Scribbling madly across his miniature notebook page, Peter almost forgot to blink as he took in the half-filled dry erase board of the English classroom. He was sitting cross-legged on his desk now and feeling especially precarious, even with one of the office secretaries assigned to follow him around to all his remaining unsupervised classes and monitor his safety. If prior conversations were to be believed, today just might be his penultimate day of public high school. He knew taking even more precocious notes than normal wouldn’t do much to help matters, but it was comforting in this moment to remind himself how badly he wanted to remain here.

                The impromptu emergency conference between the principal and his mother, the two parties who each had the distinct power to shatter his dreams of educative normalcy, had taken up the entirety of his lunch period and almost all of his algebra class afterward. Suzanne had insisted at first on accompanying Peter to all of his remaining classes for the day, but after she’d already had to walk out of a real estate meeting to come see him post-toilet dive, he’d urged her with everything he had to return to her work. Finally, she’d relented, possibly because she might start crying if she had to spent too much more time with him after the ordeal.

                And after he’d had his agency so thoroughly robbed of him today once already by the former biggest and creepiest bully in the school, Peter didn’t think he could stand being lorded over in front of his peers by his mommy. He’d never live it down. Never.

                At least he’d had the chance to see Lisa after the stomach-churning uncertainty of the meeting. Just as Suzanne was curtly saying goodbye to the principal, the office door burst open to reveal the short, slight frame of the redhead, wild-eyed and heaving on the verge of tears. The woman working the front desk had followed fruitlessly behind, unable to stop the young girl from passing all obstacles to find Peter once she’d heard the story of his brief capture through whispered rumors in class.

                Suzanne even had the kindness to pass Peter over to Lisa, who was clearly now more terrified than he was, hugging him to her cheek and letting loose the tears almost as soon as she had him enclosed in her fingers. If he was soaked before by the toilet water, his girlfriend’s saltwater deluge was giving it a run for its money. Getting her to hand him back over to his mother again for the trip to English class took more than one request, which by Lisa’s usually rule-following sensibilities, was herculean.

                And so, with the watchful eye of the secretary on him throughout the English hour, Peter diligently recorded notes on independent and dependent clauses in declarative sentences. Eventually they were given open work time to construct their own examples of sentences from the pieces on the board, for which Peter was grateful: some solitude to prove his mettle. To the boy’s subconscious desire, if he could just demonstrate how easy it was to reintegrate into a classroom after being threatened with toilet death, then maybe he’d be allowed to stay.

                “I’m glad she didn’t flush you, shortstuff.”

                There she was, right on cue: the girl who, in all likelihood, talked an unstable fifteen-year-old into nearly drowning him this morning. But Peter didn’t flinch at the sharp whisper in his ear from behind. Not even Sharon would make him lose his cool now, with so much at stake. He couldn’t help but allow himself a half-smile, even as his heart thumped at her casual admission of just how much she knew.

                “Me, too,” he said, not missing a beat.

                “It would’ve been awful lonely in this class without you to talk to,” Sharon continued. She drummed her fingers on the back of his desk, half a foot away from where he sat. Her fingernails landed with an especially hard clack, ringing in Peter’s ears. “Or history. Or P.E.”

                “Thanks for saying so,” Peter said. He hadn’t yet halted his pencil on the pad.

                “Don’t you want to turn around and talk to me?” As usual, less a question than a command.

                Peter noted the familiar feeling of her eyes boring into the back of his scalp. He could tell she was leaning further and further across her desk. The drumming of her fingertips continued, inching ever closer to him.

                “Maybe another time,” he answered. The pencil kept in motion. “We’ve got to do these examples, after all.”

                “Aw, something I said?” Sharon sighed. Her graceful hand paused in its scuttling walk across the desk toward him like an oversized crab. “We haven’t had a good little chat in weeks. What, is your little girlfriend not letting you make other friends?”

                “I really think we’d be better off getting the work done,” Peter said.

                “I’m just saying. If your little girlfriend is going to stick her fingers into your friendships, you’d think she could at least do you the favor of not letting you get flushed away like a turd.”

                That hot, cinnamon breath was floating down, clinging to the back of Peter’s neck. He knew she was close now. And, like the flinty creature of myth she was, she seemed to snake closer and closer to him beyond fear of reproach from the teacher. The secretary still had a close eye on him, but too seemed accepting of the girl’s proximity.

