Chapter 2: My head is fine

The principal’s office shrank around me, walls closing in as my mother’s voice ricocheted off every surface, a relentless tide of fury and concern. “How the fuck could this happen! Where the fuck was the school nurse! Why the fuck wasn’t I notified my son fucking passed out in the first place?” Her words were bullets, each aimed squarely at the principal who sat behind her desk, mouth tight, eyes flickering to me, then away.

I slumped lower in my seat, trying to become invisible. The sterile scent of antiseptic from the nurse’s office still clung to my clothes, a haunting reminder of the day’s surreal events. Eliot Turner’s mother, Bethan Turner, stood adjacent to us, her posture rigid with shock, her face a ghostly pale mask that distorted occasionally with grimaces of horror. Her daughter’s actions, a violent storm cloud over our heads, seemed to have shattered her world as much as they’d annoyed me.

‘This is so awkward. I can’t believe I had to meet Eliot’s mom like this. I wonder if she’s yandere enough to be my girlfriend?’

She crossed a few check marks. Hold me down, check. Threaten me, check. She kinda implied she loved me, didn’t she? Huge check! The only thing that would ruin it now would be if she was the type to just kill me on a dime. That’s my hard line for yandere.’ I nod to myself, affirming my very normal, very human thoughts.

“Mrs. Parker, please believe me when I say we are taking this very seriously,” the principal began, but my mother was a tempest not easily calmed.

As they spoke, Eliot’s mother turned towards us, her voice trembling like the tremolo of a violin. “Emily, I—I can’t express how sorry I am for what Eliot... for what she tried to do to Jason.” She clasped her hands together, knuckles whitening. “I found a note in her room. She... she was planning to—to hurt him. To—to murder-suicide the first vulnerable boy she could find today after raping them.”

My head snapped up at that, the weight of her words hitting me like a physical blow.

“What the fuck?” I muttered under my breath. My mother briefly made eye contact but looked back at them. She hates it when I swear, but I think this much should be fine.

‘Vulnerable? Was that how Eliot saw me? A target for her twisted farewell to the world? She was going to murder me? Well, then, she is certainly not girlfriend material.’

I felt a cold sweat break along my hairline, an uncomfortable prickle dancing across my skin. I wanted to say something, anything to break the tension, inject some absurd humor to make sense of the nonsensical, but my throat closed up, leaving me mute.

Silence swallowed the room for a moment, thick and suffocating before my mother responded. Her anger had shifted, now edged with something brittle. Fear, maybe, or disbelief. “Thank God that delinquent girl found you when she did.” she whispered, her gaze finally resting on me with an intensity that made me squirm.

Eliot Turner’s mother nodded, her eyes glistening with unshed tears. “I just wish I had seen the signs earlier.”

The grip on my arm was ironclad, and before I knew it, I was being hauled out of the stifling atmosphere of the principal’s office. My mother’s fingers dug into my flesh through the thin fabric of my shirt, her other hand clutching a set of jingling car keys. The corridor outside seemed to stretch endlessly, our footsteps echoing sharply against the linoleum, punctuated by the muttered expletives slipping from Mother’s lips.

“Damn irresponsible... How could they not... Unbelievable...”

I could only stumble alongside her, the shock still buzzing in my ears, drowning out the particularities of her rant. Students peered curiously from classroom doorways, but none dared to attract the attention of Officer Parker in full maternal fury mode.

‘It’s nice to not be the focus of her ire for once.’ I smiled.

We burst through the double doors, the chill air nipping at my flushed cheeks as we approached the imposing silhouette of the squad car. She practically shoved me into the passenger seat, the door slamming with an ominous finality. The engine roared to life under her forceful ignition, and we were speeding away from the school, the incident, and Eliot Turner’s dark plans.

‘I didn’t even get to go to class on my first day. So embarrassing.’

Once the initial adrenaline tapered off, Mother’s rigid posture slumped ever so slightly, her hands still vice-like on the steering wheel. Her head turned toward me, eyes narrowing, searching for something—answers, perhaps.

“Jason, why were you even in the nurse’s office?” Her voice, though quieter now, held an edge sharpened by concern and frustration.

I shrugged an automatic response, my mind grappling with the fragmented memories of the day. “I was talking to Justin,” I started, the image of my weird friend flickering hazily in my thoughts. “That’s the last thing I remember. Then, I woke up with the Eliot locking the door and hovering over me.” There was a strange gap, a blank space where time should have been, and it left me feeling unmoored.

‘oh woah, this is hype. It’s like I’m in a thriller movie.’

The silence in the car was like a thick fog, broken only by the occasional hiss of tires on wet asphalt. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Mom’s jaw clench and unclench as if she were grinding down her frustration into something manageable.

“Justin?” Her voice cut through the quiet, laced with confusion. Her eyes processing my answer. “You mean your friend Justine, the weird lesbian?”

My mind tripped over her words, trying to align them with my own recollection. “No, Mom,” I said, feeling the edges of my patience fray. “I’m talking about Justin. The tall guy who plays on the golf team? Not someone named Justine.”

