Safe If We Stand Close Together chapter six
They have to stay in the Bad Corner until gym class, and then Miss Simmons makes them go outside with everyone else.
It’s a cold day; Miss Simmons, who is wearing a thin cotton shirt, shivers and tells them to go ahead and start the game and then she goes back into the schoolhouse to get her sweater.
Roxanne and Syx move towards the jungle gym, where they usually sit.They don’t make it there this time. Wayne flies down to hover in front of them, blocking their way, arms folded across his chest, gold stars glinting.
Roxanne pulls back instinctively, hand going out to catch hold of Syx’s sleeve. She turns, intending to go around Wayne, but Nick and Derick are there. Syx turns them in the other direction, but Annie and Miranda are there, and-
Suddenly, Roxanne and Syx are surrounded, hemmed in on all sides, their entire class arranged in a ring around them.
Roxanne and Syx draw even closer together. Syx holds Minion’s ball very tightly to his chest; Minion is fluttering around inside it in an agitated sort of way.
“You are bad,” Wayne says, pointing at Syx. He squares his shoulders and puffs out his chest. “You’re a bully.”
“You’re the bully!” Roxanne says, even though her heart is beating much too hard; she can feel the pulse of it in the palms of her hands. “We want to go sit down; let us by.”
“You wouldn’t let Lisa sit down,” Wayne says sanctimoniously, as though he hasn’t spend the last few weeks being awful Lisa himself.
“Yeah!” Lisa says, “they were mean to me!”
“They’re bad,” Wayne says.
There’s a murmur of agreement from the crowd, and then everyone chimes in.
“Thinks he’s smarter than everybody else-” says Derick.
“-acts like she’s better than us-” says Miranda.
“-doesn’t even know how to say words right-” says Annie.
“-thinks his fish can talk-”
“Look!” Lisa says, pointing at Roxanne’s wrist. “I told you it was contagious; I told you!”
Roxanne looks down and sees the blue paint, the marks of Syx’s fingers around her wrist. They’re just visible beyond the slightly-too-short sleeves of her sweatshirt.
“It’s just paint,” she snaps. “Don’t be stupid.”
But everyone is shouting now and nobody is listening to her.
“-blue skin-”
“-‘alien disease’, he said, you all heard him admit it!”
“-freaks-”
“-contagious-”
“-go back to your own planet!”
“-turning her skin blue-”
“-shouldn’t be allowed around real people-”
“-ugly blue thing-”
“Stop it!” Roxanne yells. Syx is clutching Minion’s sphere in a viselike grip; they both look terrified. “Stop it right now!”
She doesn’t see who it is that pushes her, but somebody does.
Roxanne stumbles, letting go of Syx.
Someone pulls the hood of her sweatshirt up and over her her head, and yanks on the drawstrings as far as they’ll go, forcing the hood over her eyes, over her nose and mouth, over most of her face-she can’t see; the cloth is in the way; she can’t breathe; they’ve knotted the drawstrings and-she’s being pushed again, first one way then another, and they’re all around her and they’re shouting and-this can’t be happening, it can’t be; they were walking towards the jungle gym just a moment ago, just a moment ago things were normal, and she should be doing something, she should be stopping this, she should be able to make this not be happening, but she’s frozen, can’t seem to force her body to fight back, to-
Syx screams.
Roxanne kicks out reflexively, catching someone in the ankle; she hears them yelp in pain. She brings her hands up and strikes out blindly, getting someone in the shoulder and someone in the face, and then she is scrabbling at the knots in the drawstrings of her hood. But they’re too tightly tied and the strings are tangled, so she just pulls the whole thing off over her head.
In her t-shirt now, she turns in the direction of Syx’s voice. Sam S. tries to grab her, so she elbows him in the stomach.
Syx is a few feet away from her. He’s on the ground, flat on his back. Wayne is standing above him, one foot planted on Syx’s chest, pinning him down. Syx’s face is bloody; his nose is bleeding, and he’s screaming at Wayne through the blood on his teeth. Roxanne only recognizes about half of the words that he's shouting; some of them seem to be in another language. He twists frantically, trying to get away, clawing at Wayne’s leg.
