Fic: Safe If We Stand Close Together
Title: Safe If We Stand Close Together
Author: setepenre_set
Summary: AU. Roxanne attends 'Lil Gifted School.
Rating: K+
Warnings: none
“But he didn’t do it on purpose!” Roxanne says.
The whole class turns to stare at her.
“He didn’t do it on purpose,” Roxanne repeats, quieter. “He was trying to put the fire out; didn’t you see?”
“Rules are rules, Roxanne,” says Miss Simmons. “Bad people who break rules have to be punished.”
Roxanne squirms. She’s a good girl. She’s never had a teacher look at her like that before; it makes her stomach feel squirmy and uncomfortable. She doesn’t like it.
“And breaking a rule on accident,” Miss Simmons continues, “is just as bad as breaking a rule on purpose.” She smiles, sweet, but with something nasty behind it, like bubble-gum flavored cough syrup.
“But that’s wrong,” Syx says suddenly, from the corner, and the whole class looks over at him now, collectively gasping. Roxanne looks too, her eyes huge. She’s never heard anybody tell a teacher that they were wrong before.
“Excuse me?” Miss Simmons says, and there’s nothing sweet about her voice now.
Syx still doesn’t seem to realize what he’s done, though; he’s looking at Miss Simmons, a crease between his eyebrows.
“That’s wrong,” he says again. “Breaking a rule on accident’s different than breaking it on purpose. That’s why Uncle Lenny got eight years but Uncle Vic got life. ‘Cause involuntary manslaughter’s different than murder.”
For a moment the entire class is silent.
“I think,” says Miss Simmons, “that you can stand in the Bad Corner for the rest of the day for talking back.”
Syx’s mouth falls open in dismay; so does Roxanne’s. It’s only nine-thirty; is Miss Simmons going to make him stand in the Bad Corner until school gets out? What about lunch?
Miss Simmons smiles again, “And now, class, Wayne is going to lead us all in a sing-along! Won’t that be nice?”
________________________________________
“That isn’t even how you’re supposed to play dodgeball!” Roxanne says loudly. “There’s supposed to be teams!”
Stupid Wayne and all the other children just ignore her and keep throwing balls at Syx.
________________________________________
“He looks like a smurf,” Lisa says, loud enough that Syx, three tables over, can hear.
And he does hear; Roxanne can tell. His ears blush light purple and his shoulders hunch in his orange jumpsuit and he stops whispering to his fish for a moment.
Annie and Miranda giggle.
“I think he looks like a bobblehead,” Miranda says.
“A blue bobblehead,” says Annie.
“A smurf bobblehead,” says Lisa, and the three of them laugh again.
Roxanne doesn’t know she’s going to stand up until she’s already standing up, the legs of her chair scraping loudly over the floor.
She wants to throw her chair across the room. Instead, she grabs her crayons and her coloring book (Lisa can keep her stupid special metallic crayons that her aunt brought back from Canada; Roxanne doesn’t even want to share them anymore.)
Lisa and Annie and Miranda are all looking at her like she’s crazy. Roxanne wants to say something smart and mean to them, but she can’t think of anything because of how angry she is. So she just takes her crayons and her coloring book and walks over to Syx’s table in silence, and, in silence, sits down across from him.
Syx looks at her, eyes round, clutching his fish to his chest like he’s afraid Roxanne is going to try to steal it or something.
“We’re going to be friends now,” Roxanne tells Syx, in a tone that allows for no argument. She picks up her blue crayon and colors the sky on her picture aggressively.
“Are we?” Syx asks.
“Yes,” Roxanne says, still coloring with a vengeance.
There is a moment of silence.
“Do-do you want to be friends with Minion, too?” Syx asks, holding out his fish tentatively towards her.
Lisa and Annie and Miranda are whispering about her now; she can hear their hissing voices.
“Yes, I do,” Roxanne says firmly.
A smile starts in Syx’s eyes and spreads over the rest of his face, unfurling like a flower in the sun.
