Defiant (Blaze Trilogy Book 1) Read online

  The bell rang, and I glanced at the clock. Forty minutes had flown by, and I hadn’t so much as glanced at the cumbersome old TV playing the Romeo and Juliet videotape. Ah-mazing. That had to have been the best English class I’d ever been in, and I was almost sorry to have it end.

  Still, I stood up, shoved my uncapped pen into my trousers, and grabbed my schoolbag from under the desk. Slinging it on my back over one shoulder, I walked out of the door right behind Jake Clark, the most popular guy in school and Lacey’s boyfriend. He was built like a house, tall, wide, and heavy, with muscles that screamed steroids. He was also fairly smart, but he hid it well. I’d seen his Physics test scores once when I’d spent an afternoon detention helping the Physics teacher mark assessments. He’d gotten a seventy-three out of one hundred. Smart enough. But, for the purposes of seeming cool, he acted like a moron, which I thought made him a bigger idiot than he pretended to be.

  Beside him, Mark Lansford was yattering appreciatively about the new girl. “New girl’s kinda hot, doncha think? And spunky. I like a chick with spunk, if you get what I mean.” He elbowed Jake, who snickered.

  I rolled my eyes and swallowed a noise of disgust, knowing it’d cost me my Biology essay if either of them heard it. If I didn’t hand in that essay, I was going to get another detention, and I couldn’t afford another blotch on my record. It would make blotch fifteen since I’d turned seventeen last year. The headmaster and I were on first name terms.

  Stepping into the hallway, goosebumps raised on my arms as the self-professed idiots strode away, remarking on the doubtful availability of the new girl. The corridors of the school, with their pale walls, wide windows, and grimy stone floors, were always cold, even in the height of summer. I shuffled my bag about on my back a bit, so I could pull down my shirtsleeves without it slipping off my shoulder, and almost tripped over a pair of legs, crossed at the ankle in front of me. I scowled down at the scuffed black boots, heavy lace-up things, and began to raise my glower to whoever had thoughtlessly parked themselves in the hallway in front of me.

  By the time my gaze reached halfway up the pair of legs, my glower had faded, replaced by a surprised smile. When I finally got to the eyes, I grinned.

  “Hey, there. I was waiting for you,” Poppy said softly, maybe a little shyly. She pushed herself away from the wall and smiled at me.

  I was sure I’d misheard her or something. I blinked. “Did you say you were waiting for me?” I asked, feeling slow and incredulous.

  She started walking, and I joined her, easily keeping up with her quick pace due to my longer legs. I wondered if she was in a particular hurry to get to her next class after having waited an extra minute and a half for me, or if she always walked fast.

  She looked over at me, just a sideways glance under her lashes. “Yeah, that’s what I said. You look surprised,” she observed carefully, tugging down her sleeves and adjusting the cuffs over her thin fingers. As she walked, she flicked her ponytail with a brisk twitch of her head, releasing another burst of that sweet perfume.

  I was starting to think it wasn’t perfume so much as the smell of her shampoo. Did she wash her hair with flower petals or something?

  Sliding through the double doors at the end of the English hallway and taking a right at the main hall, we headed toward the stairs that would take us to the second and third floors. —“I’m not surprised,” I lied, “Just…curious.” I shrugged.

  Poppy raised one eyebrow at me in a sceptical expression, tilting her chin down just a little to make it look also a bit condescending, as if she was silently saying, ‘Who do you think you’re fooling?’ But all she said was, “Curious as to what, precisely?”

  It was strange, the way she spoke. Kind of formal, but interesting. I liked it. Then again, she probably could have spoken in Dutch and I would have found her interesting.

  I looked away, up the stairs, as if I needed to see where I was going. I didn’t. I could have walked the entire school with my eyes closed. It just made me feel funny to look at her too long. She was bright somehow, and achingly cute up close.

  “Curious, I suppose, as to why you would choose to make friends with the guy who is so obviously the school loner. Instead of making friends with the pretty, popular people. I mean, Lacey might be pissed at you for what you said to her in class, but you could still get in with the in crowd if you wanted.” It was true enough, but it hurt me just to say it. I didn’t want her to be with the in crowd. I wanted her to be with the Loner Guy.