Wayne, unperturbed, presses his foot down a little harder on Syx’s chest, and Syx’s voice takes on a gasping, pained quality, but he doesn’t stop shouting or struggling to get up because-
-Wayne has Minion’s sphere.
He’s holding it aloft; and Minion, inside it, is upside down, spinning round and round inside the swirling water-has Wayne been shaking the ball? Fish die if you do that oh god and Minion isn’t moving on his own, he’s just spinning with the water and there’s a plume of blood unfurling in the water from Minion’s side-
“Minion!” Roxanne screams and lunges for Wayne.
Nobody tries to stop her; the other kids have backed away from Wayne and Syx; most of the ones nearest the Syx are already sporting injuries and they don’t seem eager to sustain more. Wayne, hearing her shout, turns, startled. The move throws him off balance enough that Syx is able, with a violent motion, to wrench himself from underneath Wayne’s foot. Wayne, knocked even further off balance, stumbles, and Syx launches himself at Wayne, who drops Minion’s ball. Roxanne dives for it, but doesn’t make it in time.
Minion’s sphere bounces, awfully, sickeningly, and Roxanne gives a smothered noise of horror and throws herself onto her knees, grabbing it, stopping its bouncing, cradling it in her lap and the water is still spinning and Minion is still upside down, the water turning pinkish now-
Wayne yanks Syx off of himself and throws him to the ground. Syx is bruised and bleeding; Wayne doesn’t have a scratch on him, but his hair is mussed and Syx has ripped the gold stars off his shirt and left bloody handprints in their place and Wayne looks enraged.
“You’re crazy!” he yells, and then says, “stay down!” because Syx is struggling to his feet, clearly intending to throw himself back into the fight.
Wayne shoves him hard and he falls again.
“I said stay down! You lose! That means you stay down, you blue-skinned freak of nature!”
“Fuck you!” Syx shouts, dragging himself up again, and Roxanne thinks hysterically that she’s never heard anyone but an adult use that particular word before, and Syx is bleeding and Minion isn’t moving, he isn’t moving- “Fuck you and the escape pod you rode in on, you tek’sha’nekha lev’arethi-”
Wayne punches him and Syx falls again. Syx laughs, pained and crazed, and spits blood at Wayne’s feet. Wayne’s eyes flare red and a beam of light sears its way across Syx’s shoulder. Syx cries out in pain and Roxanne screams, looking around for something to throw at Wayne and-
“What on earth is going on?” Miss Simmons screeches. Everyone freezes and looks over at their teacher, who is wearing a pink cardigan and the most honest expression Roxanne has ever seen on her; she looks absolutely horrified.
For a moment there is silence, and then-
“Syx attacked us,” Wayne says uncertainly.
Roxanne gapes at him, open-mouthed.
“…attacked you,” Miss Simmons says slowly, looking at Wayne. Her eyes flicker to Syx, lying on the ground clutching his burned shoulder. She looks around the crowd of schoolchildren. “He attacked you?” she asks them.
They shuffle their feet, glance away from her gaze and-
One by one, they all nod their heads.
“Of course,” Miss Simmons says, almost to herself. “Much better that-that must have been it.”
“He attacked us,” Wayne says earnestly, more confident now. “I had to protect everyone.”
“You are a liar,” Roxanne says loudly, voice shaking with rage and shock and fear. “You’re the ones who attacked us! We were walking, we were just walking, and he-”
“I had to stop him from hurting the others,” Wayne says over top of Roxanne. He glances sidelong at her. “And then Roxanne started hitting people,” he adds.
Roxanne opens her mouth to deny it, but the others are already chiming in, telling Miss Simmons how Roxanne kicked them, how she punched them, how she elbowed them in the stomach, and Miss Simmons is nodding along as though every word they’re saying makes perfect sense, and-
Roxanne looks down at Minion, floating belly-up in the pinkish water of his ball, and Miss Simmons and Wayne and all the rest of them just sort of fade into insignificance.