________________________________________
“No, but see, it’s simple,” Syx says, waving his arms excitedly. Minion and Roxanne exchange a meaningful look. Syx’s ‘simple’ is not simple. “I know you’ll understand if you just try!”
“Okay,” Roxanne says. “Explain again.”
They’re sitting in the corner of the playground, behind the supply shed. The other kids don’t usually bother them here. Syx is trying to tell her about his latest invention, a new robot suit for Minion, a real one that Minion can move around by himself (Minion says he doesn’t feel safe in the ball anymore, ever since Wayne decided it would be funny to use him to play soccer during recess one day). But Syx’s description of the suit has devolved into an attempt to explain to Roxanne how, exactly, electricity works.
"All right!" Syx says, grinning. "When the circuit is open, the electrical charge," he holds up his left hand and wiggles his fingers in a way that is obviously meant to symbolize electricity, "gets stuck; it can't go anywhere."
He grabs Roxanne's left hand with his right hand.
"No zap," he says. "But! If the circuit is closed-" without letting go of Roxanne's left hand, he grabs Roxanne's right hand with his left hand. "-then the current goes around and around! It goes into one of your hands and through your body and out the other hand, and that's it, that's the shock! Zap!" he finishes.
"Zzzt!" Roxanne says, and pretends to jump and jerk like she's being electrocuted.
Syx laughs. "Yes, precisely!" he adds, grinning at her expectantly.
"Huh," says Roxanne, frowning at their hands. "I think I do understand."
“Hah!” says Syx triumphantly.
“Ewww,” says Lisa’s voice from above them
Roxanne jumps; she can feel Syx do the same, his hands jerking in hers.
Their classmates are standing above them in a mob (Wayne floating at the front of them).
“What do you think you’re doing?” Wayne asks Syx, like he’s caught them playing with matches or something.
“We were just-we were talking about electricity,” Syx says in a small voice.
“Why are you holding hands?” Lisa asks.
“That’s gross,” Miranda says.
“He’s bad,” says Annie.
“You could catch something, Roxy!” Lisa says.
Roxanne looks down at their hands, still linked. She feels Syx’s grip go slack, like he’s giving her the chance to let go. She tightens her own grip instead.
“What are you, four years old?” Roxanne asks scornfully. “It’s not like he has cooties, you big babies!”
Lisa sniffs.
“I just thought I’d better warn you before he turns your skin blue!” she says.
Roxanne really wants to kick Lisa in the shins. It’s probably a good thing she’s not standing up, otherwise she might really do it.
“You are stupid,” Roxanne tells her instead. “Go away and leave us alone!”
“Wayne says he could,” Lisa insists. “Wayne says if you spend too much time with him he’ll turn your skin blue and make all your hair fall out and your head will swell up and then you’ll look just like him.” There are murmurs of agreement from the crowd of children. Lisa’s eyes sparkle maliciously. “But I guess you’d be happy then, wouldn’t you, Smurfette?”
Roxanne recoils like Lisa’s just slapped her.
“He’s bad, Roxy,” Wayne says, chest puffed out beneath his gold stars. “He’s going to hurt you. You should stay away from him.”
Syx lets go of her hands, drawing back from her, drawing back from the crowd, drawing in on himself. Roxanne wants to scream at the unfairness of everything, at Wayne’s stupid smug face and Lisa’s fake smile, at all the rest of them.
Inspiration strikes like an electrical charge through a closed circuit.
“Lisa,” Roxanne says loudly, “Annie and Miranda both think your new haircut is ugly. They told me so three weeks ago, when you got it.”
Lisa goes pale and her head snaps around to Annie and Miranda, just in time to catch the guilty expressions on their faces.
“And Wayne,” Roxanne continues, voice shaking with rage. “You’re horrible at singing. Everyone thinks so. They’re too scared to tell you to your face but they’re all laughing at you behind your back!”
The look of shocked hurt the flashes across Wayne’s face is deeply satisfying, as is the suspicious way he looks at the other kids, and the way they all start backing up from him, like they’re afraid he’s going to attack them with his laser vision or something.