  We were almost at the top of the first flight of stairs. I was wondering what her next class was, and if she actually knew how to find it. It seemed she was just following me around, paying no real attention to her surroundings. There was a thoughtful look on her face again, one I was beginning to think she might wear rather a lot. She was silent as we kept climbing and moved onto the next flight that would take us to the top floor, where the Art Department and Home Economics classes were. Something sticky made a sucking sound under my foot on one of the steps and I frowned. There was a fizzy drinks can crushed into the corner of the stair, and I kicked it through the rails of the banister, hearing it make impact with the ground a floor below.

  Poppy still hadn’t said anything when we reached the third floor, and I held open one of the doors for her. She paused in the doorway and flashed me a smile that nearly took my breath away. “You want to know why I chose to befriend the school loner? Because I don’t like many people, but I think I’ll like you. You seem…different.” She stepped through the door and turned to watch me come through, too, then began walking backwards down the dim corridor. The corridors on the top floor were always dimmer because there were no windows outside of the classrooms and only half the lights worked.

  “Different,” I said, trying out the word the way she’d said it. Not as if it was a disease, but as if it was a precious, rare trait. I supposed, in modern secondary schools, different was rare. Certainly in this school it was, anyway. “You could say that. You could also say freak or loser, and you’d be a lot closer to the tenor of being me,” I commented, watching her casually strolling backwards, waiting for her to trip, so I might lunge forward and catch her. Then she’d smile that lovely smile, say thank you, and we might kiss and… I was getting so far ahead of myself that I’d need a map to find my body again. You just met her, Anson. Get a grip. Yeah, she’s pretty. Yeah, she sounds smart. But you have no idea if she really is smart. Find that out first and take it from there.

  Ah, the sensible part of my brain was a blessing, where my creative side was often a curse that led me into trouble. Some of the many blotches on my academic records were not for merely arriving late to class or failing to turn in homework on time. Nope, most of them were for, what my art teacher called, ‘creative stunts’.

  These included the time I had gotten bored in Graphics and had created an army of wee, spindly knights from silver paperclips instead of finishing the Pictorial View of my project design. Another stunt had been on the playground, when I’d decided to draw a mural on the black asphalt with chalk during the lunch break. Apparently, the headmaster frowned upon depictions of bony black trees and dusty gravestones done in chalk. I’d thought it was a good representation of how most teenagers felt about the school.

  There was also the time I had been suspended for a week for filling water balloons with paint and hanging them from the ceiling of the Art department. I had meant them to be decorative—not my fault that a bunch of kids with sharp pencils decided to have a game of darts in the middle of class. Still, I had been the one forced to clean it all up.

  Yeah, I was something of a ‘trouble student’ according to my last four report cards. Maybe that was why my mother spent all her time at home locked away in her study, hiding from me behind an oak door with her old books and new laptop. My mum was an editor for a historical magazine. My dad, well, he left when I was eight. I didn’t know why, and I didn’t care why. I didn’t talk about it.

  However, without him,
and with my mum always busy working on some new article for her magazine, I was usually the one left to look after my bratty little brother, Aaron. He was twelve and thought he knew everything. He had an annoying habit of spouting useless facts at me, some of which I already knew, and most of which I didn’t care to know.

  At least I didn’t see him at school much. He’d just moved into first year last summer, and I was unlucky if I bumped into him in the hallways once a fortnight. That was how I liked it.

  Thinking of school reminded me where I currently was and who I was currently with. Poppy was looking at me with inquisitive eyes, hovering by the door to the Art department, where I’d stopped without realising it. Apparently, she had art too. I was almost ashamed of the happiness that revelation made me feel. If it turned out she wasn’t as smart as she sounded, if she at least had a bit of decent creativity in her, I might be able to overlook her less than stellar IQ.

