Zachary Rawlins - The Academy
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- Название:The Academy
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Whatever they had done, though, it had consequences — Alex had bruises forming along his chest and above one eye and across the bridge of his nose, and he felt a strange lingering pain everywhere he’d been injured. Steve had left looking totally untouched, and Alex was fairly sure that the mess at the end of the session had been solely for his benefit. Mitsuru had bemoaned his performance, but Alex didn’t feel like he’d done too badly.
After all, it was his first time killing anybody. That he could actually remember.
Steve wasn’t about to let himself get shot, of course. He’d been grimmer, after the reset, but he seemed angry more than traumatized, which gave Alex the feeling that this was not an entirely new experience for Steve. After that, Alex was faced with an enraged, moving target, and he only managed to tag Steve once in the entire rest of the day, meaning that he was forced to go hand-to-hand with someone who was bigger, stronger and more experienced.
Given the circumstances, it could have gone worse. Mostly, things had ended with Steve bashing in his head, either with his elbows or against the floor, and Steve’s obvious wrestling background made this kind of close-quarters ground fighting particularly hopeless for Alex. But near the end of the day, Steve had gotten sloppy while setting up a choke, and Alex had managed to get a thumb up into Steve’s eye socket, and forced it in as far as he possibly could. Steve howled and reeled away from him, clutching his face, and Alex had time to pull himself to his feet, wipe the blood from his eyes, and find the Glock that Steve had knocked to the ground when he tackled him.
He hadn’t shot him. He’d intended to, of course, but instead he’d walked up behind the blinded kid and struck him in the base of the skull with the butt of it. He didn’t stop hitting him when Steve fell down, or when he stopped moving.
He’d only stopped when he heard Mitsuru laughing.
Alex stepped out of the hallway, and into the chill of the evening and the setting sun, never quite so grateful to be out of a classroom.
“Hi.”
She sat on the low fence that bordered the walkway outside the building, striped tights and shiny black shoes dangling, her nails painted to match her hair. Her face was impassive, her eyes wet and shining. She put aside her knitting and looked at him expectantly.
“Hi, Eerie.” Alex’s hand froze in the process of putting his headphones in his ears, and then they hung there, apparently determined to linger, useless and in-the-way. “What are you doing here?”
“I am waiting for you,” Eerie explained, hopping down to stand beside him. “Vivik said you weren’t in homeroom today because you had Mitsuru’s class, and Margot said you’d be messed up afterwards and that someone should keep you company. I am company.”
Alex starting walking slowly down the path, and Eerie fell in beside him.
“Wow. I’m surprised.”
“Surprised that we knew? Surprised that Margot said that?” Eerie was staring up at the changing leaves of the ancient trees that bordered the path, walking just out of reach. Every word had a ringing, musical quality to it. “Or surprised that it was me, and not Emily?”
Alex thought for a moment, trying to give an honest answer.
“No offense, but all three. I figured if anybody is going to be waiting for me outside of class like some kind of…”
“Stalker?” Eerie offered.
“Right,” Alex said uncertainly. “Well, that seems like Emily’s thing, you know?” He hesitated for a moment, then winced. “Hey, don’t tell her I said that, okay?”
Eerie walked along beside him quietly, and Alex started to worry that he handled the whole conversation very clumsily. She was short enough that when he looked down at her, he could see a quarter-inch of blond where she parted her hair, and he wondered absently whether she was changing colors, or was lazy about dyeing it.
“I will tell you a secret,” Eerie said finally. “Emily is waiting for you, back at your room. She has been planning this for days. She was very,” Eerie frowned, “loud about it. So, I decided to meet you here.”
“I see. Okay.”
Alex realized that his hands were trembling, an after-effect of the class, and buried them in his pockets. There was something about Eerie’s silence that seemed to imply to him that she was about to speak at any moment, and the anticipation stretched on for minutes. Alex stared out at the diminishing blaze of the autumn leaves, gradually being washed away by increasingly frequent rain, and tried to calm down.
“You went to Emily’s house, Alex. She talked about it,” Eerie said, her frown deepening. “She talks a lot, that girl.”
Alex shrugged, too surprised to formulate a clever response.
“She doesn’t seem like the type.”
“Not to you,” Eerie said, shaking her head sadly. “Because Alex is stupid.”
“What?”
Eerie glanced at him, her pupils massively dilated even in full daylight, her expression innocent and detached. He couldn’t help but wonder why she he was here, what she saw with her strange eyes when she looked at him.
“She wants you to feel sorry for her, I can tell. She doesn’t say it, but it’s obvious, even to me. And you have to be stupid,” Eerie said angrily, “to pity a pretty girl.”
“Huh?” Alex said, puzzled. “Are you mad at me, Eerie?”
She appeared to think about it for a while.
“Not really,” she said, shaking her head. “You are just a boy, after all. But…I do want to know. Why did you go home with her, Alex?”
“I don’t know,” he said, as truthfully as possible. “Because she asked me to, I guess.”
“You don’t like her?” Eerie asked, clutching her knitting basket in front of her with both hands, her fingers tight around the handle. “You aren’t seeing each other? Or kind of seeing each other?”
“What? What are you talking about? No. It’s not like that,” Alex said guiltily, his eyes on the concrete path in front of them. “I don’t even know her that well.”
“You went just because she asked you?”
“I guess,” Alex admitted, shrugging. “What can I say?”
“So, you’d go somewhere with me, if I asked you to?”
Eerie spoke casually, refusing to meet Alex’s eyes when he looked over at her, one hand picking absently at the hem of her skirt. Alex kept looking at her with a shocked expression for a little while, hoping for a reaction, then gave up.
“Sure.”
“For real?”
Eerie glanced up at him shyly, like he’d promised her something she was hesitant to believe.
“Sure,” Alex repeated, feeling surprised and a little embarrassed.
“Will you go somewhere with me?”
“Um, sure,” Alex said, laughing. “When did you have in mind?”
Eerie smiled at him, and grabbed his arm, fortunately not picking the one that still ached from class.
“Now,” she said, pulling him along behind her, away from the dorms, back toward the center of campus. “Right now.”
“I’d really like to go and change my clothes first,” Alex complained to Eerie, who dragged him along determinedly by his sleeve. “I didn’t think that I’d be going anywhere, you know?”
Eerie glanced back at him icily.
“Emily is in your room, remember?”
“Oh,” Alex said, blushing. “Right. That would be. Um. Yes.”
Alex felt, quite frankly, like an asshole. He didn’t know what either Emily or Eerie had planned, and he hadn’t had enough time to think about either to know what he would have picked, given the choice. His first day in Mitsuru’s ‘Program’ had been enough to leave his brain violated and muddled, and his body tired and battered. When he closed his eyes, he kept seeing Steve’s broken head, the vile mess against the wall behind him, the gun in his shaking hands. He didn’t feel like going somewhere with Eerie, he felt like going somewhere and being sick.
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