Roxanne scoops up Minion’s ball in one hand and shoves herself to her feet, then grabs Syx’s hand and pulls him up after her.
“We should run,” Syx whispers.
They do.
________________________________________
“They might be right, you know,” Syx says at lunch later that week. He tears his peanut butter and jelly sandwich in half, and then proceeds to rip it into smaller pieces. The jelly oozes out onto the tabletop.
“Who might be right about what?” Roxanne asks, taking a bit of her apple.
“The-” Syx scowls and gestures around them with a jelly-covered hand. “The others! They might be right about me. Not about-not about your skin turning blue and your hair falling out and your head swelling up, I mean, obviously that isn’t going to happen; seriously, that is the most ir-ratio-nal thing I have ever heard, but-” he traces a pattern in the jelly on the table. “What if I am bad?” he finishes in a whisper. “What if it’s destiny?”
“You aren’t bad!” Roxanne says, swift and forceful. She sets her apple down.
Syx looks up at her, frowning.
“But I do bad things all the time,” he says simply. “I set the wastepaper basket on fire five times already this week!”
“You’re not bad,” Roxanne insists. “You’re just, you know, accident-prone!”
Syx bites his lip. Minion rolls comfortingly towards his hand, ignoring the jelly. Syx puts his hand absently on the ball.
“But,” he says, “I’m always in trouble with Miss Simmons at school and with the Warden at home. If they think I’m bad, then I must be, right?”
Roxanne bites her own lip.
“I think,” she whispers, conscious that she’s about to say something she can’t ever go back from, “I think maybe the adults are wrong.”
“And people don’t like me,” Syx says, so quiet Roxanne can barely hear him. “Nobody likes me.”
Roxanne gets up and goes around the table; Syx looks up at her with a confused expression, and then she hugs him.
Syx goes perfectly still, stiff and immobile in her arms, and then he puts his arms awkwardly around her back and squeezes very gently. Roxanne waits for him to stop squeezing, and then stands back up, her hands still on his shoulders. She probably has jelly in her hair now. She doesn’t care.
“I like you,” she says fiercely.
“I don’t understand why,” Syx says, looking up at her with a lost expression.
________________________________________
Gym is easily Roxanne’s least favorite class. Miss Simmons always wants them to play dodgeball-Wayne’s wrong version of dodgeball.
The game always starts the same way. Wayne is the ‘team captain’, and he picks the other kids to help him throw balls one at a time, in the order that he likes them on that particular day. Dodgeball order is a big deal at this school. Today, the order goes: Lisa, Sam S., Alex, Derick, Sam T., Meredith, Stephen, Tommy, Nick, and then Annie, who used to always get picked second but got moved to third-to-last when she broke her leg rollerskating-Wayne laughed at her cast when she wore it to school for the first time.
Only Roxanne and Syx are left, standing against the wall like they’re facing the firing squad, waiting for Wayne to point to Roxanne so everybody can throw things at Syx.
But today, after Wayne squints at them thoughtfully, screwing up his face in concentration, he points-not at Roxanne-
But at Syx.
Syx, in the act of buckling some sort of new protective helmet onto his head, stops and stares at Wayne in shock.
“Wh-what?” he demands. “You want-what?”
“That’s right,” Wayne says, smirking. “Come be on our side, Syx.”
Syx stares at him for a moment longer, glances at Roxanne, then looks back at Wayne.
Slowly, Syx unbuckles the helmet from his head and hands it to Roxanne.
She isn’t going to cry. She isn’t. Even if the bottom has dropped out of the world, even if Syx is leaving her here, Roxanne is not going to cry.
She puts the helmet on; it seems like the only thing to do at that point.
“It’s okay,” she tells Syx quietly, because she knows, she knows how much he’s wanted this.
She waits for Syx to walk away.
But he doesn’t.
“You!” Syx bursts out suddenly, finger pointed accusingly at Wayne. “You are-you are mean! Roxanne is my friend and you wanted to make me-that is mean and you are mean and all this time I’ve thought I was the bad one, that it was destiny, that it was the way it had to be, but you know what? You’re the one who’s bad! You! Not me! And I don’t want to be on your side! I don’t want to be on any side without Roxanne!” Breathing hard, he turns to Roxanne. “I don’t have the helmet calibrated for two people, but we should be safe if we stand close together,” he says in a rush, and then puts his arms around her.
