Page 8 of The Bargain

Birnam Hastings—star athlete, party-boy, and self-appointed prince of vulgarity—discovered this the hard way. Half the school saw him carried off to hospital, but not one voice seems to remember who delivered the blows.

Curious, isn’t it, how selective memory becomes when the untouchable finally taste fear?

3

Causal Chain

Elias

It’s midnight on the last Friday of September when the last person I ever expected to see turns up at my bedroom door.

I don’t even hear the knock at first. My music is playing loud, the window open because I’m smoking. I’m bent over my desk, which is covered with notepads and textbooks.

We’ve only been back a month, but the workload is already insane. Probably shouldn’t have let the teachers push me into taking physics, maths and further maths. I even let Professor Li bully me into picking philosophy as a soft fourth. “You can always drop it if the workload gets too much,” she’d said airily, knowing full well my pride would never allow such an outcome.

And that’s how I’ve ended up having to both solve differential equations and write an essay on free will and determinism on the same damn night. Talking of determinism⁠—

The knock comes again, sharp, crisp. Insistent. Inevitable, as Professor Li might have suggested, the last link in a causal chain formed by every event and condition leading to it.

Maybe this was always going to happen, determinism in action. But at this time of the night, it only means one thing to me: an opportunity.

Crushing my cigarette against the windowsill, I toss one of my black hoodies over my desk. My clientele prefers me dumb, ruthless and compliant.

When I throw the door open, my breath hitches for a split second.

Then a grin slowly spreads across my face.

Desdemona Sutton-Knight is standing in the dimly lit corridor of the boys’ dorm, her back straight and her arms crossed and her long hair, half gathered back in a sapphire-blue ribbon, draped like a golden cloak over her shoulders. She’s angelic and celestial, yes, but cold as all hell.

“If it isn’t our virtuous and irreproachable head girl,” I greet her, crossing my arms and leaning against the doorway. I don’t raise my voice so that she can hear me over my music—I know she’s paying attention to every word coming out of my mouth. “To what do I owe the honour?”

“Are you smoking in here?” she says, glancing over my shoulder with a frown.

Pretty, uptight little busybody.

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”

“Turn your music down.”

“Playing music isn’t against school policy.”

She almost winces; I see the shadow of a twitch in her lips.

But Desdemona is, above all things, always fully in control of herself.

“It would be the courteous thing to do,” she says, every syllable emphasised.

Which, for her, is the equivalent of getting on her knees, only I don’t think anybody has ever succeeded in getting Desdemona to her knees. Still—wouldn’t it be fun to try?

“Why don’t you come in?” I ask her with zero sincerity.

“Not before you put on a shirt.”

Oh, I know she hates the sight of my bare chest. She’s been working awfully hard to keep her eyes pinned to mine, as if the mere sight of my torso would be enough to send her swooning back into a fainting spell.

Desdemona strikes me as the sort of girl who hates the sight of blood, the sort of girl who would have even the tiniest scar surgically dealt with. I can’t quite tell what bothers her more: my naked skin, or the ugly scattering of old scars covering it.

“It’s too hot to wear a shirt,” I tell her mildly.