  “Do you often get lost inside your own head?” she asked quietly, her fingers on the varnished wood of the door, the silver plate with PUSH etched into it glimmering under the dim lighting. It was such an odd question, and even odder was the fact that she’d been observing me closely enough to notice me vanishing into my own thoughts.

  I shrugged and leaned over to push the door open a crack. The smell of paint and chalk wafted out from the brightly coloured room, flooding me with the feeling of lightness I always felt when surrounded by passion and inspiration. Art was my favourite class. Music was second. I liked poetry, but I didn’t play an instrument, which made Music class a little redundant to me most of the time, but I enjoyed listening to others compose their lyric-less masterpieces.

  “Sometimes. When you spend a lot of time alone, it becomes second nature to talk to yourself. I learned quickly that it’s better to have silent conversations with yourself, though, not ones aloud.”

  Poppy laughed and pushed her way into Art ahead of me, ducking under my arm. The lighting in the Art department was much brighter than the hallways, and the neon colours painting the walls forced me to squint until my eyes adjusted. The department was made up of three ‘classrooms’ divided by long, tall walls that only came halfway across the room. Each ‘room’ had large desks and little wooden chairs placed at random angles, a sink lined with paint bottles and brushes, and a wall of trays full of pencils, pens, paper, fabrics, lollypop sticks, and other such riffraff you might need during Art class.

  I walked straight to my usual table, dumped my bag under it, hooked my stool, and sat down. The only other person who sat at my table was a quiet boy named Alistair with dyed black hair and a pierced ear. He also had a tattoo of an angry rat on his left forearm, which was visible because he had the sleeves of his black shirt rolled up like everyone else in this heat. He and I got along great because neither of us liked to talk much, so we maintained a companionable silence most of the time—except for the odd occasion when one of us asked ‘Could you pass the pencil sharpener?’ or something similarly inane.

  Unlike me, Alistair wasn’t a loner. He just didn’t happen to have any of his friends in the class. There were a few other gothic guys he hung out with on the playground, and one punk girl who had a different hairstyle every month. Last time I’d seen her, she’d had a neon pink Mohican.

  Alistair was already busy scribbling away with a piece of charcoal on white paper, drawing what appeared to be a copy of the angry rat on his arm. It wasn’t until I’d gotten the big plastic folder full of my work from the cupboard where all the folders were usually kept and started pulling out drawings that I realised Poppy was still hanging about by the door, chewing her lip anxiously. I caught her eye as her gaze swept around the room and smiled at her, gesturing for her to come over.

  Mr Gabe, my Art teacher, wasn’t in the class, which was a turn of good luck because it meant Poppy could pick her own seat—preferably next to me—and the next lesson that Mr Gabe felt like turning up to, he wouldn’t ask her to move because she’d already be settled. Mr Gabe was cool like that. Even when he was in class, he didn’t exactly micromanage us like the other teachers did. He let us play music, chat, or drink coffee, so long as we were getting on with our work and didn’t spill coffee on anything.

  Hesitantly, Poppy crossed the classroom to my table, which was two plastic-topped desks pushed together, and then just stood there. I pulled out a stool for her, and she glanced around before putting down her bag and sitting. She drummed her fingers on the shiny, pale blue surface of the table.

  I kind of wanted to put my hand on top of hers to stop her, but I thought that was much too bold a move, so I settled for bumping my elbow against hers until she looked at me. “Relax. Nobody’s going to drop paint balloons on you.” I knew she wouldn’t get the joke, but I said it anyway, more to comfort myself than her.

  Alistair made a rough sound like a scoff, but I knew it was a chuckle in Alistair language. He looked up from his rat picture and glanced at Poppy before looking at me as if he might say something, and then he did a double take and looked back to Poppy. She didn’t notice because she was watching her own fingers tapping the desk insistently.

  Alistair stared at her for a long moment then turned to me and mouthed what I thought was, “Whoa, she’s hot, man.”

  I smiled tightly and nodded in agreement. Poppy looked up at me, not even glancing at Alistair, who was gaping like a guppy, and tilted her head questioningly. I could tell she was trying to work out my joke, though she couldn’t possibly know about my stunt.