Roxanne closes her eyes and hugs him back tightly.
She doesn’t understand what he means about the helmet until after it deflects one of the balls into a window; she just wants to hug him.
________________________________________
Of course, Syx gets in trouble for the helmet; Miss Simmons is even more upset about nearly getting hit herself than she is about the window.
“He wasn’t trying to hurt anyone!” Roxanne says, after Wayne shoves Syx in the Bad Corner yet again. “He just didn’t want to get hit anymore!”
“That is enough, young lady!” Miss Simmons snaps, and Roxanne flinches at her tone, sinking down in her chair. “We’ve talked about the rules before, Roxanne! Now I don’t want to hear another word about this from you. Unless,” she adds, “you’d like to join your friend there for quiet time in the Bad Corner!”
With a hot twist of shame, Roxanne finds herself blinking back tears.
Miss Simmons smiles her needles in candy-floss smile and turns back to the board.
Roxanne takes a breath.
She stands up, chair legs scraping across the floor.
Miss Simmons turns back to her.
“You are wrong,” Roxanne says quietly.
And she goes to stand beside Syx in the Bad Corner.
Behind her, there is a long moment of silence.
“Well,” says Miss Simmons with a vicious titter, “now that our two troublemakers have been taken care of, let’s move on to music class. Wayne, why don’t you sing something for us all?”
Roxanne stares into the supply cabinet, breath coming quickly. She is in the Bad Corner. She is in the Bad Corner. She told a teacher that she was wrong. What will her parents think? What will everyone think?
Syx shifts slightly, so that the backs of their hands brush together.
“Thanks,” he whispers, under the sound of Wayne’s off-key yodeling.
Roxanne doesn’t answer, but she takes his hand and laces their fingers together.
They stand like that for a long time.
(cross-posted to my tumblr)
Author: setepenre_set
Summary: AU. Roxanne attends 'Lil Gifted School.
Rating: K+
Warnings: none
“But he didn’t do it on purpose!” Roxanne says.
The whole class turns to stare at her.
“He didn’t do it on purpose,” Roxanne repeats, quieter. “He was trying to put the fire out; didn’t you see?”
“Rules are rules, Roxanne,” says Miss Simmons. “Bad people who break rules have to be punished.”
Roxanne squirms. She’s a good girl. She’s never had a teacher look at her like that before; it makes her stomach feel squirmy and uncomfortable. She doesn’t like it.
“And breaking a rule on accident,” Miss Simmons continues, “is just as bad as breaking a rule on purpose.” She smiles, sweet, but with something nasty behind it, like bubble-gum flavored cough syrup.
“But that’s wrong,” Syx says suddenly, from the corner, and the whole class looks over at him now, collectively gasping. Roxanne looks too, her eyes huge. She’s never heard anybody tell a teacher that they were wrong before.
“Excuse me?” Miss Simmons says, and there’s nothing sweet about her voice now.
Syx still doesn’t seem to realize what he’s done, though; he’s looking at Miss Simmons, a crease between his eyebrows.
“That’s wrong,” he says again. “Breaking a rule on accident’s different than breaking it on purpose. That’s why Uncle Lenny got eight years but Uncle Vic got life. ‘Cause involuntary manslaughter’s different than murder.”
For a moment the entire class is silent.
“I think,” says Miss Simmons, “that you can stand in the Bad Corner for the rest of the day for talking back.”
Syx’s mouth falls open in dismay; so does Roxanne’s. It’s only nine-thirty; is Miss Simmons going to make him stand in the Bad Corner until school gets out? What about lunch?
Miss Simmons smiles again, “And now, class, Wayne is going to lead us all in a sing-along! Won’t that be nice?”
________________________________________
“That isn’t even how you’re supposed to play dodgeball!” Roxanne says loudly. “There’s supposed to be teams!”
