Winter of Discontent (Four Seasons Book 1) Read online

  As I thought it would be, English Lit was pretty great. Unfortunately it was over too soon and it was off to meet up with friends for lunch. Simon Jenkins was a geek. I don’t mean the kind of geek people thought I was but a genuine 24 carat, 100 per cent geek. Head of the electronics, math, and science club the guy was Einstein for the 21st Century. Hanging around with him might not have been the most exciting chapter in my life but he was a good guy. You could hold a conversation with him that didn’t come down to Salma Hayek’s bra size, who was leading the NFL, or whether McDonalds were better than Burger King; as such he wasn’t as mind numbingly boring as the jocks tended to be. We had sat down for less than a minute when ‘she’ walked in with Kacey and her ‘pet dogs’ – so called as they nodded at her every word like the nodding dogs you used to get in the back of cars. I determined I wouldn’t catch her gaze. This proved easier said than done as they sat at the only free table in the canteen; the one next to ours. I kept my head down and just ate my lunch. I ached to look up every time I heard her laugh, speak, or cough. I wanted to know what was so amusing, wanted to know what she was saying and I wanted to join in, but I didn’t. In the end I just blocked out the sound of her voice and talked to the guys.

  Twenty minutes later the bell rang for the end of recess. Now the hard work began. Phys. Ed. I loved sport but I couldn’t excel at it. I had to stay invisible, remain the geek. Sports classes were hard for me. I wanted to show what I could do but how could I? It was like cheating and I was no cheat. My father, my brother, and I worked hard to be ‘normal’ so self control was a must. I could never allow myself to be the dark horse. I was more than capable of handling myself under do-or-die fourth down and goal, last play of the game pressure. It would have been too easy to score a touchdown, make that basket from halfway down the court, hit a home run first ball in, but would it be fair, would it be normal? No, it wouldn’t. Although I wanted to be, I wasn’t normal.

  I was a Warlock.

  Chapter Three – Nurture Over Nature

  Erik

  Being born into a family of Warlocks was pretty cool; being born into a family of Warlocks that wanted to be normal however wasn’t quite so cool.

  Dad made the decision that we would live a normal human life many years ago. I was never really happy about it but I loved him very much and I would never go against him. It certainly wasn’t easy though, I think the difficulties that came with it were one of the reasons why Jared and I were so close. There were so many times when we wanted to get involved in school activities but weren’t able to because of our physical advantages. We would often sit up for hours discussing how fantastic it would be to stick it to the jocks who mocked us as geeks but of course we never did. After one particular, disappointingly long week of sporting activities Dad took us on a trip out to the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia. He had hired a secluded log cabin by a lakeside where Jared and I could swim and dive to our hearts content. We would run for hours at speeds that would have had Usain Bolt stuck in the starting blocks. It was great. Dad knew it was hard on us and I know he was proud of how we coped with things. I got a bit frustrated sometimes though when Dad wouldn’t use magic for anything at all. I remember one time, we spent the whole evening in darkness when a power surge blew out all the bulbs. It was too late to get into town for replacements and he wouldn’t use just the simplest of notions to fix them. I didn’t get it. It wasn’t like there was anyone around to see him. We lived away from close neighbours and had no one overlooking our property, but no, he wouldn’t do it and just insisted that we deal with it like any other normal family.

  Phys. Ed should really have been reclassified under the heading of Drama for me. I can’t tell you how many times I allowed myself to be convincingly fouled, to turn in last over the line and the odd ‘trip up’ over my own feet. Just once I would love to have been first but I had to resign myself to knowing that although I would win, I never could win. Today was basketball. Ryan Enders was captain of the squad and a real dick. I so wanted to smack him up a bit. He had slept with more senior girls than the rest of the squad put together and then bragged about it to anyone that would listen. I hated that. It wasn’t a Warlock thing to dislike his behaviour it was a family thing; there was nothing wrong with wanting a lot of sex but slagging the girls off afterwards wasn’t on. Nurture over nature you might say. Anyway, by the time we had warmed up and each had two quarters it was time to head home.

  As I walked back toward my locker, I sensed her again. Before I’d even turned the corner into the hallway I knew she was there. And she was. I’d spent most of Phys. Ed sidelined following a foul by one of the jocks and therefore sat brooding on the bench thinking how I’d love to have pushed him back, and when I wasn’t thinking about that I was thinking about her. I’d come to a decision. I was gonna smile back, speak even. I had to find out what it was about her that made me feel uneasy and I wasn’t gonna do that if I didn’t at least acknowledge her.

