Brightly Burning Bridges by Ivy Wild
My wriststill ached from when I’d fallen last week on my way up to the front of the classroom. Of course I suspected it was Silas, but I couldn’t prove it and he wasn’t going to fess up—or apologize.
I hadn’t meant to start the Cold War that was currently raging between us. But when I’d gone to school on the Monday after his party, I couldn’t bring myself to look at him. All I saw when I did was the way he looked at me right before he’d stolen my first kiss.
A girl’s first kiss wasn’t supposed to be traumatic. I’d yearned for mine since I was a little girl. All I wanted in the world was for boys to like me. Shallow, I know. But when you looked the way I did, the need to be accepted and liked burned hotter in my soul than most of my peers. It probably had something to do with the fact that my father ran out on my mother when I was born. I think that was literally the definition of “Daddy Issues.”
When you yearn for something, you imagine it, over and over and over again. And every time you picture it, the situation gets further and further from reality. At least that’s how it is for most girls. I think this is how Bridezillas are born into the world. From young girls reimagining their weddings a million times until their vision requires a circa 2009 Taylor Swift style horse drawn carriage.
But, to be fair to myself, my dreams about my first kiss had stayed relatively grounded. My mother always told me she’d named me after clear skies, but I rarely had my head in the clouds. Girls like me couldn’t afford to dream. Reality smacked us in the face too often for our heads to get inflated.
However I imagined my first kiss, I did not imagine it the way Silas had delivered it. He tasted of booze, marijuana and another girl. It was awful and it flipped my stomach upside down, because even though he was vicious to me, if some higher power had given me the ability to take that kiss away, I wouldn’t. The moment his lips pressed against mine, it felt like every nerve ending in my body lit up.
He was so beautifully damaged.
And I was the only person he’d ever showed that side of himself to.
Problem was, I wasn’t sure which side of Silas had kissed me.
Not that it seemed to matter anymore. His stunt in the classroom a week ago and the way he’d laughed about it afterward told me he’d very clearly gotten over me. I should have expected the teasing to start up at some point. He was easily the most popular boy in the high school just for existing. He didn’t do any sports, he wasn’t a member of any clubs. He was just Silas Jenkins. The notorious Party King.
Every girl wanted him and every guy wanted to be him. The only people at the school that weren’t entirely infatuated with him were himself and until recently, me. I tried to put Silas out of my mind as I made my way over to my locker to grab my books before catching the bus home.
I kept my head down, but the hushed murmurs as I passed by in the hallways had my stomach in knots. Normally people didn’t pay much mind to me if I kept to myself. I was just the ghost of a girl that faded into whitewashed walls. So, all this attention was disconcerting.
I rounded the corner and the world dropped from beneath my feet as I looked up. A crowd had gathered around my secluded locker spot and I suddenly understood the reason for all of the hushed whispers.
White paint and glue had been slathered all over the front of my locker and across the windows next to it. To make matters worse, the culprit had thrown a tremendous deal of white feathers against the drying liquid. The entire area looked like a deconstructed pillow with me at the center of it.
I decided I could do without the books in my lockers but one of the teachers spotted me and they called out my name sharply.
“Skyler!”
I sucked in a breath and tried to turn around and put on a fake smile. I wasn’t quite sure how Silas did it, because mine was paper thin and cracking down the center.
“Did you do this?” It was Ms. Clifford. She was a little heavy set, with dark brown hair and naïve eyes.
My eyes widened at her accusation. “No,” I said quietly, trying to curl in on myself as the number of onlookers increased due to the promise of drama.
“Well, if you didn’t, who did?”
How was she so dumb? She was supposed to be a teacher. Did she not remember that Silas had clearly tripped me in her class just a week before? Or did her students mean so little to her that she couldn’t be bothered with a severe case of bullying?
“I don’t know,” I lied. Implicating Silas would have played out two ways. The first, is that he would have gotten called to the office, but that would only spur him on to behave worse. Unfortunately, Silas’ father donated a good deal of money to this school. There was no way that administration would even put Silas in detention, let alone suspend him.
The second option is that I would implicate him and nothing would happen at all. And that was probably the worst of the two options. Because in Silas’ eyes, it would mean he’d won.
So, I stayed quiet. Acted like I couldn’t possibly understand why someone would want to do something so horrendous to me and let Ms. Clifford announce my fate without due process of the law.
“Well, I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to clean this up, Skyler. Please call your parents and let them know they’ll have to come and pick you up later this evening once you’ve finished.”
“Yeah, okay,” I said, realizing I’d be walking home again.
“Alright everybody get to your buses please,” Ms. Clifford announced, as if any of the people attending this school didn’t have private chauffeurs or luxury sedans of their own. I stood still, my head looking down at the floor, as people passed by me with malice on their tongues.
The whole school knew who had pulled this prank. That was just the thing about having power. When you had a certain amount of it, no one would challenge you lest you turn it on them.
When the remainder of the student body finally cleared from my normally peaceful corner, I walked up to my locker and turned the small dial to open it. Thankfully it hadn’t been glued completely shut so with a little extra effort, I was able to get it open. A note fluttered to my feet when I pulled the feathered door open and I looked down at it.
“You are the victim of a series of accidents,” was scribbled in blotted black ink across the torn piece of notebook paper. Something outside caught my eye through one of the gaps in the painted windows. Silas was standing there at the fountain, looking up. Our gazes met and he smirked before walking off.
He thought he’d won.
That I’d just fold.
Well he was wrong.
So very wrong.