Stupid Wayne and all the other children just ignore her and keep throwing balls at Syx.
________________________________________
“He looks like a smurf,” Lisa says, loud enough that Syx, three tables over, can hear.
And he does hear; Roxanne can tell. His ears blush light purple and his shoulders hunch in his orange jumpsuit and he stops whispering to his fish for a moment.
Annie and Miranda giggle.
“I think he looks like a bobblehead,” Miranda says.
“A blue bobblehead,” says Annie.
“A smurf bobblehead,” says Lisa, and the three of them laugh again.
Roxanne doesn’t know she’s going to stand up until she’s already standing up, the legs of her chair scraping loudly over the floor.
She wants to throw her chair across the room. Instead, she grabs her crayons and her coloring book (Lisa can keep her stupid special metallic crayons that her aunt brought back from Canada; Roxanne doesn’t even want to share them anymore.)
Lisa and Annie and Miranda are all looking at her like she’s crazy. Roxanne wants to say something smart and mean to them, but she can’t think of anything because of how angry she is. So she just takes her crayons and her coloring book and walks over to Syx’s table in silence, and, in silence, sits down across from him.
Syx looks at her, eyes round, clutching his fish to his chest like he’s afraid Roxanne is going to try to steal it or something.
“We’re going to be friends now,” Roxanne tells Syx, in a tone that allows for no argument. She picks up her blue crayon and colors the sky on her picture aggressively.
“Are we?” Syx asks.
“Yes,” Roxanne says, still coloring with a vengeance.
There is a moment of silence.
“Do-do you want to be friends with Minion, too?” Syx asks, holding out his fish tentatively towards her.
Lisa and Annie and Miranda are whispering about her now; she can hear their hissing voices.
“Yes, I do,” Roxanne says firmly.
A smile starts in Syx’s eyes and spreads over the rest of his face, unfurling like a flower in the sun.
________________________________________
“No, but see, it’s simple,” Syx says, waving his arms excitedly. Minion and Roxanne exchange a meaningful look. Syx’s ‘simple’ is not simple. “I know you’ll understand if you just try!”
“Okay,” Roxanne says. “Explain again.”
They’re sitting in the corner of the playground, behind the supply shed. The other kids don’t usually bother them here. Syx is trying to tell her about his latest invention, a new robot suit for Minion, a real one that Minion can move around by himself (Minion says he doesn’t feel safe in the ball anymore, ever since Wayne decided it would be funny to use him to play soccer during recess one day). But Syx’s description of the suit has devolved into an attempt to explain to Roxanne how, exactly, electricity works.
"All right!" Syx says, grinning. "When the circuit is open, the electrical charge," he holds up his left hand and wiggles his fingers in a way that is obviously meant to symbolize electricity, "gets stuck; it can't go anywhere."
He grabs Roxanne's left hand with his right hand.
"No zap," he says. "But! If the circuit is closed-" without letting go of Roxanne's left hand, he grabs Roxanne's right hand with his left hand. "-then the current goes around and around! It goes into one of your hands and through your body and out the other hand, and that's it, that's the shock! Zap!" he finishes.
"Zzzt!" Roxanne says, and pretends to jump and jerk like she's being electrocuted.
Syx laughs. "Yes, precisely!" he adds, grinning at her expectantly.
"Huh," says Roxanne, frowning at their hands. "I think I do understand."
“Hah!” says Syx triumphantly.
“Ewww,” says Lisa’s voice from above them
Roxanne jumps; she can feel Syx do the same, his hands jerking in hers.
Their classmates are standing above them in a mob (Wayne floating at the front of them).
“What do you think you’re doing?” Wayne asks Syx, like he’s caught them playing with matches or something.
“We were just-we were talking about electricity,” Syx says in a small voice.
“Why are you holding hands?” Lisa asks.
“That’s gross,” Miranda says.
“He’s bad,” says Annie.
“You could catch something, Roxy!” Lisa says.
Roxanne looks down at their hands, still linked. She feels Syx’s grip go slack, like he’s giving her the chance to let go. She tightens her own grip instead.