  In an attempt to grab her attention, Alistair leaned his elbows on the table and grinned at her. “Yeah, paint balloons are dependent on the day of the week. Tuesdays are Anson’s crazy days,” he said, brushing his ink-black hair out of his eyes.

  Poppy transferred her gaze to him and smiled. Judging by the sudden outbreak of goosebumps on Alistair’s arms, her smile had approximately the same effect on him as it did on me. For some reason, it disappointed me.

  “Really? That’s funny because Tuesdays are my crazy days too,” Poppy replied.

  I was no expert, but I was pretty sure she was flirting. I felt my stomach dip, sinking, until she cut her eyes toward me, and I realised she wasn’t flirting with Alistair. She was flirting with me in her own shy way. It was unbearably cute.

  It seemed that Alistair noticed it, too because he leaned a little further across the table and lowered his chin just enough so that he was looking at her from under his scruffy hair. I think it was an attempt at that look I’d heard girls call smouldering. Certainly, it caught Poppy’s attention. Her smile faltered a little, and her shoulders came up slightly as if she was trying not to shiver.

  I frowned, trying to work out how such a minor change in the way he looked at her could have such an effect. I’d never really noticed, being a guy—and not a gay one as the footballers seemed to think I was— I supposed Alistair was attractive in a sort of dark, dangerous way. His grey eyes lent him a little mystery, his subtle cheekbones and heavy brows making him look very handsome. Handsome in the way that some statues were. I was tempted to try the smouldering thing myself, but I figured I’d just look like an idiot and went back to my work instead.

  I pulled out the last piece I’d been working on while Alistair and Poppy exchanged names and pleasantries. I tried not to listen as I grabbed a HB pencil from my schoolbag and set to work shading and smudging the sketch of a guitar I’d started on last week. Since Art was a two-year course, I had all my work from last year, and this year my theme was to be musical instruments. Last year, it had been urban life. Pictures of plastic street cones, plastic police tape caught in a tree, and an abandoned bicycle left to rust in the rain. That sort of thing.

  Try as I might, not to hear Poppy and Alistair flirting, my attention was instantly pricked when I heard my name.

  “So a bunch of us started throwing pencils, you know, at the balloons. You can guess what happened. We didn’t realise they were full of paint. We thought they had, like, foam beads in them or something.
So when one of them popped and splattered paint everywhere, there was chaos. Then everyone thought it was hilarious and got up on desks to burst the balloons, and there was paint everywhere. Mr Gabe was so pissed, and Anson got, what was it dude, a week suspension? Yeah, it was wicked.” Alistair grinned at Poppy, but Poppy was grinning at me again.

  “Is that true? Did you really put paint balloons on the ceiling?” she asked, but the look in her eye said she already knew I had, and she was impressed.

  I nodded.

  She laughed again. “For any specific purpose, or you just felt like doing something naughty?”

  Oh, did she have to say it like that? Naughty. It was a bad word for a pretty girl to say around teenage boys. It meant different things in our language. To girls, it meant: Naughty, bad, mischievous. To guys, it meant: Naughty, dirty, invariably sexual. Alistair proved my point by snickering.

  The question also caught me off-guard. Nobody had asked me why I’d done it before, not even the teachers. Not the headmaster, not my mother, not my classmates. They all just assumed I’d done it just to do it, just to earn some popularity points by playing an outrageous prank. And I’d never corrected them because I didn’t really know why I’d done it.

  “I…I guess I did it…to prove a point,” I said hesitantly, thinking. “I mean, to prove that when something’s fragile, it doesn’t matter what the consequences of breaking it might be, somebody will always laugh when it bursts. It’s human nature to be curious, to want to find out what’s inside, but doesn’t it say something about us when we laugh at the destruction of something pretty?”

  Once I’d said it aloud, I knew it was true. Maybe that was why I had pinned the paint balloons to the ceiling, and I just hadn’t consciously known it until somebody asked. They were both silent for a moment, and then Alistair started laughing as if I’d said something hilarious. Poppy stayed quiet for so long, I wished I could read her thoughts to find out if she was thinking I was crazy.