1
Axel
They say you can never go home again. Bullshit. I’d been inside Westmont High’s boys’ locker room so many times, it smelled like my own damn bedroom: feet, cheap soap, and institutional despair. But it never smelled better than that night, after hours, with the lights off and the door propped open with a half-empty Gatorade bottle. Just me, Melissa Davidson, and a gravity so hungry it was about to swallow us whole.
She had her back to the bank of lockers, the kind with dents from a thousand bad days. My hands were up her skirt, hiking it over hips that always looked too tight in those Presbyterian-school plaid uniforms. The elastic waistband gave a little shriek, and I didn’t know if it was the fabric or her, but either way, it did something ugly and sweet to my insides.
“Jesus, Al,” she gasped, squirming against the cold metal. Her breath smelled like cinnamon gum, but her skin—where Imanaged to get my mouth on it—tasted like salt and the vanilla body spray she shoplifted from CVS.
“Don’t blaspheme,” I whispered into her thigh, working a finger under the edge of her panties, “I thought your dad was supposed to be the righteous one.”
She giggled, short and sharp, like she might explode if she didn’t let the pressure out somewhere. “You shut your mouth. You stop now, and my old man kills us both.”
“Your old man’s home grading papers.” I’d checked the schedule. The whole faculty was supposed to be at the winter formal in the gym, doing chaperone shit. But there’s always a chance, and that’s what made it good.
“Seriously, Al—” she started, but I cut her off by kissing her, deep, my hand clamped over her mouth so nobody in the empty halls would hear. The heat coming off her was radioactive, sweat slicking her hair to her forehead, eyes wide and wet. If I’d known what happened next, I would’ve paid more attention to those eyes.
We didn’t have a lot of time. Never did. I could get her panties to mid-thigh, but not further, because she was afraid of leaving them on the floor. She said her dad could spot them at fifty paces. It became a challenge. How much could I get away with while keeping everything technically in place? Answer, just enough.
I got her moaning through my fingers, legs trembling, her knee knocking a locker hard enough to set off a little metallic chain reaction all the way down the row. The sound might as well have been a car alarm. Melissa gasped, “Wait, wait, you hear that?”
I froze, listening, but heard nothing except the sound of our pulses and the thump of her foot on tile. “It’s just us,” I muttered, one hand under her blouse now, squeezing a breast through her cheap lace bra.
She melted against me, soft and shivery, and we were getting close to the part where all the rules of being a teenager and a principal’s daughter went straight to hell, when the lights flickered.
Just a stutter. Off, on, off again.
That was all the warning we got before the yellow beam of a janitor’s flashlight sliced through the gloom, bouncing off a row of urinals. It hit me square in the face. I shoved Melissa off my lap and tried to button up, but my hands were all thumbs and adrenaline.
“Who’s in here?” came a voice, nasal and angry, a middle-aged man who hated his life just enough to rat on horny teens for minimum wage.
Melissa was already yanking her skirt down, stumbling for composure. She hissed, “Al, run!”
But I didn’t run. Not at first. Maybe it was the shame, maybe the stupidity, but I froze. The flashlight was swinging closer, heavy footsteps echoing on the tile.
Then, another voice—one I knew like a recurring nightmare.
“Melissa?”
It wasn’t the janitor. It was the fucking principal.
And not just any principal. Mr. Davidson. Her father. The same man who’d suspended me last semester for fighting, who called my mother to say her son had no respect for authority. The same man whose daughter was now breathing so hard her voice came out in little animal squeaks.
“Melissa Jean Davidson!” He roared, and the sound bounced off the lockers like a gunshot.
Melissa shot upright, hands clutching at her shirt, her hair wild, mascara smeared like she’d been punched in both eyes. For one second, we all stood there: me, pants barely zipped, Melissa, flushed and trembling, and Principal Davidson, clutching a briefcase and his own sense of righteous doom.
He didn’t look at me. He looked only at her. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Melissa opened her mouth, but nothing came out. She just stared at the floor, tears building in the corners of her eyes.
He looked at me then. He looked through me, as if I was something tracked in on his shoe. “Get. Out.”
The word was so final, so absolute, I didn’t question it. I bolted. I heard the squeak of my sneakers on the wet tile, the echo ricocheting off the cinderblock walls. I didn’t look back.
Behind me, I heard Melissa start to sob, her father’s voice dropping to a low, venomous growl. I caught only one phrase, spat out like a curse. “I expected better from you.”
Maybe he meant her. Maybe he meant me. Maybe he meant the world.
