8 Chapter 8

Montis High came into view. It was a brick mass that hadn't changed since it was built. Ren had seen old photos. Time hadn't changed a single thing. Over time, a football field and a parking lot had been added. Besides those two things, the building looked like a small castle sitting in the center of a haunted forest.

He could imagine ghosts poking through windows and following students down hallways. They'd make a mess of the bathrooms, playing with everyone's minds while they laughed amongst themselves.

But there was nothing special about Montis High. It was a school and that was it.

He was later than he liked to be. Kids had started forming groups. They were a mixture of low and high ranks. These kids had been going to school together since elementary. They were raised almost like they were one big family.

He'd never been a part of it. He'd seen it and lived through with it, but he'd never been the one on the inside.

He was fine with that. Nothing would have made him feel more at home than being included in a group only for entertainment. That's what he would have been. Comic relief.

They could be as close as that wanted to be. Sharing girlfriends and being so closely related in marriage that almost everyone showed up to the same family reunion. They traded one another like playing cards and that was okay. That was fine.

Despite how cold it was, he shrugged off his backpack and sat in his usual spot around the corner of the parking lot. There was no point in going inside unless he wanted to make himself more uncomfortable. He leaned against the brick wall, his arms crossed over his knees. It was colder than last night, colder than when he'd been digging through the dirt like a dog. If he'd known it would be this cold, he would have slipped a hoodie under his coat.

The groups slowly scattered and kids started entering the school. They broke off in ones in twos, yet somehow the structure of the main group didn't diminish. He watched them, waiting for the right moment to head in. Stragglers made it to the door and he stood up.

He turned the corner and at the same time, he saw the blur of someone running back out to the parking lot. He was knocked off his feet and he stumbled into the wall.

"Shit--I'm sorry!"

A kid with black hair and thin wire-framed glasses grabbed him by the shoulders in an attempt to save him, but it only ended up crushing Ren between him and the wall.

The kid jerked back with his hands raised and a look of horror on his face.

At first Ren's confused. The kid doesn't look familiar, but he doesn't look new at the same time. His face strikes a chord within Ren, drawing up hazy memories of a kid that once went to his school but had moved away.

Ren doesn't know his name nor does he really care, yet, not knowing made him agitated.

He's tall, almost towering a foot above Ren, and his glasses make him look younger, too young to be that tall. And it clashes with the stumble that scatters his upper lip.

Ren frowns.

"Hey, listen," he said, waving his hands that are currently holding a ring of keys. "I'm sorry about that, but I've got to—"

He doesn't finish his sentence before he's sprinting across the parking lot. Ren watched him fly between the cars to the last line until the bell rings. Reluctantly, Ren turned to walk through the front doors. When he's inside, he glanced over his shoulder just to see. The kid is struggling to reach into the floorboard of what Ren assumed was his car. He couldn't watch for long.

He doesn't like how he has to force himself to look away. There was something about that kid that caught his interest. Almost in the similar way that Mantel caught his attention though the buzzing hadn't come to the surface to freak out. This at least a calm reaction than what Ren was used to.

The encounter distracts him for only a while.

He walked down the halls and toward his first class. It feels foreign, unlike all the other times he'd walked this path. It might be that he was dead on his feet or that he couldn't stop thinking about the night before. An itch at the back of his mind was scared that someone would find out. It was his secret to bare now and he couldn't let anyone know about it.

That should be easy. He didn't talk to anyone and no one tried to hold a conversation with him.

But the buzzing was just there. He could feel it like it was a building feeling that was waiting for it to get strong enough to take over his body completely.

That was what he had to fear now. He had to worry that he would lose control of his body and he'd do something irrational. There might have been a killer loose in Montis, but he still had to worry about the building bloodlust and monster that was lurking inside of him.

He adjusted his bag, trying to distance his mind from last night. It worked to a degree. The moment he walked into first period, English, he was too focused on blending in the background and keep his head down, he began to forget about Mantel and the dead girl.

They weren't erased. He didn't think they ever would be, but they're almost ghosts.

They're easy to see right through.

***

The strangest of things happened in Math.

Fourth period had started as normal with Ren sitting at his corner seat and his eyes downcast on his open notebook. The class chattered over upcoming football games and the start of the basketball season. He zoned out of those conversations, tuning in once in a while for his own amusement.

He was staring so long at his paper that the lines were beginning to fade into one another. His eyes were going crosseyed.

And then the kid from before who'd almost ran into him in the parking lot walked into the room.

Interest peaked, Ren stiffened in his seat. He hoped it wasn't too obvious.

