Winslow High School
Brockton Bay, New Hampshire
April 7, 2011








It was five minutes until the end of classes, and all I could think was that I really hoped I didn’t screw this up.

Truthfully, I wanted nothing to do with this place—it was the Neon Genesis Evangelion of superhero settings. Hell, Ultimate Marvel was less depressing, and that took work. But the fact was, we had no way of knowing if our old reality even existed anymore, much less a reliable way back. And if Scion’s “eat all related counterparts of the planet” included it, then it wouldn’t matter anyway.

Granted, my home reality did, but the latter issue was still a problem—and even if we could get there, there was the little matter of my friends being fictional and me being dead . . .

So here I was, back in the hell known as high school—and this one really was. Graffiti, gangs in attendance, and a general look that had stepped out of every “streetwise” teen movie ever made . . . Where were Sidney Poitier or Michelle Pfeiffer when we needed them?

There were a number of ways we could have gone about this, and probably would if this didn’t pan out; Taylor Hebert’s father was much easier to locate, if possibly harder to get to, since the Dockworker’s Union undoubtedly had security. I presumed so, anyway; sadly, I just had the broad strokes for this universe—and probably not all of them, either. This was also a bad idea in all the potential ways this could go wrong, of course. But I really hated bullies, and this girl had put up for this for years. I wasn’t really keen on letting it continue if I could at all avoid it.

And so here I was, sneaking around the entrance to the upper circle of Hell under an Imperturbable Charm and a weak Notice-Me-Not Charm. The second was calculated to not be enough to cause everyone to get out of my way—I was a 220-pound man and six feet tall, after all—but enough to keep their attention elsewhere. This was a world that had security for mind control; I didn’t need anybody realising that there was a hole in the crowds, or that people were getting out of the way for someone they couldn’t see.

That could not end well.

No, I just needed them to not care about my being around, and so far, it appeared to be working. It was nice that something was—because trying to pick out a (relatively) tall, skinny white girl with long brunette curls and glasses in the streams of students filling the hallways, even with my senses. And it didn’t help that if she was smart (and I damned well knew she was), she’d be trying to hide from the—

. . . Okay, I was an idiot. It took me almost five minutes to make the obvious connection and look for the damned bullies. Even though I had even less idea of what they looked like, it’d be a lot easier to spot a redhead, a black girl, and “cute, petite girl” in one cluster.

I was right, as it turned out; it didn’t take long at all. It took even less time to realise that they were carrying full bottles of . . . Soda? Juice? I couldn’t read the label at this distance, and didn’t really care. It wasn’t like they were likely to be bringing them into the bathroom for any good reasons—they had lockers, after all. Hell, they had purses; why lug around a full bottle any other way, if you weren’t going to drink from it (he asked sarcastically)?

Unfortunately, I had to pause for a beat when I realised where they were headed. I really couldn’t afford to get caught, and wasn’t willing to bet on the Notice-Me-Not Charm holding when someone of my general proportions walked into the girls’ bathroom, so I needed to duck behind a row of lockers for a breath, and a quick Switching Spell. Once the Deathcloak was equipped, I shifted into dire wolf form. It wasn’t ideal, but with the cloak effectively another layer on my fur in this form, I wasn’t likely to be outed by somebody or something snagging the edge of it. And the door was easy enough to shift open, even without my hands—a hundred kilos is even more wolf than it is human.

Once I was past the door, the smell was terrible, almost a tangible thing in its repulsiveness. Seriously, public washrooms in general are terrible, high schools are worse, a high school as low-grade as this one was horrifying, and my nose was literally a hundred times more sensitive than a human’s—I was astonished that I remained conscious after running into that.

As it was, I shifted back to human form immediately, and wished really hard for some nasal spray.

It took me a beat to process what I was seeing: the dark-skinned chick and the red-haired one boosting themselves up that they could lean over the tops of the stall and peer into the centre one—presumably where Taylor was hiding. With, you guessed it, the aforementioned beverage bottles. It didn’t take Hermione to figure out the plan here, much less to derail it.

The cutesy one whose name I barely remembered when I bothered trying to was playing lookout, but she had at least half her attention on the scene before me. Moreover, the bathroom was designed to let two people pass each other side-by-side. The bathroom stalls’ locks might be on the outside of their doors (wait, what? What idiot did that?!), but the size and design of the place was still up to code. Slipping by her was easy.

And even Miss “the world is predator and prey, survivor and victim, and I’m not the second type” didn’t notice anything wrong. . . Honestly, that was pathetic. One would think that simply as a non-white girl in a school full of neo-Nazi gangbangers, much less a vigilante or a zealous adherent to her beliefs, she’d have better situational awareness. I mean, yes, I was invisible and my shoes were prevented from making sounds, and she was preoccupied, but even Neville had been harder to catch by surprise in the early days of our training. He’d been alert to the possibility of danger.

Oh, well—it just made things easier for me.

It was a simple thing, really; the trickiest part was the angle. Just wait until they were leaning over with just the right amount of effort and silently Summon their shoes in quick succession—immediately cancelling the spells afterwards. The end result had the two girls “slip” on the toilet seats, and land hard. Of course, they also dropped the bottles, which happened to land face down on their bodies.

. . . Of course it was a coincidence. “Too much hang-time for a few fractions of a second,” you say? “Silent Hover Charms,” you say? Lies and slander. The fact that the bottles spun fast enough to avoid aiming at Taylor’s stall before unleashing their payload was purely a lucky break, I tell you—the kid certainly deserved one.

Speaking of, the girl took advantage of the chaos—a great deal of shrieking, swearing, and other assorted noises—to make her getaway. Cutesy was too busy checking on her friends to worry about her would-be victim, and I used a couple of non-permanent Sticking Charms to make sure it stayed that way. I figured needing the janitor to have them pried out of the toilets would keep them off the girl’s back for a day or two, at least; hopefully long enough for us to work out a better meeting time and place.

In the meantime, I’d confirmed that yes, she did exist; yes, the situation more-or-less seemed to be following what little of the canon I knew, and hopefully, she’d have a brighter day than she otherwise would have—

I didn’t know how I’d done it, exactly—but when Taylor paused for just a beat in the open doorway of the bathroom, to glance behind her, at exactly where I was standing, and nod slightly . . . Well, it was in that moment that I knew: somehow, I’d messed up.

Bloody hell.