“Are you sure you’re going to be okay?” JC asked Brooke for the third time that morning almost a week later as he pulled up to the front of Orlando High School.

She rolled her eyes and opened the door of his jeep. “Yes, Josh, I’ll be fine. Don’t worry.”

He sighed. “Okay. You want to be picked up at three?”

“Yeah.” She got out of the jeep and slung her book bag over her shoulder. “Bye.”

“Bye.”

She watched him drive away and then turned to the school. She slowly went inside the front doors and into the main office. A lady looked up from the main desk as she entered.

“May I help you?”

“Uh, yeah. My name’s Brooke Barkly,” she said, using her mother’s maiden name. “I registered here and I have to pick up my schedule.”

The woman smiled. “You’re Brooke? Let me just grab your things for you.” She reached under the counter and produced a stack of papers. “Oh, and this is Morgan Samuals,” she said, gesturing to a blond girl who had been sitting in a chair by the door, but was now standing beside Brooke at the counter. “She offered to show you around.”

“Oh, thanks,” Brooke said, turning to Morgan.

She smiled. “No problem. Actually, I think we might have some classes together. What’s your schedule like?”

Brooke glanced down at the paper on the top of the stack she held. “I have English, math, then physics.”

“Do you have English with Olson and physics with McGregor?”

“Yeah.”

“Cool. I have those classes with you then. Do you have a locker yet?”

Brooke shook her head.

“I think there’s an extra one by me and my friends. You can have it if you want.”

“Sure, that’d be great.”

“I’ll show you where it is.”

Brooke followed Morgan through out of the office and through the hallways of the school that were already becoming crowded with students. Morgan led her upstairs and into one of the school’s wings.

“This is the science wing,” Morgan told her as she walked down towards the end of the hallway. “The teachers are a little strange, but they’re nice. Mr. Blair,” she pointed to one of the open doorways where a teacher sat behind a desk, “hates it when people are loud in the hallways when classes are in though, so if you’re late or you skip, you have to be quiet.”

“Okay.”

At the end of the hallway, two guys and a girl stood around the lockers, talking. They looked up when Morgan and Brooke neared.

“Hey Morgan,” one of the guys said. “How’s it going?”

“Not bad, Scott,” she answered. “Guys, this is Brooke Barkly. Brooke, this is Scott, Dan, and Tracy.”

Brooke smiled at them. “Hi.”

“Brooke just moved here,” Morgan explained. “I thought she could take the empty locker by you, Dan.”

Dan shrugged. “Sure.”

“Hey, Dan, you have English first, right?” Morgan asked as she opened her locker.

“Yeah. Why?”

“Brooke has it with you.”

“Really?” He turned to Brooke. “This is actually my second time taking it. It’s a pretty boring class.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard that,” she said, putting her bag in the empty locker. She picked up her binder and closed the locker when the first bell rang. “The class is in room 208, right?” she asked as she and Dan walked down the hall.

He nodded. “Yeah. The teacher, Carmichael, is a real idiot. I had him for English in grade ten and he didn’t exactly like me.”

“How come?”

He smiled. “Probably because I skipped a lot of classes and generally pissed him off a lot.” He turned into a hallway. “So where did you move from?”

“Bowie, Maryland,” she answered.

“Cool.” He stopped outside a classroom. “This is the room.”

She followed him inside and to the back of the room where a couple empty desks sat. Dan dropped his binder on one and sat down, she following suit.

At the desk at the front of the classroom, a man with graying hair and a moustache stood up when the second bell ran. He cleared his throat loudly and waited for the class to quiet down.

“As I’m sure most of you have figured out,” he started. “I’m Mr. Carmichael and this is English 30. If anyone has the wrong class, now would be the time to leave.”

A couple giggles sounded as a guy got up and sheepishly walked out of the room. Mr. Carmichael rested his elbows on his lecture podium.

“Alright. Now that we all know we’re in the right place, I’ll take attendance. Mike Brady?”

“Here.”

“Brooke Barkly?”

Brooke raised her hand slightly. “Here.”

“Tara Carrey?”

“Yeah.”

Dan rolled his eyes and turned to Brooke. “You know that girl, Tara, that he just called?” he whispered.

“Yeah,” she whispered back.

“Total skank. She went out with Scott for awhile last year and cheated on him with some jock on the football team.”

“Really?” she looked over the girl he had pointed out. “She looks like the type of person who would,” she said, taking in the girl’s tight pants and barely there tube top.

“Yeah. My boyfriend knows her and hates her too.”

She was surprised. “Boyfriend? You mean you’re…”

“Gay? Yeah. Couldn’t tell from looking at me, huh?”

She shook her head. “Nope. Does your boyfriend go here?”