“What are you, four years old?” Roxanne asks scornfully. “It’s not like he has cooties, you big babies!”
Lisa sniffs.
“I just thought I’d better warn you before he turns your skin blue!” she says.
Roxanne really wants to kick Lisa in the shins. It’s probably a good thing she’s not standing up, otherwise she might really do it.
“You are stupid,” Roxanne tells her instead. “Go away and leave us alone!”
“Wayne says he could,” Lisa insists. “Wayne says if you spend too much time with him he’ll turn your skin blue and make all your hair fall out and your head will swell up and then you’ll look just like him.” There are murmurs of agreement from the crowd of children. Lisa’s eyes sparkle maliciously. “But I guess you’d be happy then, wouldn’t you, Smurfette?”
Roxanne recoils like Lisa’s just slapped her.
“He’s bad, Roxy,” Wayne says, chest puffed out beneath his gold stars. “He’s going to hurt you. You should stay away from him.”
Syx lets go of her hands, drawing back from her, drawing back from the crowd, drawing in on himself. Roxanne wants to scream at the unfairness of everything, at Wayne’s stupid smug face and Lisa’s fake smile, at all the rest of them.
Inspiration strikes like an electrical charge through a closed circuit.
“Lisa,” Roxanne says loudly, “Annie and Miranda both think your new haircut is ugly. They told me so three weeks ago, when you got it.”
Lisa goes pale and her head snaps around to Annie and Miranda, just in time to catch the guilty expressions on their faces.
“And Wayne,” Roxanne continues, voice shaking with rage. “You’re horrible at singing. Everyone thinks so. They’re too scared to tell you to your face but they’re all laughing at you behind your back!”
The look of shocked hurt the flashes across Wayne’s face is deeply satisfying, as is the suspicious way he looks at the other kids, and the way they all start backing up from him, like they’re afraid he’s going to attack them with his laser vision or something.
Roxanne scoops up Minion’s ball in one hand and shoves herself to her feet, then grabs Syx’s hand and pulls him up after her.
“We should run,” Syx whispers.
They do.
________________________________________
“They might be right, you know,” Syx says at lunch later that week. He tears his peanut butter and jelly sandwich in half, and then proceeds to rip it into smaller pieces. The jelly oozes out onto the tabletop.
“Who might be right about what?” Roxanne asks, taking a bit of her apple.
“The-” Syx scowls and gestures around them with a jelly-covered hand. “The others! They might be right about me. Not about-not about your skin turning blue and your hair falling out and your head swelling up, I mean, obviously that isn’t going to happen; seriously, that is the most ir-ratio-nal thing I have ever heard, but-” he traces a pattern in the jelly on the table. “What if I am bad?” he finishes in a whisper. “What if it’s destiny?”
“You aren’t bad!” Roxanne says, swift and forceful. She sets her apple down.
Syx looks up at her, frowning.
“But I do bad things all the time,” he says simply. “I set the wastepaper basket on fire five times already this week!”
“You’re not bad,” Roxanne insists. “You’re just, you know, accident-prone!”
Syx bites his lip. Minion rolls comfortingly towards his hand, ignoring the jelly. Syx puts his hand absently on the ball.
“But,” he says, “I’m always in trouble with Miss Simmons at school and with the Warden at home. If they think I’m bad, then I must be, right?”
Roxanne bites her own lip.
“I think,” she whispers, conscious that she’s about to say something she can’t ever go back from, “I think maybe the adults are wrong.”
“And people don’t like me,” Syx says, so quiet Roxanne can barely hear him. “Nobody likes me.”
Roxanne gets up and goes around the table; Syx looks up at her with a confused expression, and then she hugs him.
Syx goes perfectly still, stiff and immobile in her arms, and then he puts his arms awkwardly around her back and squeezes very gently. Roxanne waits for him to stop squeezing, and then stands back up, her hands still on his shoulders. She probably has jelly in her hair now. She doesn’t care.
“I like you,” she says fiercely.
