. This is how it happened. I was too blind to see what was going on and because of that someone's life went to hell. I have to live with that the rest of my ruined life.