“Minion,” she whispers. Minion doesn’t move. “Syx,” she says, “Syx, Minion isn’t moving; he isn’t moving.”
She looks up, tears blurring her vision. Syx is beside her now, reaching out for Minion’s sphere, fingers leaving crimson smudges on the glass.
“He’s okay,” Syx says rapidly. “He’s okay, he’s-he has to be okay; Minion likes to pretend; it’s his-favorite game to-Minion, Minion, tell me you’re okay!”
In his ball, Minion stirs sluggishly. Roxanne gives a gasping sob of relief-so does Syx-and Minion turns himself slowly upright.
“Minion,” Syx says, grinning through tears and blood. “I knew you were okay.”
Minion gives him a look so patently disbelieving that Roxanne has to laugh, startled and teary around the edges. Minion sends a glance her way that is half smile, half wince, and then winks at her.
Syx laughs, hugging Minion’s sphere tightly. Roxanne wraps her arms around both of them, and they cling together as, above them, Miss Simmons says unacceptable and violence and expelled and permanent records and ordinarily that would seem important to Roxanne, maybe, but right now the sound of her own relieved heartbeat is too loud in her ears for her to pay much attention.
“We’re okay,” Syx whispers. “It’s okay. We’re going to be okay.”
________________________________________
Miss Simmons makes them clean themselves up at the sink with soap and water and a bottle of stinging antiseptic. Syx is in worse shape than Roxanne, who just has skinned knees from when she threw herself down to catch Minion’s ball. Roxanne asks Syx if there’s a way to put antiseptic on Minion, or if they should drop it in the sphere or something, but he tells her that the water has natural cleansing properties.
“-actually a unique chemical composition which-”
“Stop talking,” says Wayne, who Miss Simmons put in charge of watching them while she calls Roxanne’s parents and the Warden of the prison. “You’re not allowed to talk.”
Syx stops talking.
He tilts his head back until his nose stops bleeding and pulls the collar of his shirt aside so that Roxanne can put a bandaid over the burn on his shoulder and they wash the blood off of Syx’s hands and Minion’s ball.
Some of the blue paint of Syx’s handprint comes off in the sink when Roxanne washes her hands, but she deliberately avoids scrubbing it off all the way. She isn’t sure why, but it seems-important, somehow, to leave it.
Seeing that they’ve finished patching themselves up, Wayne grabs their collars and flies them over to the Bad Corner. Wayne’s never picked Roxanne up before, like he always does Syx; it’s sort of terrifying and rather painful, the collar of her shirt digging into her throat, cutting off her air. Wayne drops them and hovers in the air in front of them for a moment, looking smug. He glances at Minion, and for a moment, Roxanne thinks he’s going to try to take the sphere away from Syx.
“Don’t even think about it,” Syx snarls, looking ready to throw himself at Wayne again.
Wayne’s eyes go back to Syx, and for a moment he looks-uncertain, almost guilty. But then he narrows his eyes and draws up his chest.
“You’re never coming back here again, you blue freak!” he says, and shoves Syx so that he’s facing the corner. He smirks and looks over at Roxanne, who gazes at him for a long moment with as much disgust in her expression as she can muster. Again, Wayne’s expression flickers into guilt and then hardens back into self-righteousness. Roxanne gives him a look of utter disappointment and then turns away from him, so that she, too, is facing the corner.
Behind her, she can hear Wayne blow a raspberry, and then he flies away to rejoin the rest of the group.
Miss Simmons is still out of the room; everyone is talking and laughing.
“We won’t be bothered by them anymore,” Wayne says loudly, and everybody cheers. “They’re getting expelled.”
“Bye-bye, you blue freak!” Annie sing-songs.
“Losers!”
“Have fun being expelled, Smurfette!” Lisa calls, and everyone laughs.