The kid was greeted by a couple of guys who raised their hands and high-fived him. Ren didn't understand it. They were talking to each other and he couldn't make out a single word.

The kid was new and Ren knew that now though by the way the guys were talking to him he wasn't new to them. They smiled and laughed like they'd known each other for years.

It solidified Ren's first assumptions. He'd been here in elementary. Ren just couldn't recall his name.

He averted his eyes. The lines in his notebook blurred into a jumbled mess. Sleep kept crawling back to him, pulling him down harder each time. He pushed it away. The longer he resisted, the harder it tried to drag me under. He'd tried pinching his arm and after the first fifteen failed attempts, with dark blue bruises to prove it, he stopped trying. He didn't know how he was doing, but he feared he wasn't going to last after lunch.

His eyes slid closed. Just as he was about to fall under slumber's spell, the desk in front of him screeched forward.

His eyes shot open.

The kid was there. The kid from the parking lot with his wire-framed glasses and freakishly long legs was standing in front of him. He doesn't look at Ren and he can't tell if the kid even noticed he was sitting right behind him. If he didn't then Ren knew he needed those glasses.

The stare he's shooting into the back of the kid's head as he unpacks his bag still doesn't get his attention. He doesn't know why he's doing it, but he can't pull his eyes away. It's emotionless, just something he's doing. He doesn't give in to the painful burning in his eyes no matter how much it hurts.

The kid finally sat down with his textbook in front of him and a mechanical pencil tucked behind his ear. Ren held back the shaking need in his fingers to reach out to flick the annoying pencil across the room. The itch in his hand killed him to ignore. He tore the corner of his notebook's cover to resist doing anything else.

The memory of this kid before him in faint, so small he questioned if he actually did recognize him from those far away school days. The kids he was just talking to, Malcolm and Tyler, Ren doesn't see much of in the halls and the only class he did have with Tyler was Social Studies.

They're people that clash that don't step out from the normal mix of people that walk in and out of Montis High. But the truth of the matter was that he didn't pay much attention to the daily life of everyone else. He would rather focus on what he was doing and how he could disappear even further into the background.

His eyes were closing once more. He can hear the soft turns of pages, the rustle of clothing, and the quiet murmurs of conversations around him. The world was no longer a part of him. He was detached from the things taking place.

He knew he could never find peace within the walls of the school or Montis for that matter. He'd come to terms that he would be forever alone, working until his hands could no longer hold their own weight. Slowly, his body would crumble and his mom would be long gone. He didn't know what he'd do then and it wasn't fair to torture himself with those useless thoughts. Looking into the future only damaged the present.

The desk in front squeaked. Ren could feel him turn around.

At first, he was committed to ignoring him. His eyes were looking over him, wandering like curious hands that wanted to know every detail.

Ren flushed at the thought. He decided then he was losing his mind.

His lips turned down and he lowered his head into his folded arms to cover his face. He took a chance to look out from his hiding spot.

He saw him. He was looking at Ren just as he thought.

"I'm Darrien." He did a little halfway, sheepish smile. Ren blinked and frowned deeper.

The way Darrien was looking at him, with his eyes downward and a look of awkwardness, was confusing. It was a different reaction he usually got.

His fingers curled around the frayed notebook, clutching it as if it was his lifeline. A slow ticking of time suspended the moment for way longer than he wanted. His throat seized as he struggled to find the words to say. All the while, the kid Darrien, never lost his smile.

"I'm, uh, Ren." It was like he didn't know his own name.

Ren took a good look at him. He looked younger than his age, but his height made up for it. If he was shorter, Ren would have thought he was a freshman or maybe a sophomore. His round glasses made it harder to pinpoint his age. They suited him in a weird way. The sharp point of his chin softened out with them on.

He smiled. "I think I remember you. I use to go here in seventh grade."

He almost seemed pleased with himself. He grabbed onto the back of his chair. His eyes looked wider in those glasses and Ren was too tired to look away from them.

He was different in some way. Even when he'd run into him, there wasn't the gnawing fear that he got from others. Most times he couldn't hide how he felt, how terrified he was that one of them, anyone, would lash out. They could do anything they liked and he couldn't fight back. It was a battle between what he wanted to be.

Either he was a vicious monster or he was the wimp that would take any beating as if he deserved it.

He rubbed his eyes. A yawn broke through and he covered his mouth.

"Yeah, I thought you looked familiar," Ren said. The conversation was dying. He could feel it when they did. The whole small talk thing never worked with him. He was surprised he'd carried on this well enough so far.

But he was still there, staring at Ren now instead of looking. He hated that. He knew he did it to others, but he still hated it.

He was such a fucking hypocrite.