improvisation ✔️

♡ f o u r

I walked to school like usual. It was only 3k, nothing much.

The walk gave me time to think and clear my head before and after school.

I listened to music while walking but it didn't distract my thinking. Music helped. It healed.

It usually took around 30 minutes for me to walk, although the scenery wasn't great.

I lived in a housing complex with a few apartments; not that ideal but it provides. There was litter all over the streets and gangs gathered in huddles at night, so I didn't get out much at that time. It wasn't that I was afraid of them I just didn't want to get my ass beaten.

I arrived at school around 10 minutes before the bell for registration and went to the edge of the school's lot to smoke. My parents, as you could tell, don't really approved my smoking habits but why should I give a fuck about what they think?

I looked about the schoolyard at the shuffling of zombie-like students. They all seemed dead; what they needed was a nice walk in the morning to wake them up.

I'm starting to sound like my mother. I took a drag and blew the part of me that was turning into something of a forty-year-old woman out in a breath of grey, lung decaying smoke.

I knew it was bad but once I started I couldn't stop. That doesn't mean I smoke like 5 packets of cigarettes a day, I just wasn't able to give it up, I used it as a numbing device, to numb the pain from when I wasn't that good of a person. But now I'm better but couldn't give it up.

I went back to surveying the schoolyard. Then I saw her. She was sitting at that table she was usually at with her best friend. They were laughing together, unaware that there was someone watching them. I sounded creepy. I needed to stop.

I couldn't take my eyes off her; the way the early morning sun gleamed with her hair, the way her skin lit up, giving her a natural highlight. The way her smile lit up her face. The way she... I was being weird again.
Fucks sake stop it, Dylan.

They got up to leave. I checked my phone; 9:00 am. 5 minutes.

I followed her as she walked and she turned around to gaze over the school ground again. She looked at me and our eyes met. I looked away quickly and so did she.

I felt my face go hot.
Damn, she was cute. If only she knew how I felt.

'Hey, dickhead.' My daydreaming was disturbed by Cory, the quarterback, shoving me hard against the wall.

'Hello, Cory, nice to see you too.' I said sarcastically, smiling.

'Don't act all nice prick, I have a fight to pick with you.'
'Over what?'
'You got me in shit last week.'
'Ah yes, for having sex with Rebecca in the third-floor bathrooms? How did your parents react?'
'I'm not allowed out till I'm 20.'
'And whose fault is that?'
'Yours, you bastard, you told Mr Lee what we were doing.'
'I didn't, I simply suggested he check the bathrooms.'

'And then he caught us. Now I'm afraid I have to beat your ass.'
'Some other time maybe? I'm not really up to a fight.'
He grabbed my collar and pushed me against the fence, lifting me slightly so I had to stand on the top of my toes.
'I don't care what you feel like doing.'
'Cory, mate, let's not get too hasty here. Let's all just forget it ever happened, yeah?'
'One; I'm not your mate and two fuck you.' He said and slammed his gorilla fist into the side of my face.

'Thanks.' I said, not fighting back knowing that if I did I'd be the one to get in shit.
'You're welcome, here's another one seeing you liked that so much.' This time his fist made contact with my nose and I began to taste a metallic liquid on my lips.
He continued to hit me; twice more across the face; once in the eye and a final one in my stomach.

He walked away without a sliver of sympathy, but with his head held high thinking, he was the big man.
This made me angry, not the fact I had just been beaten by the ape but because he thought it was fun.

I walked to match his pace, grabbed the collar of his jacket, swung him around onto the ground and beat the shit out of the bastard.

'Mr O'Neill! My office. Pronto!'
Mr Lee.
Why was he always around when I was hitting someone and not when Cory did it. Mr Lee hates me enough.

'Mr Robinson, get yourself to the nurse.'

Cory gave me one last look of pure hatred before getting up off the floor, shoving me and walking off.

I made my way to where Mr Lee stood at the school's double-doored entrance.

'Again? What's wrong with you boy!'
'Not a hate, sir.'
'Doesn't seem like it. Now get in my office.'

I guess I had escaped a lecture from my parents this morning but I was going to be getting three more; one from Mr Lee; one from my mother, telling me how disappointed she was and; one from my father who would threaten military school, again.

I braced for the hours ahead.

**