  I can’t really describe how this sense of heightened anxiety left me feeling. Sick to my stomach doesn’t really cover it, I’d never broken a sweat inside of school before but I could feel the back of my neck sticking to my shirt and it felt really uncomfortable. Relax, relax I repeated over and over to myself. This was alien territory for me. I may play the geek for the sake of camouflage but I wasn’t that person underneath. I was confident and assured; so why didn’t I feel like that? As I got closer to her I saw her turn toward me. She had beautiful long dark brown hair, almost to her waist. It had the tiniest hint of a wave and it bounced when she turned around quickly. She was hot! My realisation that that was my opinion made me think that perhaps Jared had been right; maybe I just had a hard-on for her. I’d never given any real thought to who I had sex with before so maybe feeling like this meant I had a crush on her. The possibility that it might be as simple as that was strangely reassuring.

  My locker was just over to the left from hers. As I unlocked the door and took out my books I purposely looked in her direction. I was gutted. She was stood with her back to me now and at such an angle, unless she moved, I wouldn’t be able to make eye contact. In my frustration, I slammed the door to the locker shut. The noise it made when it closed shocked most of the students into silence as they turned round to see what it was all about.

  ‘Oops. Don’t know my own strength,’ I said trying to laugh it off.

  You can imagine the comments that bought. ‘Yeah right, Mr Puniverse’ was the loudest and got the most laughs! She wasn’t laughing though. Kacey and the rest of her pets were roaring for all they were worth but not her. She looked quite sorry for me, like she didn’t approve of the mockery. I didn’t let this throw me though; I grabbed the moment and smiled at her, just briefly. Unfortunately it wasn’t brief enough and Kacey caught my look and grabbed her sharply by the arm.

  ‘No flirting with the geeks, Trent,’ she snapped sharply.

  ‘I wasn’t,’ came her reply. ‘He was the one smiling, not me. I was laughing, not smiling back,’ she stammered as she turned her face away from me.

  It confused me as to how disappointed I felt in her. I had no right to feel like that. I didn’t even know her name for Christ’s sake so how could I feel disappointment? I tried to shrug it off as I headed out of school but it hung over me like a lead weight. Oh well, yet another sleepless night ahead, I thought, as I boarded the bus for home.

  Chapter Four – The Photograph

  Sarah

  I was so annoyed with myself. Yet again I’d allowed Kacey to pressure me into saying something I didn’t mean. I wasn’t laughing at the geek; I felt for him. I’d scraped the floor with my chair on my first day and, as the class laughed, I wanted the ground to open up and swallow me. He must have felt a little like that and I felt bad for him.

  ‘I’m starting to think that perhaps you don’t really want to hang around with us,’ snarled Kacey as we headed out of school.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, it seems that wheneve
r the geek squad is around you are more interested in what they are doing than what we are.’

  Kacey could be spiteful, I’d realised that almost from the first moment we’d met. I’d decided I would put up with it though. Making friends wasn’t easy especially when you are a newcomer part way through the semester. Kacey had sort of welcomed me into the fold on the first day and I didn’t want to argue about some geek that had snubbed me. Some geek whose name I didn’t even know!

  I tried to convince Kacey and the rest of the girls that I couldn’t care less about what the geeks were up to but Kacey was clearly in a snide mood and was having none of it.

  ‘Prove it,’ she said firmly refusing to believe me.

  ‘How?’ I asked sheepishly.

  ‘You need to show us you don’t give a damn about Erik.’

  ‘Which one is Erik?’

  ‘Shut the fuck up,’ said Britney.

  Britney didn’t say a lot but when she did she always cursed. Fuck this, shit that, bastard the other. I hated it but I didn’t say anything.

  ‘The geek that you were flirting with,’ she elaborated.

  ‘I wasn’t flirting with him,’ I protested again.

  ‘Well, if you don’t care for him then you’ll take up our little challenge,’ Kacey goaded.

  ‘Sure,’ I said, as blasé as I could.

  ‘OK. Then I reckon you should get a photograph of him in his underwear and then post it online.’

  Kacey laughed out loud and the others lauded their approval.

  ‘Fine, no problem,’ I scoffed lightly, as we continued towards the parking lot.

  As I got on Aunt Suze’s scooter, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t just told them to go to Hell. This was so unlike me. I wasn’t mean spirited, I didn’t mock others and I sure as heck didn’t set out to hurt people.