“No, Mark graduated last year. He-”

“Mr. Torrance, would you mind joining us sometime soon?” Mr. Carmichael said, interrupting Dan.

“Sorry, Mr. C.,” Dan grinned, making the teacher glower at him. “I’m here.”

“Yes, I can see that unfortunately.”

He snorted quietly as Mr. Carmichael resumed calling out students’ names. “Prick,” he muttered under his breath, making Brooke laugh softly.

Mr. Carmichael finished the attendance and cleared his throat again. “Alright. As I said before, this is English 30. This is a very academic course and requires attendance everyday and hard work. Throughout the semester, we’ll be studying a series of short stories, Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’, poetry, a selected novel, and one film. You will be graded based on the following…”

Brooke sighed as he began to drone on. She stole a quick glance over at Dan, who smiled at her and softly murmured, “Welcome to hell.”

At two o’clock that afternoon, Brooke slammed the door to her and JC’s house behind her and dropped her bag on the floor. As she was taking off her shoes, JC appeared from downstairs where his recording studio was.

“Hey,” he said. “I thought I was supposed to pick you up at three.”

“You were, but I found out that I have my spare last period so I decided to walk home.”

“All the way from the school?”

“Yeah. It’s not that far. It only took me half an hour. Weren’t you going to go to the studio again today?”

He shook his head. “No, we decided to take a day off. I think Justin might come over tonight to work on a song. Do you have homework?”

She groaned. “Yeah. I swear, my teachers have never heard of going easy the first day of the semester.”

“Was your day okay?”

She nodded. “I met a few people in the morning and I know someone in all my classes.”

“That’s good.”

“Yeah. Well, I should probably start on my homework.”

“Okay.”

She went upstairs to her room and set her things on her desk. She put a cd in her stereo and then with a sigh, she sat down at her desk and started on her math.

When the phone rang a two hours later, she gladly accepted the interruption and picked it up.

“Hello?”

“Hi, is Brooke there?” a female voice asked on the other end.

“This is her.”

“Hey, this is Morgan.”

“Oh, hi. What’s up?”

“Not too much. I just got home from school and I’m trying to find ways to put off doing my homework. You?”

“Just finishing up my math. All my teachers gave an unbelievably amount of homework considering it’s the first day of classes.”

“I know! What’s up with that? Usually it gets better as the year goes on. Well, until exams that is.”

“Yeah.”

It was silent for a minute before Morgan asked, “Hey, what are you listening to?”

“2Pac.”

“Really? Cool! I love 2Pac! Which cd is it?”

“‘Until the End of Time’. It’s my favorite album by him.”

Morgan sighed. “Isn’t he the best singer ever? All of his songs are sung with such…”

“Passion?” Brooke supplied.

“Yeah, passion. You can tell he really means what he says. You don’t find that too often in singers anymore.”

“I know. That’s why I like him so much.”

Brooke and Morgan talked for another hour before JC came upstairs and told her he had dinner finished. After eating a quick supper, she returned to her room and began to work again on her homework. By time she finished, it was close to eight thirty and she was exhausted. Leaving her books stacked on her desk, she changed into her pajamas and laid down on her stomach on her bed. She picked up her notebook from her bedside table, opened to a blank page, and began to write.

At nine o’clock that night, Justin ran up the stairs to JC’s house two at a time. He and JC had been working on a song for a couple hours and were taking a break by playing a couple games of pool. He had decided to go see if Brooke wanted to play with them.

At the end of the hallway, he tapped lightly on Brooke’s closed door. When no answer came, he eased open the door. From the soft glow of a lamp, he could see Brooke laying on her bed, asleep, with her head resting on her arm and a open notebook beside her. He went over to her quietly and pulled her blankets over her. As he picked up the notebook and put it on her bedside table, the words on the page caught his eye.

If I fall along the way
Pick me up and dust me off
And if I get too tired to make it
Be my breath so I can walk

If I need some other love
Give me more than I can stand
And when my smile gets old and faded
Wait around I'll smile again

Shouldn't be so complicated
Just hold me and then
Just hold me again

Can you help me I'm bent?
I'm so scared that I'll never
Get put back together
You're breaking me in
And this is how we will end
With you and me bent

If I couldn't sleep could you sleep?
Could you paint me better off?
Could you sympathize with my needs?
I know you think I need a lot

I started out clean but I'm jaded
Just phoning it in
Just breaking the skin

Start bending me
Keep bending me until I'm completely broken in

He glanced from the notebook to Brooke and then back to the notebook again. She really needs someone to help her get through this, he thought to himself as he closed the cover of the notebook and set it on her bedside table. It was at that moment he promised himself that he would do everything in his power to help her as much as he could. After deciding this, he shut off the lamp, pitching the room into darkness and left the room, closing the door with a quiet click.

Chapter Five

Index