It took a moment for reality to sink in after Peter opened his eyes. He blinked away the images of the dank sewers encrusted with aerosolised slime monster, letting the warm, soft lights of the library welcome him. The pain of his injuries faded quickly as his actual nerves replaced the signals form the implant. He looked around, seeking the comforting faces of his friends. Warren was yawning and stretching in his chair, Pham was already bouncing up and down on the spot.
“Alright, who’s ready to get their math on?” Pham’s enthusiasm was a bit forced, clearly still somewhat worried about Billy seeking vengeance. Still, she was obviously excited for the test.
Glaring at her, Warren stretched again. “We’re not all nerds like you.”
Pham pouted. “I’m not a nerd, nerds have no friends and live in their mum’s basement. I’m a geek. I have friends and I live in my grandma’s attic.” She crossed her arms and huffed. “It’s completely different.”
“Neeerd.”
“Pom.”
“Hey, there’s no need for that sort of language.” Warren tried to run over her toes with his chair, Pham shrieked and leapt back, falling onto the couch.
Peter stood up and grabbed the handles of Warren’s chair, turning it in the direction of the door. “How about we get out of here before the librarian kicks us out?” He gave the chair a bit of a shove and offered a hand to Pham. “Not a huge math fan, but we all have tests to get to. Hopefully enough of it has stuck to screw Bully over.”
Ignoring the hand, Pham bounded to her feet and took charge of Warren’s chair. “You’ll do fine, I’m an awesome teacher. Just ask my cousin, he could count his fingers three times and come up with different numbers every time until I started tutoring him. Now he gets only two answers and one of them is ten.”
The three laughed all the way to the hall, where they had to split up into their respective classes. Just to be sure they all stayed out in the open where they could be clearly seen if one of Billy’s accomplices tried to escort them to a meeting. After their afternoon tests were announced the hall emptied rapidly as everyone made their way to their assigned room as quickly as possible, there was no time for any student to dawdle without making it obvious.
Still, Peter breathed a sigh of relief as he lowered himself into his seat in an unremarkable classroom at the back of the campus. The room was entirely sterile, there were no hints as to what would normally be taught there. No posters adorned the walls, no unusual equipment to reveal its purpose. Just a beige room full of desks. In a way, it was reassuring. After the excessive stimulation up to this point in the day, beige was a good colour.
The tests were delivered in due course, and the teacher gave the usual speech. Peter didn’t bother listening, he just let his mind drift, with a few gentle nudges in the direction of the lesson from Pham. He didn’t try too hard to remember though, it wasn’t going to help giving himself a headache this close to the test.
Flipping the top page over, Peter perused the questions in the allotted time. This is amazing! He flipped the next page over. Dang Pham, you might be right! What would have been an impenetrable page of confusing mathematical notation yesterday was now a difficult but manageable series of tests. He had already figured out the answers to the first few questions in his head before the test proper time began, and the last couple looked like they could be worked out if he had enough time. He hoped he had time.
The teacher, an overly cheerful middle aged woman with her hair in a bun that was held in place by a paintbrush, indicated that perusal time was over and the students could now begin writing. Immediately marking the answers to the ones he knew, Peter threw himself into the test with gusto. Gusto that waned as he ran into more and more complex problems, but he refused to give up. Unlike previous tests he used up the entire test time and then some, only stopping when the teacher threatened to invalidate his paper for going overtime. The consolation that he wasn’t the only one in the room hard up against the time limit helped a little, though he doubted the other students filing out the door with him had been taking the same test as he.
Looking around warily, Peter slunk along the patio outside the classroom, using the bag racks as cover in case Billy or his goons tried to ambush him. I really don’t want a repeat of this morning. When they ended and he was forced to brave the open space between buildings, he abandoned stealth and dashed for the nearest fence line. He loped along the boundary of the school, his breathing loud in his own ears, but the ruse worked and Peter reached the bus stop by the front gate without incident or heart attack.
It wasn’t quite the official end of the school day yet, but there was already a large crowd jostling for position, eager to be the first on the transport. Peter squeezed himself onto the tiny exposed corner of the bench seat to recover and completely and pointedly ignored the disgusted expression of the girl beside him. Unbidden, his knee began bouncing, tapping his heel on the ground and sending vibrations through the whole shelter. Other students muttered, looking around to see who was causing the issue.
“Sorry,” Peter forced his foot firmly onto the ground as the bus pulled up. He leapt at the door, rebounding off a much larger student and stumbling up the stairs. He found a seat halfway down the length of the bus and curled up on the seat, hugging his knees and keeping his head down while the rest of the passengers climbed aboard. The uncomfortable weight of his backpack pressed him forward, so he shook it off and sat it beside him, a bulwark against whomever would decide to share his seat.
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The other rows filled up rapidly, nobody wanted to tarry at school on an exam day, and eventually another student made the choice between standing in the aisle and sitting next to the weird kid. Their weight caused the air in the pleather cushion to shift, tipping Peter’s bag into the footwell. When he leaned forward to grab the handles a searing agony spiked into the back of his neck. Peter clapped his hand over the abused flesh and a second stab bloomed on the back of his wrist. He was only able to refrain from screaming in pain because it was the lesser injury compared to the azure beam of the slime-taur he had endured at lunch. He placed the bag back on the seat and examined the flesh bubbling up in the shape of a smile. Turning to glare at the boy behind him holding a cigarette lighter he growled. “Is that all you’ve got?” He could feel the cold starting to spread again.