  As I set off, I felt quite miserable. I should have gone straight home. I had plenty of homework to do, enough of an excuse not to take up their challenge today but I didn’t. I parked up a few hundred yards from the bus stop where Erik was stood waiting. When the bus arrived and he’d safely boarded I followed closely behind. I had no idea where he lived so I just pulled in each time the bus stopped and watched carefully to see who got off. It was a good twenty minutes out of town before we finally reached his stop. The road was quite open and not really busy so I held back quite a way. Fortunately, as he got off, he walked in the direction the bus was going and didn’t look back. About three hundred yards up on the right there was a lane leading up to a lone house set back from the road.

  I remained where I was wondering how best to approach the challenge. I gave it another fifteen minutes and pushed the scooter up the lane. It was a bit old and the engine was quite noisy, as I didn’t want to be spotted I figured turning it off was the best way to go. Erik had clearly reached home by the time I got to the top of the lane and there wasn’t a soul in sight. It was already starting to go dark; this wasn’t great as I didn’t know my way around too well. Just then a light came on in an upstairs room. The house was quite big and there was a balcony on two sides. There may have been one on the back as well but I couldn’t see that from where I stood. Just then the patio doors opened and Erik walked out towards the railing that edged the balcony.

  It was pitch black now; there was no lamp light in the lane. The weirdest feeling came over me. Just as he had at the end of my first day at Carterbrook he turned to look in my direction. He couldn’t have seen me, surely he couldn’t – I could barely see me, so there was no way he could. It was eerie though. Stood on the balcony to what was almost certainly his bedroom I could clearly make him out and I could swear he was smiling across at me.

  I decided there was no point lingering, there was no chance of getting the photograph tonight, besides which Aunt Suze wouldn’t be too impressed with me. It was almost 8 p.m. and the sun had set a while back. I couldn’t believe what time it was. It felt like I’d left school no more than an hour ago. This was really weird. How could I possibly have been stood here for three hours? I checked my phone and sure enough Aunt Suze had tried to call me; she must have been worried, I wasn’t usually the sort to go AWOL without explanation. I pushed the scooter back down the lane before I dared start up the engine then set off for home.

  ‘Where the hell have you been?’ screamed Aunt Suze when I finally arrived back.

  ‘I’m sorry, I should have called – I had my phone on silent. I … erm, I went round to a friend’s after school.’

  This was as close to the truth as I could get without blatantly lying.

  ‘Right, well next time, call!’ she said, with what was clearly a relieved smile.

  ‘I will. I promise.’

  ‘What on earth have you been doing? Or dare I ask?’ she said pointing at my legs.

  As I looked down I could hardly believe what I saw. The front of my skirt was dirty, had at least a dozen pulled threads, and my pantyhose were torn to pieces.

  ‘I have no idea. Really I don’t.’

  Now I was really worried. How the hell could I get in that state and not know how?

  Aunt Suze just seemed to laugh it off so I didn’t make a big deal of it. Still confused I made my way upstairs, ran the bath, and lay back amongst the bubbles to try to work things out in my head. Unfortunately all that thinking did was give me a headache so I turned in just after 9 p.m. and exhausted fell fast asleep.

  When I awoke the next morning, my head hurt like hell. I’d slept surprisingly well considering the previous evenings state of confusion but even so I woke up later than normal and had to rush round like a headless hen in order to get to school on time – I failed miserably! Fortunately for me my first period teacher was also late so I managed to get away with it.

  Kacey was on fine form when I met her and the girls at recess. Within thirty seconds of saying hello she had snatched my phone from my hand and went straight into the photo app. I stood, almost speechless at her rudeness; however rather than protest I submissively started to shake my head.

  ‘I haven’t got it yet,’ I said apologetically.

  Kacey just shoved the phone back at me and gave me a look of thunder.

  ‘I knew you wouldn’t. All mouth.’

  ‘I’m not all mouth,’ I said, rather pissed by the insinuation that I’d chickened out. ‘I went round after school but didn’t get chance.’

  ‘Yeah, of course you did.’

  ‘Are you calling me a liar?’

  Kacey didn’t answer. She simply turned her back on me and walked off with the others leaving me stood alone like an idiot.

  The bell for class went and I have to confess to being more than a little relieved that none of my classes this morning were the same as Kacey and the girls.

  Lunchtime, however, gave no such relief.

  I’d sat at a table on my own over on the far side of the canteen. I’d been there for just a few minutes when the geeks walked in, then not far behind them were the girls. I really hoped they’d avoid me; I was in no mood for another standoff with them. No such luck though. The geeks had sat a couple of tables away and I don’t know whether that was what spurred her to come and sit with me but my quiet lunch suddenly turned into yet another bitch-fest.