Special

Portraits

"Hey!"

Daniel winced when Emily shouted angrily. Not towards him, but still scary enough. Sometimes he wished that he could be more like her, confident and not to be messed with.

"What is going on?" the teacher inquired and walked over to her.

"Someone threw a pencil case at me," she complained with gritted teeth and handed the case to the teacher who held it up.

"Whose is this?" he asked and Daniel saw Joe and Jonathan pointing at Matt, who shot those two an angry look before looking apologetically at Emily.

"Come see me after class, Matt," the teacher ordered and gave the pencil case to Matt who now looked frightened.

"Sir..." he tried to plead but the art teacher who usually seemed like a really laid back person cut him off.

"I said, come see me after class!"

Emily huffed and wiped some tiny paper balls off her table.

"They got thrown at me for the last ten minutes or so. I guess he did that as well," she explained when she saw Daniel looking at her, "like it was funny or something. Jerks."

"Oh," was the only sound that Daniel could make and he quickly turned back to his drawing. During the past few weeks he had gotten to know the side of Matt that he had thought he had left behind on the playgrounds of primary school and somehow it was hard for him to see him as a bully again. But maybe that's what he was? Maybe there was no other side to him? Maybe Matt was just using him as his personal private tutor and as soon as the exams were over he'd treat him just the same as before? Had it really been a good idea to develop that much trust for him? Daniel was captivated by the questions in his mind both in an intriguing and terrifying way, so much so that he didn't realise how little he got done in that time until the bell rang, announcing the weekend, and he stared at his only half finished drawing.

"You didn't get it done?" Mr Taylor asked when Daniel handed him the sheet of paper.

"No, Sir. I'm sorry."

The teacher looked at it for a while and then gave it back to him, "If you want to you can work on it over the weekend and hand it in next week," he suggested and returned Emily's picture as well. "The same goes for you, Emily. Just give it to me some time next week when it's done, alright?"

They nodded and Daniel breathed in deeply. The weekend. With one hand he held onto the strap of his backpack while the other one held the drawing which was too big to fit into the backpack so he just hoped that the wind wouldn't make any folds into it as he hurried towards the bus stops. Matt and him hadn't planned to meet after school and he was quite content with that. He just wanted to go home. The thoughts were still keeping his mind busy and he couldn't come to a conclusion on how to view Matt. What was he actually like? Was he just a bully, manipulating people until they were useful to him? But hadn't he also shown a different side? A side where he was afraid of judgement, a side where he was sensitive and soft? Or had that just been a farce?

Daniel was ripped out of his thoughts when the ground hugged his face very aggressively.

"Hey, loser," Joe snarled and Daniel felt his stomach tighten in fear. He scrambled to get back on his feet as quickly as he could. Once standing his face was met by Jonathan's fist which knocked him back against the wall that surrounded the school grounds. He looked down to where his drawing was lying in the dirt, ripped from the fall and now decorated with a print of the underside of Joe's shoe.

"Do we not get to hear a hello back?" Joe asked and Jonathan punched him again, this time into the stomach and the pain of it made his knees weak.