The Bottom Club

07 | surreptitious

WHENEVER HE BROKE up, Wyatt went through a cleansing after some much-needed crying that is, all of which happened to be among his post-breakup rituals.

It involved listening to slow music, eating junk food while he FaceTimed his sister, deleting every trace of an ex from his phone (but only after he backed them up, because there were some really cute selfies and text screenshots he couldn’t let go of), boxing and mailing out every paraphernalia of the relationship, etc., because as the saying went: Out of sight, out of mind―even though he usually forced himself to not bring up the absence makes the heart grow fonder argument, and almost always lost.

So it was in detention the next day―Tobi was absent because he was at soccer practice―that Wyatt realized that he hadn’t seen much of Rashad since they last spoke; which was the bathroom incident from two weeks ago.

It wasn’t that he wouldn’t have noticed earlier, but rather that he had tried his possible best to put anything Rashad-related out of his mind for as long as he could, even if he had checked off everything in his purge list except deleting his contact.

Wyatt sat back in his chair, drumming his fingers on the desk as his mind wandered to Canyon, with who he’d spent the previous day’s lunch with after ditching Tobi, who was already familiar with Wyatt’s idiosyncrasies.

Sighing, he rested his chin on his knuckles as he stared listlessly at the digital wall clock which read four thirty-six p.m. in bold black characters and whiled away time by letting his mind fill up with images of what kissing Canyon would feel like.

He was a sucker for love, not naïve; and so Wyatt did not expect technicolor and poppy fields, but he imagined that it would feel like smoking pot, which may not have been the most romantic descriptor, but it was the closest that he could come up with bored out of his mind in detention.

The kisses would settle heavily over him with a quiet potency that made him want to laugh or cry, and when he finally got high enough on them, belts fumbling, he would hit the ground running with the velocity of an asteroid, crash into a million pieces, and those pieces into a million more.

Or maybe he was just being melodramatic, again.

With his track record this was most definitely the case, and kissing his latest crush would involve lots of tongue and saliva that would probably end up in a drunken one-night stand that he would not remember the next morning.

Someone cleared their throat bringing him back to the present and Wyatt shook his head to find that the detention supervisor had his eyes on him.

He was a substitute who Wyatt had caught glimpses of here and there around the school premises. He was also sure that he was Slutty Masc 69 who constantly tapped him on QWERTY―Wyatt could not burn the image of those overgrown armpit hairs he’d sent as nudes from his retinas. From how he kept staring intently in his direction, he knew.

There were rules for this kind of thing, like torts or something. He was sure that he’d caught it from all those hours he’d spent binge-watching How to Get Away with Murder and Suits reruns. Wyatt was in the middle of typing do the laws of torts include assault when he was interrupted.

“Hey,” the sub called out, “no phones allowed. Bring that here.”

Wyatt paused, looking around as others around him began to hide their phones. He eyed the sub distastefully, deciding that ignoring him would be the best option.

“I’m talking to you, yes; you at the back.”

He looked up, blinking innocently, to find the sub pointing at him.