I grabbed the books I needed from my locker, stuffing his note into my pocket, slammed the door shut and made my way outside to catch my bus.
Ms. Clifford could go to hell.
And Silas Jenkins could go fuck himself.
I was nobody’s doormat.
Every dayon my way home from school, I stopped by Silas’ front door, lifted the rubber welcome mat that screamed irony and darted away as fast as possible. I didn’t want a confrontation with him. I didn’t want to speak to him.
I reserved all verbal battles for school.
Where it was public.
Where I could prove that there was one person in the fucking Academy that would challenge the Party King.
So, I still did his homework. But, I did it strategically. He wasn’t getting one hundreds anymore. There would always be one or two questions where the answer was way off the mark. And I knew those questions and always bounced the discussion over to him, very much on purpose.
At first, he was able to play it off. But every time he read out an answer completely unrelated to the subject, the class and the teacher started questioning his intelligence. Some people fight grand battles, but my tactic against Silas was much more sinister. I chipped away at the little confidence I knew he had.
He tried to play it off like he didn’t care what people thought of him. Deep down, he was as much of a liar as I was. Unfortunately, Ms. Clifford’s planned discussion for the day didn’t focus on the readings in a way that I could showcase Silas’ lack of preparation. Instead, she’d apparently watched too many episodes of the Walking Dead and wanted to talk about what we would all do in the event of the apocalypse.
I wasn’t sure how this related to Modern English Literature, but good thing she was able to draw the connection.
“So, I think it would be really cool if we all arranged our desks in a circle to facilitate the discussion,” she said. We all groaned but dutifully picked up our desks and dragged them across the floor until we’d created a ring around the border of the classroom.
I was somewhere in the middle of one of the sides, and strangely, I was okay with that. Lately, I’d been feeling more confident about myself, more able to open up during classes, more okay with people looking at me. I was starting to accept that they may not like me, the way I talked or the way I looked and I was starting to be okay with that.
My desk was across the room from Ms. Clifford’s and just to her left, in the corner opposite me, sat Silas. His long legs stretched out beneath him as he reclined in the desk, acting like the entire class was a bore for him. At this angle, I could see beneath his desk. He had his phone out and he was clearly texting someone.
I desperately tried not to care.
“Alright,” Ms. Clifford said. “Now that we’re all settled, I’ll start off the conversation. The question is, ‘If you knew the apocalypse was coming and that you probably weren’t going to make it, what’s the one thing you would do before you died?’”
I rolled my eyes. A rather morbid question for one thirty on a Friday.
“Alice, why don’t we start with you?” Ms. Clifford said to the girl next to her in a cheery attitude that didn’t quite fit the prompt.
Alice shrugged her shoulders. “Um, I don’t know. I guess maybe like, buy a bunch of stuff I really wanted from Amazon Prime?”
Ms. Clifford pursed her lips slightly. Clearly, Alice had not given her the answer she was looking for. “Well Alice,” she said, obviously trying to keep her tone even. “The Apocalypse will be on the way. So I’m not sure Amazon Prime would be able to stick to its two-day delivery window. You might not have that amount of time, anyways.”
“Oh, right, duh,” Alice said, twirling a lock of chestnut hair around her finger. “I guess like, I could use Prime Now then. That stuff gets delivered in an hour.”
I watched Ms. Clifford’s lips form a flat line. “Why don’t I go first, instead? Alright, if I were told the Apocalypse was coming, I’d head to the grocery store and eat as many cookies and sweets as I wanted.”
Silas barked out a laugh from the corner of the room and a few snickers rose up in response. Ms. Clifford was a little heavy set and it was obvious to everyone that his outburst was related. “Did you have something to say, Silas?” Ms. Clifford asked, ignoring the obvious buzz around the room.
“No. Just read something funny on my phone, that’s all,” he replied smoothly.
“Yes, well, phones need to be put away during class, please.”
Silas rolled his eyes but tucked his brand new iPhone back into his pocket.
“Instead of going around the room,” Ms. Clifford said, suddenly realizing that Silas was next to Alice and therefore on deck, “Why don’t we just go at random. Becca, what would you do?”
Becca was sitting right next to me. Of all the girls at the Academy, I actually liked her. She was tall, worked out a ton and had a killer body with long strawberry blonde hair to match. She was immensely popular but also extremely sweet to everyone, including me.
She laughed a little under her breath before giving Ms. Clifford an interesting look. “Well, I mean, I don’t know what answer you’re looking for Ms. Clifford, but I think most of us are going to say we’d try and lose our virginity.”
My eyes widened as giggles and nods went around the room. It sort of shocked me that Becca was still a virgin considering how she was always rolling her skirts up and seemed entirely comfortable around guys. Maybe I wasn’t as inexperienced as I thought.
I looked around the room to gauge people’s reactions. Silas was openly laughing and just as the room quieted down he said, “Some of us already have,” loud enough for everyone to hear.
I stared at him.
Really stared at him.
That green snake I’d thought I’d killed returned with a vengeance. It coiled around my heart, squeezing it until jealousy and envy dripped down my soul.
Why was I jealous that Silas had sex? Why did that matter to me? I guess I always figured he wasn’t a virgin, maybe? But hearing him say it out loud . . .
My teeth clenched and I must have been staring too long, because he turned to look at me. Our eyes met, mine light, his dark, and he flashed me a wicked grin. I turned away, unable to hold his gaze any longer.
I told myself I didn’t care.
I told it to myself over and over again, waiting for it to seep in.
“Well, maybe this wasn’t the best idea,” Ms. Clifford finally admitted just before the bell rang.