Roxanne, in the Bad Corner, looks down at the blue marks on her wrist.
She is-having some trouble breathing, actually. It feels like she’s suffocating, like she’s trapped in her own hood again, like she’s being held by her collar once more, and her heart is fluttering wildly in her chest.
Expelled.
She’s getting expelled. That goes on your permanent record.
What are her parents going to say? What is she going to do? She’s getting thrown out of school; she’ll probably never get a job; when she grows up, everyone will look at her record and nobody will want to hire her, and she’ll end up as some sort of criminal and-
A vision appears in Roxanne’s head: her and Minion and Syx, dressed in black and white striped outfits and little black masks, like robbers in a cartoon, holding up a bank with that dehydration gun Syx showed her last month.
Roxanne shakes her head. That’s irrational, she tells herself; no doubt she’ll be able to get a job at, at McDonalds or something, and anyway, prisoners don’t dress in black and white anymore; they dress in orange jumpsuits, obviously, since Syx wears one every day, and why would he bother wearing a mask to rob a bank; it’s not as though there are any other blue people running around the city and oh, god, this isn’t helping-
She looks over at Syx, who’s gazing into the open door of the supply cabinet with an odd expression on his face.
“What are you thinking?” she whispers, wanting him to turn and look at her, wanting him to tell her we’re going to be okay again.
But he keeps staring into the supply cabinet with that strange expression.
“I’m thinking,” he says slowly, “that there’s enough stuff in this cabinet to make a paint bomb that’ll turn everybody in this classroom blue.” He strokes his fingers over Minion’s bowl and looks over at Roxanne. “What are you thinking?” he asks.
Roxanne looks at him, at the ‘skin-colored’ bandage against his blue shoulder, showing beneath the hole that Wayne burned in his jumpsuit. She looks down at her wrist, marked with blue, and then she looks up into his face again. She looks at his blue skin, at the alien shape of his head and the inhuman color of his eyes.
She looks at his expression.
She takes a breath.
“I’m thinking we should build that paint bomb,” she says.
It’s a cold day; Miss Simmons, who is wearing a thin cotton shirt, shivers and tells them to go ahead and start the game and then she goes back into the schoolhouse to get her sweater.
Roxanne and Syx move towards the jungle gym, where they usually sit.They don’t make it there this time. Wayne flies down to hover in front of them, blocking their way, arms folded across his chest, gold stars glinting.
Roxanne pulls back instinctively, hand going out to catch hold of Syx’s sleeve. She turns, intending to go around Wayne, but Nick and Derick are there. Syx turns them in the other direction, but Annie and Miranda are there, and-
Suddenly, Roxanne and Syx are surrounded, hemmed in on all sides, their entire class arranged in a ring around them.
Roxanne and Syx draw even closer together. Syx holds Minion’s ball very tightly to his chest; Minion is fluttering around inside it in an agitated sort of way.
“You are bad,” Wayne says, pointing at Syx. He squares his shoulders and puffs out his chest. “You’re a bully.”
“You’re the bully!” Roxanne says, even though her heart is beating much too hard; she can feel the pulse of it in the palms of her hands. “We want to go sit down; let us by.”
“You wouldn’t let Lisa sit down,” Wayne says sanctimoniously, as though he hasn’t spend the last few weeks being awful Lisa himself.
“Yeah!” Lisa says, “they were mean to me!”
“They’re bad,” Wayne says.
There’s a murmur of agreement from the crowd, and then everyone chimes in.
“Thinks he’s smarter than everybody else-” says Derick.
“-acts like she’s better than us-” says Miranda.
“-doesn’t even know how to say words right-” says Annie.
“-thinks his fish can talk-”
“Look!” Lisa says, pointing at Roxanne’s wrist. “I told you it was contagious; I told you!”
Roxanne looks down and sees the blue paint, the marks of Syx’s fingers around her wrist. They’re just visible beyond the slightly-too-short sleeves of her sweatshirt.