Mother’s stare flickered at me with something between anger and brutal confusion. She was silent for a moment as if digesting this piece of information that didn’t fit into the puzzle she was trying to solve.

“Justin,” she muttered under her breath, almost to herself, before her gaze snapped back to me. The lines on her forehead deepened, and her lips pressed into a thin line. “We’re going to the hospital. You’re getting your head looked at.”

Her tone brooked no argument, but it wasn’t just the authority in her voice that made me sink deeper into my seat, it was the undercurrent of annoyance, a subtle tell that she didn’t fully believe me. Or maybe she did, and that scared her even more. Whatever the case, I stared out the window at the passing scenery, feeling like a specimen under a microscope, poked and prodded for symptoms of some unknown condition.

I check my phone, but the case is differnt than the one i remember. My wallpaper is the same though. A Corgi in pants.

‘Heh. Gets me every time.’

Weirdly I can’t figure out the password but it’s fine maybe Eliot did something to it when I was sleeping. I had nothing on their other than my discord chats with my friends.

‘Jesus Christ, if she leaks the chats with the boys, I am fucked.’ I briefly sweat, but then remember my mom told me she’s gonna be locked up for a long while.

‘Thank god she can’t leak the chats from jail.’ I smile, knowing my darkest secrets are kept.

***

The chlorine like smell was starting to make my head swim, or maybe that was just the leftover dizziness from before. I shifted in check up room chair, attempting to find a comfortable position to no avail. Beside me, Mother sat rigid as a statue, her eyes occasionally flitting to the clock, then back to me, as if she could will the hands to move faster with her gaze alone.

“Jason Parker?” The voice cut through the muffled hospital room ambiance like a scalpel.

I looked up, following the sound to the woman in a white coat who held a clipboard like a shield. Her eyes were fixed on the film displayed on the lightbox behind her, lines of concern etched across her brow.

‘I don’t know what mom’s deal is. I am clearly operating at 100%. If there was something wrong with me, I would have noticed by now. I am incredibly self-perceptive.’ I confidently think to myself.

“Based on the initial scans,” she began, tapping the X-ray with a manicured nail, “there’s definitely something... irregular in the pattern here.” She pointed towards a shadowy area in the image of my skull.

“Something funky, you mean,” I muttered, trying to inject a bit of humor into the situation, but it fell flat, absorbed by the thick tension hanging in the air. My mother glared at me. Her eyes were far sharper than the knife Eliot held to my throat earlier.

‘I wonder if Eliot would have let me cum before killing me. I think I would have had I, had even like ten more seconds. But thankfully, despite my blue balls, Erica came to my rescue.’

I think about my busty blonde savior. ‘I definitely heard a rumor Erica sells fentanyl, so I wonder why she helped me.’ I get lost in my thoughts as a way to escape the situation. ‘I wonder if fentanyl has a taste, and if so, what drug tastes the worst?’

Mother leaned forward, her posture telegraphing her demand for more details without her saying a word.

“It appears there’s been some trauma, likely from your fall. It would account for the confusion you’re experiencing and the... discrepancies in your memory.” The doctor looked at me like I was an idiot.

“Discrepancies?” Mother echoed sharply, a crack appearing in her usually unflappable demeanor. For a moment, I saw something like fear flash in her eyes as they met mine. She was scared for me. It was unsettling to see the angry facade of my mother waver, even slightly.

“Is it serious?” Mother asked her voice tight with barely concealed anxiety.

“Too early to tell,” the doctor said, maintaining the professional detachment that I suddenly found irritating. “We’ll need to run more tests.”

“Great,” I sighed, slumping back into my seat. More time to sit around in this purgatory of uncertainty. They already took a bunch of blood for the STD tests earlier.

“Until then,” Mother said, straightening up and turning to me with a sigh. “Button up your shirt, Jason. You’re not at home.”

I looked down at myself, only now noticing a few buttons had come undone, exposing part of my chest. When I glanced back up, I caught the tail end of the doctor’s lingering gaze as she quickly averted her eyes, her cheeks tinged with a blush.

“Uhh, sure,” I mumbled, fumbling with the buttons. My fingers felt clumsy, my movements sluggish, as if through a haze. I managed to close up my shirt, hiding away the skin that seemed to have drawn unwanted attention.

‘Why is Mom acting like I’m some girl showing off her cannons right now?’

“Let’s hope it’s just a temporary glitch in your system,” Mother murmured, her hand briefly brushing mine in a rare gesture of comfort before she withdrew it, folding her arms across her chest once more.

“Glitch,” I echoed, though it felt like more than that. Something deep inside whispered that this was just the beginning of a much larger unraveling.

‘Obviously, cocaine would taste the best, right? So if I was a betting man, which I sure as fuck am, I’m betting fentanyl tastes the worst.’ My adhd pulled me back to the genuinely important thoughts that needed to be had as Mother led me back home.