Chapter Text
Hailey stays silent; even from far-ish away, Jake can see in her silence, in the tenseness of her mannerisms, that she knows better than to respond to the insults ringing in her ears. She only ever seems to say things back when her friends are around.
“Aw, little baby Hailey-Wailey gonna cry?” a boy with gelled hair jeers at her, in a whiny kind of way. Jake can see Hailey’s shoulders tense.
A cacophonous series of laughter erupts from the semicircle of boys standing around Hailey’s locker. One of them has his face closer to Hailey’s locker than he should have it, and Jake can tell that Hailey knows it, because Hailey slams the door shut right next to the guy’s ear. It’s loud and Jake can see from the back of the guy’s head that it makes him flinch, but it doesn’t make anyone stop laughing. Wordlessly, Hailey turns on her heel and pushes past them into the hallway. Jake notices that she makes no eye contact with any of them.
“Aw, it’s okay, back away,” Jake hears one of the guys yelling after her, his voice pinched into a ugly, mocking baby voice. “It’s okay, crybaby.” He’s met with more laughter.
Something in Jake’s chest pinches a little watching it all, but he stays on the outskirts—a silent observer—and says nothing. He wouldn’t know what to say, anyway—it’s not like he ever knew Hailey all that well to begin with.
Drew snickers next to him.
“Freak,” Drew mutters in a sneery chuckle. He’s looking off somewhere, so Jake follows his line of vision—and Hailey’s still walking off down the hallway, her head kind of down. She hasn’t made it around the corner yet.
Jake can feel his heart rate increase for a moment. He’s not a stranger to anything he’s seen Hailey withstand so far, in fact, extremely far from it—but he’s learned something in his first months of high school. If he really wants to feel estranged from ostracization, that horrible, overhanging dread that made his every moment at school miserable from elementary into middle school—something needed to change, right here and right now, anything to keep that kind of low, sneery chuckling directed anywhere but at him. Anything to get himself anchored—even just a little bit, even if he doesn’t completely stick in the sand just yet—into the in-crowd. A first step, the first dig of a walking stick into the dirt of an uneven hiking ground.
Jake keeps his eyes up and wide open, watching. Hailey’s not out of sight yet, so that means she’s still in earshot, so that means—
“Yeah, run away, princess, you show ‘em!”
That sentence feels unnatural ripping out of his throat, let alone so loudly and so meanly—but it does. And now it’s too late for him to rethink it.
For a moment, Jake isn’t sure if Hailey actually heard him—but he knows she did when she starts walking away just a little faster. She turns the corner, and she’s gone.
There’s a feeling that starts rising up in Jake’s chest and almost into his throat, and he can’t quite tell if it’s shock-induced nausea or excitement or a mix of both—his hands are clammy, and he hates the feeling of it, so he rubs them on the sides of his sweatshirt.
Holy shit, I just said that, he can hear himself thinking in his head. Even in his head, he sounds all lame and out-of-breath.
But to his right, Jake hears Drew do one of those half-laughs—that sharp, exhale-through-the-nose thing. And it sounds like approval.
That was all Jake had wanted.