“I don’t understand why,” Syx says, looking up at her with a lost expression.
________________________________________
Gym is easily Roxanne’s least favorite class. Miss Simmons always wants them to play dodgeball-Wayne’s wrong version of dodgeball.
The game always starts the same way. Wayne is the ‘team captain’, and he picks the other kids to help him throw balls one at a time, in the order that he likes them on that particular day. Dodgeball order is a big deal at this school. Today, the order goes: Lisa, Sam S., Alex, Derick, Sam T., Meredith, Stephen, Tommy, Nick, and then Annie, who used to always get picked second but got moved to third-to-last when she broke her leg rollerskating-Wayne laughed at her cast when she wore it to school for the first time.
Only Roxanne and Syx are left, standing against the wall like they’re facing the firing squad, waiting for Wayne to point to Roxanne so everybody can throw things at Syx.
But today, after Wayne squints at them thoughtfully, screwing up his face in concentration, he points-not at Roxanne-
But at Syx.
Syx, in the act of buckling some sort of new protective helmet onto his head, stops and stares at Wayne in shock.
“Wh-what?” he demands. “You want-what?”
“That’s right,” Wayne says, smirking. “Come be on our side, Syx.”
Syx stares at him for a moment longer, glances at Roxanne, then looks back at Wayne.
Slowly, Syx unbuckles the helmet from his head and hands it to Roxanne.
She isn’t going to cry. She isn’t. Even if the bottom has dropped out of the world, even if Syx is leaving her here, Roxanne is not going to cry.
She puts the helmet on; it seems like the only thing to do at that point.
“It’s okay,” she tells Syx quietly, because she knows, she knows how much he’s wanted this.
She waits for Syx to walk away.
But he doesn’t.
“You!” Syx bursts out suddenly, finger pointed accusingly at Wayne. “You are-you are mean! Roxanne is my friend and you wanted to make me-that is mean and you are mean and all this time I’ve thought I was the bad one, that it was destiny, that it was the way it had to be, but you know what? You’re the one who’s bad! You! Not me! And I don’t want to be on your side! I don’t want to be on any side without Roxanne!” Breathing hard, he turns to Roxanne. “I don’t have the helmet calibrated for two people, but we should be safe if we stand close together,” he says in a rush, and then puts his arms around her.
Roxanne closes her eyes and hugs him back tightly.
She doesn’t understand what he means about the helmet until after it deflects one of the balls into a window; she just wants to hug him.
________________________________________
Of course, Syx gets in trouble for the helmet; Miss Simmons is even more upset about nearly getting hit herself than she is about the window.
“He wasn’t trying to hurt anyone!” Roxanne says, after Wayne shoves Syx in the Bad Corner yet again. “He just didn’t want to get hit anymore!”
“That is enough, young lady!” Miss Simmons snaps, and Roxanne flinches at her tone, sinking down in her chair. “We’ve talked about the rules before, Roxanne! Now I don’t want to hear another word about this from you. Unless,” she adds, “you’d like to join your friend there for quiet time in the Bad Corner!”
With a hot twist of shame, Roxanne finds herself blinking back tears.
Miss Simmons smiles her needles in candy-floss smile and turns back to the board.
Roxanne takes a breath.
She stands up, chair legs scraping across the floor.
Miss Simmons turns back to her.
“You are wrong,” Roxanne says quietly.
And she goes to stand beside Syx in the Bad Corner.
Behind her, there is a long moment of silence.
“Well,” says Miss Simmons with a vicious titter, “now that our two troublemakers have been taken care of, let’s move on to music class. Wayne, why don’t you sing something for us all?”
Roxanne stares into the supply cabinet, breath coming quickly. She is in the Bad Corner. She is in the Bad Corner. She told a teacher that she was wrong. What will her parents think? What will everyone think?
Syx shifts slightly, so that the backs of their hands brush together.
“Thanks,” he whispers, under the sound of Wayne’s off-key yodeling.
Roxanne doesn’t answer, but she takes his hand and laces their fingers together.
They stand like that for a long time.
(cross-posted to my tumblr)