“It’s just paint,” she snaps. “Don’t be stupid.”
But everyone is shouting now and nobody is listening to her.
“-blue skin-”
“-‘alien disease’, he said, you all heard him admit it!”
“-freaks-”
“-contagious-”
“-go back to your own planet!”
“-turning her skin blue-”
“-shouldn’t be allowed around real people-”
“-ugly blue thing-”
“Stop it!” Roxanne yells. Syx is clutching Minion’s sphere in a viselike grip; they both look terrified. “Stop it right now!”
She doesn’t see who it is that pushes her, but somebody does.
Roxanne stumbles, letting go of Syx.
Someone pulls the hood of her sweatshirt up and over her her head, and yanks on the drawstrings as far as they’ll go, forcing the hood over her eyes, over her nose and mouth, over most of her face-she can’t see; the cloth is in the way; she can’t breathe; they’ve knotted the drawstrings and-she’s being pushed again, first one way then another, and they’re all around her and they’re shouting and-this can’t be happening, it can’t be; they were walking towards the jungle gym just a moment ago, just a moment ago things were normal, and she should be doing something, she should be stopping this, she should be able to make this not be happening, but she’s frozen, can’t seem to force her body to fight back, to-
Syx screams.
Roxanne kicks out reflexively, catching someone in the ankle; she hears them yelp in pain. She brings her hands up and strikes out blindly, getting someone in the shoulder and someone in the face, and then she is scrabbling at the knots in the drawstrings of her hood. But they’re too tightly tied and the strings are tangled, so she just pulls the whole thing off over her head.
In her t-shirt now, she turns in the direction of Syx’s voice. Sam S. tries to grab her, so she elbows him in the stomach.
Syx is a few feet away from her. He’s on the ground, flat on his back. Wayne is standing above him, one foot planted on Syx’s chest, pinning him down. Syx’s face is bloody; his nose is bleeding, and he’s screaming at Wayne through the blood on his teeth. Roxanne only recognizes about half of the words that he's shouting; some of them seem to be in another language. He twists frantically, trying to get away, clawing at Wayne’s leg.
Wayne, unperturbed, presses his foot down a little harder on Syx’s chest, and Syx’s voice takes on a gasping, pained quality, but he doesn’t stop shouting or struggling to get up because-
-Wayne has Minion’s sphere.
He’s holding it aloft; and Minion, inside it, is upside down, spinning round and round inside the swirling water-has Wayne been shaking the ball? Fish die if you do that oh god and Minion isn’t moving on his own, he’s just spinning with the water and there’s a plume of blood unfurling in the water from Minion’s side-
“Minion!” Roxanne screams and lunges for Wayne.
Nobody tries to stop her; the other kids have backed away from Wayne and Syx; most of the ones nearest the Syx are already sporting injuries and they don’t seem eager to sustain more. Wayne, hearing her shout, turns, startled. The move throws him off balance enough that Syx is able, with a violent motion, to wrench himself from underneath Wayne’s foot. Wayne, knocked even further off balance, stumbles, and Syx launches himself at Wayne, who drops Minion’s ball. Roxanne dives for it, but doesn’t make it in time.
Minion’s sphere bounces, awfully, sickeningly, and Roxanne gives a smothered noise of horror and throws herself onto her knees, grabbing it, stopping its bouncing, cradling it in her lap and the water is still spinning and Minion is still upside down, the water turning pinkish now-
Wayne yanks Syx off of himself and throws him to the ground. Syx is bruised and bleeding; Wayne doesn’t have a scratch on him, but his hair is mussed and Syx has ripped the gold stars off his shirt and left bloody handprints in their place and Wayne looks enraged.
“You’re crazy!” he yells, and then says, “stay down!” because Syx is struggling to his feet, clearly intending to throw himself back into the fight.
Wayne shoves him hard and he falls again.
“I said stay down! You lose! That means you stay down, you blue-skinned freak of nature!”