                Good old Sharon. For all her self-important attitudes, they weren’t exactly bluster. The world seemed pretty content to ignore her as she danced along the line of the appropriate. Rules were just suggestions to someone like Sharon. Peter gulped.

                “Sharon,” he breathed. He still didn’t turn around; she could hear him. “I’m asking… I mean, I’m saying nicely now. I don’t want to talk about Lisa or what might have happened today.”

                “Oohh. It sounds like somebody is growing up,” Sharon said with some token mocking, though the heat of her spicy gum-breath became less severe in the intervening seconds as she retreated further back into her chair. “It’s really cute, shortstuff. I’m sure it does it for the girlfriend, too, who shall not be named.”

                Peter rolled his eyes and continued writing. His sentences had run just a little outside the notepad lines while Sharon talked, but he seemed to have come out more or less on top. There weren’t so much victories against Sharon as lesser defeats.

                “Well, I just wanted you to know…” Sharon slurred. “…I don’t think it’s cool how she just picked you up when you didn’t want her to.”

                Raising an eyebrow, Peter kept on with what he was doing. That was new. Not to mention unexpected.

                “Thanks,” he said neutrally.

                “I mean it,” she continued. The tapping of her fingernails continued, this time on her desk. He could also make out the rubber thump of her pencil eraser against the edge of the surface. A bass line.

                “I’m glad.”

                “…it’s just not right, you know?” Sharon said. “If it were me, I wouldn’t pick you up until you asked me to.”

                And there it was.

                “And I’d be real gentle, too,” she explained in what was probably her closest approximation of a soothing voice. To Peter, it felt more like the silver-eyed vixen was trying to chloroform his ears. “You know. I’d make sure your arms were nice and still at your sides, so you couldn’t move too much and distract me. That’s how I’d keep you. Safe.”

                Peter mustered a nod. His sentence writing had fully left the demarcated lines by now, descending into awkward doodles.

                “But what can I say?” Sharon sighed, leaning further back in her chair. She tossed her platinum locks up with the back of her hand. “That’s just the kind of person I am.”

                Well, wasn’t that the truth. The five-inch freshman thumbed his pencil tip, watching the ashen tone of the lead paint his hands. Mandy may have been all but gone from his life now, but he wasn’t exactly out of the woods yet. Somehow, he doubted he ever fully would be.

                “Oh, shortstuff?”

                “What?” he responded before he could stop himself.

                “Good luck in your little puppet show.”

                Peter had a hard time looking his sister in the eye when she laid her hand down on the desk in English to ferry him to the final period of this inordinately long day. He knew she’d been taken out of class earlier and briefed on what happened by Judy, but hadn’t yet seen his elder sibling since the dunking.

                The exit from the room was the silent one. The boy leaned into the heel of Erica’s hand and fiddled with the straps of his backpack. For her part, she kept him steady and even centered by curled fingers. From behind, the office secretary followed at a distance through the quickly bustling hallway.

                “Hey,” Peter muttered, still without looking up.

                “Hey,” Erica said back.

                “Did you tell Mom anything? About… you know-”

                “Nope.”

                “Okay,” he said, deflating with relief. “T-Thanks.”

                “We’ll just add that to the pile of IOUs.”

                “Y-Yeah. I guess so.”

                Peter slowly let down his guard as they neared the broad gymnasium hall, having been expecting a reaming somewhere on the trip between here and P.E. Certainly he’d grown accustomed to them from his sister when things went south, and he knew for a fact she didn’t enjoy delivering those speeches any more than he enjoyed receiving them. He stewed, studying the deepest crease in the palm of the girl’s tan hand.

                “Is that all?” he asked.

                “Uh-huh.”

                “Really?”

                “Are you still in one piece?”

                “As far as I can tell.”

                “Cool,” she said curtly. “Just try to keep it that way.”

                Peter nodded, giving his sister a pat on the thumb, but ultimately resolved to hang onto it once he’d placed his hand atop her slender nailbed. It was nice not to get a lecture from someone today.

                “Thanks, sis.”

                “Stop trying to have a moment, twerp,” Erica snorted dryly as they entered the brightly lit sanctum of the gym. She lightly flicked him in the shoulder, earning a punch in her knuckle back from his eager fist.