Most of the period 5 freshman English class was seated before the bell rang. There was no real need and no real urgency. They had a sub, as they had had every day for the last two weeks. There was no work to do other than independent reading, with the vague notion of having a book report of sorts to do eventually. But there was no fixed person yet to assign, or grade, or care. So most of the period 5 English class took their seats and settled down quietly not because there was a need, but because it felt hauntingly wrong to do much else.
Wes Weston stared forward. He toyed with the dog-eared edge of Wuthering Heights, tattered and yellowed, bookmarked three chapters through though Wes had absorbed none of it. He ignored the empty seats in the classroom like everyone else.
“Pss, Weston.” Dash, from behind. “Weston.”
Wes felt the rubber end of a pencil prod him between the shoulder blades. He ignored it.
“Weston.” Another jab. Harder. Wes’s neck scrunched up.
“Baxter.” The substitute. From the front. She stared through thick coke-bottle glasses, gray corkscrewed hair a messy frame of her face. She didn’t know many names yet, but she knew Dash’s. The troublemakers were easiest to learn.
“Sorry, I’m asking him about a book question,” Dash responded.
“Do it quietly,” was all the substitute bothered saying before dipping her head back into her own book.
Wes turned now, rubbing his neck for effect, dagger eyes fixed on Dash. “What?”
An uneasy flicker moved through Dash’s eyes, fixed to the other side of the classroom and back. “I think. Um. I was gonna say. I think maybe you’re right, you know?”
“Of course I’m right,” Wes answered. The same involuntary schism overcame him, flicker and back, as Wes’s eyes lingered for all of a moment on the far left end of the room. Two empty desks, Fenton’s head buried too low in a book, too still, too alert. “About what?”
Dash glanced again, and back. “You know. Fenton. Like, you know?”
Wes turned in full toward Dash. He knew with a prickle down his spine that the students nearby had frozen, listening. They were eager to hear, eager as all people were now to know things about the Fenton boy. It came with a warm shiver, a moment of processing, the realization that he’d won—finally won—a single small battle in this war that should have been his ages ago.
“The Phantom thing?” Wes asked, and he felt the shiver reach his tongue.
Dash gave a single curt nod. “Phantom disappeared right, yeah? Like at the same time as the thing happened. It makes sense you know, if it’s Fenton, you know? Because like—” Dash gave a quick gesture, just a snap of his head, toward the left end of the room. “You know?”
Wes did know. Wes had realized the same, that Fenton probably didn’t have it in him to play hero much anymore. That whatever took his friends and family probably did it in an act of revenge, covered it up with an explosion of the burger joint, in that way so typical of supervillains seeking vengeance on superheroes. It made Wes all the more right. Right, like he’d been from the very start.
Wes glanced to Fenton’s buried head once more. That too-stiff and alert head, no doubt keyed in, no doubt listening, a king cornered and silent on the board under Wes’s siege. Possibly one of the last times ever that Wes would see Fenton in the same room – rumor had it some family friend was taking him out to Wisconsin, uprooting him once the paperwork was sealed to cut all Danny Fenton’s ties from Amity Park. If Wes had Dash, he had others. It was an 11th hour victory, his last chance, to be so very right.
He only need to answer. He needed only respond. “Exactly.” “That’s what I was thinking.” “Of course.”
It would finally be victory. A hard-fought, long-earned, victory. And it would taste—it would taste so…
Wes froze with the words on his lips, because the imagined sensation in his body confused him. Wes tried to shake the feeling. He knew this already—he knew it would be catharsis, vindication, validation. After months suffering under Fenton’s thumb, this was justice.
This was justice. This was putting Fenton in his place.
Fenton, curled down in his book, utterly mute for two weeks as most eyes avoided him like the plague. Fenton, face of glass, eyes completely absent while most teachers didn’t bother assigning him work. Fenton, who shouldn’t even be in school right now, but had nowhere else to exist.
What… place was there to put Fenton in? What place worse than this? What, actually, what had Fenton done to deserve punishing before Wes started all this? Because suddenly Wes did not remember. It had to have been something. There had to have been something.
Fenton had tried to keep his identity secret. Was that really it? Was that really all that had spurred Wes to act in the first place? A Need to be right and… nothing else?
This had been a game when Wes started playing. He’d operated under the conviction that all this was trivial, that Fenton having his identity secret or not was pointless, that there were just points to be won in the game of being right.
Wes thought again about whatever happened at the Nasty Burger.
“No,” Wes responded. “That’s not right.”
Confusion muddied Dash’s face. Another quick glance to Fenton. “But—”
“My theory was wrong, okay. I actually found a bunch of evidence that Fenton isn’t Phantom. I was wrong, okay? So drop it.”
“Oh…” Dash shook his head a fraction, clearing the confusion from his eyes that hardened, appraising Wes. “Well… stop telling me your stupid wrong theories.”
“Got it,” Wes answered. And he felt the keen tension in the room dissipate around him, wafting to disappointment. Dash faced forward again. Book pages shivered again. Spines cracked. The attention vanished.
Or it mostly did. Fenton’s posture remained stiff, but his shoulders had eased down just a fraction. Wes’s eyes lingered there. He wondered if Fenton could feel him staring. He wondered if this was good enough, for now, for an apology.
He hoped so. Since Fenton never came to school again.
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