“Fuck you!” Syx shouts, dragging himself up again, and Roxanne thinks hysterically that she’s never heard anyone but an adult use that particular word before, and Syx is bleeding and Minion isn’t moving, he isn’t moving- “Fuck you and the escape pod you rode in on, you tek’sha’nekha lev’arethi-”
Wayne punches him and Syx falls again. Syx laughs, pained and crazed, and spits blood at Wayne’s feet. Wayne’s eyes flare red and a beam of light sears its way across Syx’s shoulder. Syx cries out in pain and Roxanne screams, looking around for something to throw at Wayne and-
“What on earth is going on?” Miss Simmons screeches. Everyone freezes and looks over at their teacher, who is wearing a pink cardigan and the most honest expression Roxanne has ever seen on her; she looks absolutely horrified.
For a moment there is silence, and then-
“Syx attacked us,” Wayne says uncertainly.
Roxanne gapes at him, open-mouthed.
“…attacked you,” Miss Simmons says slowly, looking at Wayne. Her eyes flicker to Syx, lying on the ground clutching his burned shoulder. She looks around the crowd of schoolchildren. “He attacked you?” she asks them.
They shuffle their feet, glance away from her gaze and-
One by one, they all nod their heads.
“Of course,” Miss Simmons says, almost to herself. “Much better that-that must have been it.”
“He attacked us,” Wayne says earnestly, more confident now. “I had to protect everyone.”
“You are a liar,” Roxanne says loudly, voice shaking with rage and shock and fear. “You’re the ones who attacked us! We were walking, we were just walking, and he-”
“I had to stop him from hurting the others,” Wayne says over top of Roxanne. He glances sidelong at her. “And then Roxanne started hitting people,” he adds.
Roxanne opens her mouth to deny it, but the others are already chiming in, telling Miss Simmons how Roxanne kicked them, how she punched them, how she elbowed them in the stomach, and Miss Simmons is nodding along as though every word they’re saying makes perfect sense, and-
Roxanne looks down at Minion, floating belly-up in the pinkish water of his ball, and Miss Simmons and Wayne and all the rest of them just sort of fade into insignificance.
“Minion,” she whispers. Minion doesn’t move. “Syx,” she says, “Syx, Minion isn’t moving; he isn’t moving.”
She looks up, tears blurring her vision. Syx is beside her now, reaching out for Minion’s sphere, fingers leaving crimson smudges on the glass.
“He’s okay,” Syx says rapidly. “He’s okay, he’s-he has to be okay; Minion likes to pretend; it’s his-favorite game to-Minion, Minion, tell me you’re okay!”
In his ball, Minion stirs sluggishly. Roxanne gives a gasping sob of relief-so does Syx-and Minion turns himself slowly upright.
“Minion,” Syx says, grinning through tears and blood. “I knew you were okay.”
Minion gives him a look so patently disbelieving that Roxanne has to laugh, startled and teary around the edges. Minion sends a glance her way that is half smile, half wince, and then winks at her.
Syx laughs, hugging Minion’s sphere tightly. Roxanne wraps her arms around both of them, and they cling together as, above them, Miss Simmons says unacceptable and violence and expelled and permanent records and ordinarily that would seem important to Roxanne, maybe, but right now the sound of her own relieved heartbeat is too loud in her ears for her to pay much attention.
“We’re okay,” Syx whispers. “It’s okay. We’re going to be okay.”
________________________________________
Miss Simmons makes them clean themselves up at the sink with soap and water and a bottle of stinging antiseptic. Syx is in worse shape than Roxanne, who just has skinned knees from when she threw herself down to catch Minion’s ball. Roxanne asks Syx if there’s a way to put antiseptic on Minion, or if they should drop it in the sphere or something, but he tells her that the water has natural cleansing properties.
“-actually a unique chemical composition which-”
“Stop talking,” says Wayne, who Miss Simmons put in charge of watching them while she calls Roxanne’s parents and the Warden of the prison. “You’re not allowed to talk.”
