Renegade (Heven and Hell #4)(34)
Author: Cambria Hebert

“Oh, thank you,” she wailed and threw her arms around the blond woman who smiled.

“You’re welcome. Now get to class.”

Out in the hallway, I looked at Kimber. “Thanks for the note.”

She grinned.

At the end of the hallway, she stopped walking and looked at me. “Truce?”

I nodded. “Truce.”

We parted ways, me going to chemistry and her going to history, and as I walked I thought maybe even after everything, Kimber and I might still be friends.

*     *     *

Before walking into class I took a deep breath and braced myself. Yes, I had a note, but Mrs. Engles would probably still torture me for being late. I was late once before and my punishment was to stand at the front of the room, beaker in hand, and try to mix the longest, most complicated element equation problem known to man.

It ended with me dumping the wrong thing into the wrong bottle and a volcano of blue foam erupting all over the table and oozing down onto the teacher’s shoe.

I still had nightmares about that foam.

I reminded myself that my chemistry teacher wasn’t the worst of my problems and pulled open the door and walked inside. The buzz of voices and laughter caught me off guard because usually the room was quiet as a tomb. When people noted someone entered the room, a hush fell over the group and everyone looked up from their desks, staring at me. I waited to hear the teacher call out my name. Heven! What’s your excuse this time?

Except she didn’t say a word.

I did a double take at her desk that was perched at the front of the room like a throne overseeing its court and saw she wasn’t there.

Odd. She always sat at her desk.

I looked around the room, searching for her disapproving stare but still coming up empty.

“She isn’t here,” someone in the front row said.

“We don’t have a teacher today?” I asked.

The kid shrugged and turned back to his lab partner to continue his conversation. I debated on leaving the tardy slip on Mrs. Engles’s desk, but I decided against it. Why tell her I was late at all if I didn’t have to? I shoved the slip into my bag as I took my seat at the table in the center of the room.

“Is there a substitute?” I asked Alexis, my partner at the table.

“Haven’t seen one. We’ve been sitting in here alone all period.”

Just then the door to the room flung open and Mrs. Engles walked in. She was dressed as she usually was, in a black pencil skirt and a blouse, but her clothes didn’t look as neat as usual. Her blouse was half untucked, her skirt was wrinkled, and her shoes didn’t match (I’m sorry, but brown shoes do not go with a black skirt). Her dark hair, which was usually pulled into a sleek bun, had strands falling around her face and neck.

She didn’t address the class as she walked to her desk, briefcase in hand, dropping it on the floor by her chair. But she did stumble in the heels that she wore and I swear I heard her utter a cuss word under her breath.

Alexis looked at me and widened her eyes.

I shrugged.

Everyone had fallen quiet because 1) if you talked in her class you got detention and 2) she was acting weird.

To further her weirdness, she shuffled around the neatly stacked papers on the desk, picking up a few here and there to skim over them. Then she dropped the one in her hand and I watched it flutter back down to land on the new mess. “As you can see, I’m running late today,” she began, stepping to the first lab table and picking up a clear glass beaker to examine. As she finished her sentence, she set it back down. “So today will have to be a free period.”

Everyone just stared at her.

She patted her hair. “Well, you would think when a teacher announces you can do nothing there would be some kind of celebration.”

Again, no one said anything. In fact, you could have heard a pin drop in that room.

She scowled. “Would you rather I assign a ten-page paper?”

Someone from the back row raised their hand.

She motioned for them to speak. “We don’t write papers in chemistry.”

A few people snickered.

Again, Alexis looked at me, but this time she mouthed, “O-M-G.”

Mrs. Engles didn’t seem too pleased to be laughed at and opened her mouth to no doubt unleash a wicked assignment on us, but then the bell rang signaling the end of class.

I breathed a sigh of relief and hurried to grab my stuff and go.

“Heven!” Mrs. Engles snapped just before I could clear the door.

I felt my shoulders slump when I turned back. “Yes?”

“I want to see you in this room after school.”

Crap. She somehow knew I was late and tried to hide it from her. The office probably told her when she arrived. I ought to stop by the office and thank Mrs. Schuster for blabbing. “Yes, Mrs. Engles,” I said and escaped into the hallway.

The way this day was going, she was sure to assign me that ten-page paper and make it due tomorrow.

*     *     *

When the final bell of the day rang, I trudged toward the chemistry room, thinking of excuses the whole way to get me out of a ten-page paper. I even briefly considered telling her that the last time I was given a paper I had to stay up late for I got attacked, landed in the hospital, and ended up with scars and nerve damage on my face.

I wasn’t Kimber, though, and that just seemed really dramatic.

Mrs. Engles was at the back of the room when I came in. She was doing something in the storage closet, muttering under her breath. I cleared my throat and she spun around. More of her hair had fallen from her bun and she had a coffee stain on her white blouse.

“You wanted to see me?” I asked, the tardy excuse clutched in my fist.

She smiled. It wasn’t really that friendly. “I need a student to help me with an experiment we’re going to try in class tomorrow.”

So this wasn’t about me being late to class?

“Well, I actually have somewhere I’m supposed to be.” I lied.

She came forward, her heels pounding against the tile floor. It’s like she doesn’t even know how to walk. And she snatched the note out of my hand. “What’s this?”

She scanned the paper, looked up at me, and smiled. “You were late to my class this morning?”

So were you! I wanted to argue, but I didn’t think it would get me anywhere.

“You have a choice. Help me now or write that paper tonight.”

Like that was even a choice. “What do you want me to do?” I said, dropping my bag onto the floor.