“Buh. Buh-Billy says to watch your back.” The boy clambered over the seats to get away, his message delivered
Peter blew on the burn, a ‘smiley’ as it was known, made by heating up the metal guard and the striker of a lighter with its own flame and then branding the victim with it. The inverse, a ‘frosty’, was caused by applying a deodorant can nozzle directly to the skin and spraying for as long as you could hold the victim still. As with insulting nicknames, school age torure names weren’t particularly inventive but they were quite accurate. The student who had taken the seat beside Peter decided that discretion was the better part of cowardice and shouldered their way towards the front of the bus, leaving the spot empty for the rest of the ride.
Stepping in through his front door, Peter could hear his mother moving about in the lounge, but took his time to hang up his bag and grab a cup of water before greeting her. When he poked his head into the room, she was on a voice only call, talking animatedly to someone and sipping from a tumbler which was barely containing the sloshing liquid as she gesticulated wildly. He stepped into the room to wave hello and was instead waved away.
“I’ll be in my room,” he mouthed in an exaggerated way. His mother frowned but nodded and shooed him away again.
Peter ducked into the bathroom on the way through and grabbed a pair of band-aids. One went on his hand as he walked into his room, the other took a bit of finesse to ensure the pad went over the blisters on the back of his neck without bursting them and without the use of a mirror. The first-aid complete, he threw himself onto his bed face down, then dragged his abused body to the edge and hung his head off the mattress. It wasn’t an uncommon position for him, he’d often laid this way before he got his implant, a book wedged under something heavy to keep the pages flat while he read. Now it ensured that there was no pressure on his wound, and was just comfortable. He considered logging into TAOS&S, but discarded the idea. He wanted plenty of time to play later, after dinner, and doubted that Warren, Dani or Pham were online yet. He also really didn’t want to go wandering the sewers by himself.
As he lay there letting the numbing agent in the band-aids work its magic, Peter thought about tomorrow’s tests and what they might bring. Not just the school assigned ones, but the social ones too. Warren had warmed up to him, Pham had accepted that he wasn’t a complete loss. Bully had issued a challenge, the proverbial gauntlet to the face. Or neck. Do I hide? Peter considered his options. Do I run? Should I fight? He’s a lot bigger than me and one-on-one I’m going to get cheesed. Woz would help if he can, but Pham’s not a fighter. He slid off the bed onto the floor, then pushed himself to his feet. She’s a decent trap builder in-game, maybe she could be useful offline too? Gotta ask her tonight.
Taking a wobbling step towards the door while his head took a lap around the room from standing up too quickly, Peter nearly stumbled into his mother coming the other way. “Woah buster. Watch where you’re going.” She pushed him back onto the bed and grabbed the chair from his desk. “How was school today? I see you have some new accessories.”
Peter’s nose wrinkled at the strange smell on his mother’s breath, but felt it would be rude to say anything. “It’s nothing, I scratched a mozzie bite too hard and made myself bleed. And school was good. I was a bit nervous about my math test, but my new friends helped me at lunch and I’m certain I passed. We’re still going to Disneyland, aren’t we?”
His mother coughed and the smell intensified. “Uh, what? Who said anything about Disneyland?”
Bugger. “Oh, um, Dad did. He said that if I got good marks we could go. Didn’t you guys talk about it?” Peter rubbed the back of his neck, where the burning had faded to an intense itching. Rather than scratch the burn site, he scratched a bit higher where his implant scar met the base of his skull. It helped, a little.
A cloudy expression swept across his mother’s face for a moment, then cleared into a sunny smile. “Of course we did, it just slipped my mind for a moment. It’s been a busy week for all of us.” She stood up suddenly. “I closed the Fernwood deal, so I’ll get tomorrow off and you get to have a nice holiday. If you keep passing all your tests.”
“Deal,” Peter surged to his feet, buoyant. “I’ve got this in the bag.” I have to have it in the bag or it’s not going to work.
“Good, then you can set the table. Your Dad should be home in ten and he’s bringing dinner home this time.” His mother swept out of the room, a smothered hiccough marring her exit.
As promised, his Dad arrived home soon after and was greeted with hungry smiles around the prepared table. He quickly portioned out the roast chicken and chips he had brought, apologising for being late. The conversation meandered around, riffing on how the day had been, plans for the weekend and the variability of the weather recently. No mention of times absent, expensive holidays or missing hip flasks. There was a minor interrogation with regards to tests and how well Peter was doing in them, but as it the results wouldn't be released until Friday afternoon it was all speculation anyway. Each of them was preoccupied with their own thoughts and the conversation devolved into silence, broken only by the sounds of food being chewed.
Peter wiped up the last of the potato and gravy with a chip and pushed his chair back with a screech that echoed through the apartment. “Uh, sorry. May I be excused? I have some study before tomorrow.”
“Sure bud,” his Dad waved him away, “go, do. Leave your plate, I’ll get it.”
His mother smiled, but it didn’t really reach her eyes. “You make sure you get top marks, I have to talk to your father anyway.” Something in that tone made goosebumps rise along Peter’s arms so he took the opportunity to flee.
Once safe in his room with the door closed over but not shut completely, Peter formed his pillow into a horseshoe and rested on his bed. When it was clear that the intense whispering in the kitchen was staying there, he got up, turned off the light and logged in.