Syx stops talking.
He tilts his head back until his nose stops bleeding and pulls the collar of his shirt aside so that Roxanne can put a bandaid over the burn on his shoulder and they wash the blood off of Syx’s hands and Minion’s ball.
Some of the blue paint of Syx’s handprint comes off in the sink when Roxanne washes her hands, but she deliberately avoids scrubbing it off all the way. She isn’t sure why, but it seems-important, somehow, to leave it.
Seeing that they’ve finished patching themselves up, Wayne grabs their collars and flies them over to the Bad Corner. Wayne’s never picked Roxanne up before, like he always does Syx; it’s sort of terrifying and rather painful, the collar of her shirt digging into her throat, cutting off her air. Wayne drops them and hovers in the air in front of them for a moment, looking smug. He glances at Minion, and for a moment, Roxanne thinks he’s going to try to take the sphere away from Syx.
“Don’t even think about it,” Syx snarls, looking ready to throw himself at Wayne again.
Wayne’s eyes go back to Syx, and for a moment he looks-uncertain, almost guilty. But then he narrows his eyes and draws up his chest.
“You’re never coming back here again, you blue freak!” he says, and shoves Syx so that he’s facing the corner. He smirks and looks over at Roxanne, who gazes at him for a long moment with as much disgust in her expression as she can muster. Again, Wayne’s expression flickers into guilt and then hardens back into self-righteousness. Roxanne gives him a look of utter disappointment and then turns away from him, so that she, too, is facing the corner.
Behind her, she can hear Wayne blow a raspberry, and then he flies away to rejoin the rest of the group.
Miss Simmons is still out of the room; everyone is talking and laughing.
“We won’t be bothered by them anymore,” Wayne says loudly, and everybody cheers. “They’re getting expelled.”
“Bye-bye, you blue freak!” Annie sing-songs.
“Losers!”
“Have fun being expelled, Smurfette!” Lisa calls, and everyone laughs.
Roxanne, in the Bad Corner, looks down at the blue marks on her wrist.
She is-having some trouble breathing, actually. It feels like she’s suffocating, like she’s trapped in her own hood again, like she’s being held by her collar once more, and her heart is fluttering wildly in her chest.
Expelled.
She’s getting expelled. That goes on your permanent record.
What are her parents going to say? What is she going to do? She’s getting thrown out of school; she’ll probably never get a job; when she grows up, everyone will look at her record and nobody will want to hire her, and she’ll end up as some sort of criminal and-
A vision appears in Roxanne’s head: her and Minion and Syx, dressed in black and white striped outfits and little black masks, like robbers in a cartoon, holding up a bank with that dehydration gun Syx showed her last month.
Roxanne shakes her head. That’s irrational, she tells herself; no doubt she’ll be able to get a job at, at McDonalds or something, and anyway, prisoners don’t dress in black and white anymore; they dress in orange jumpsuits, obviously, since Syx wears one every day, and why would he bother wearing a mask to rob a bank; it’s not as though there are any other blue people running around the city and oh, god, this isn’t helping-
She looks over at Syx, who’s gazing into the open door of the supply cabinet with an odd expression on his face.
“What are you thinking?” she whispers, wanting him to turn and look at her, wanting him to tell her we’re going to be okay again.
But he keeps staring into the supply cabinet with that strange expression.
“I’m thinking,” he says slowly, “that there’s enough stuff in this cabinet to make a paint bomb that’ll turn everybody in this classroom blue.” He strokes his fingers over Minion’s bowl and looks over at Roxanne. “What are you thinking?” he asks.
Roxanne looks at him, at the ‘skin-colored’ bandage against his blue shoulder, showing beneath the hole that Wayne burned in his jumpsuit. She looks down at her wrist, marked with blue, and then she looks up into his face again. She looks at his blue skin, at the alien shape of his head and the inhuman color of his eyes.
She looks at his expression.
She takes a breath.
“I’m thinking we should build that paint bomb,” she says.