Capítulo 3

Endless Debate: Bravery or Stupidity

Orion Crawford.

Orion motherbleeping Crawford.

Seeing the melting ice cream on his admittedly gorgeous shoes was equal to seeing her life flash before her eyes.

Victoria was still sitting on the ground in the position she fell in, eyes wide as she gawked at the boy - no, demon - in front of them. Iris was sure that her friend’s heart has stopped, seeing as she wasn’t even breathing. Not that Iris could blame her. She wasn’t even breathing, and she wasn’t even the one responsible for the fall.

If it was anyone else besides a student from Crawford who they bumped into, all they would have done is apologise - because normal human beings make mistakes. But the students of the Academy were anything but normal and the school ground hierarchy still existed, even if you were not on them. If it was anyone else this would have been seen as a simple mistake, but as it was the Crawford elite standing in front of them, it was seen as deliberate.

Iris wasn’t stupid - she wouldn’t be in Crawford Academy if she was - and she knew that what Victoria just did, accidentally or not, was enough to get her on Orion’s hitlist. They had once seen Orion dump his food onto another boy just because they had the same shirt on.

Behind Orion stood the rest of his posse - aptly named R5 by the rest of the student body - dressed in equally over-expensive clothing that matched their holier-than-thou attitude. Iris didn’t care about them though, she kept her eyes steady on the boy glaring viciously at her friend. The look in his eyes was powerful, Iris was surprised Victoria hadn’t burst into flames. Luckily, she wasn’t in his direct line of sight, otherwise, her knocking knees may not have been strong enough to keep her upright.

In the back of her mind, she realised that this was the first time she had ever seen him up close. The only time she saw the stupidly titled R5 was when they were humiliating their poor targets and in photos that made it onto her social feed. When she saw them, it was usually during the time they humiliated students and she always made sure to stay out of their line of sight by hiding between the crowd. She has seen how these five people treat others within their own class system, how would they treat someone they consider lesser than them?

His eyes were dark, probably because he was envisioning their social deaths, hidden beneath black lashes and thick brows. He was handsome, with features he still had to grow into, such as a jawline that would sharpen when he shed his last bit of baby fat. His hair was a chestnut colour and curled stylishly on top of his head.

It was unfair, Iris thought, that his curls were manageable at such short length while Iris’s always looked like a slovenly afro.

All her thoughts disappeared when his eyes dropped to his shoes and he said, “Well, are we just going to stare at each other? While I am aware that I’m pleasing to the eye, you, however, are not.”

Victoria stood up hastily, while Iris was wondering what kind of a teenager spoke like that. Teenagers mostly spoke in Vine references and Twitter slang. Just what kind of deprived life were these people living?

“I’m sorry,” Victoria whimpered, tears gathering in her gawking eyes. She then did something that Iris would never think she would; she honestly bowed to Orion. Iris’s red brows furrowed as she observed the scene, wondering when Western people started bowing to each other. Last time she checked, only some of the European countries still bowed and curtsied to people who were royalty. Victoria continued, “I didn’t mean to. I-I didn’t see you and- Oh my gosh, I’m so-so sorry-"

Orion chipped in, “Well, if sorry fixed everything then we wouldn’t need a justice system, now would we?”

He had a point, but that didn’t give him the right to treat Victoria like a murder suspect or a con woman. It was a simple mistake. Iris could feel her blood starting to boil as Victoria continued to plead for mercy. She couldn’t help but notice a crowd of Academy students surrounding them.

They did what they always do - stare and agree.

Victoria was near tears when she said, “I’m sorry, please. I’ll do anything-"

“-anything?” he scoffed, signaling his deranged disciples around them to begin laughing under their breaths. A dark brow raised as he pointedly looked at the ice cream before slowly dragging his eyes across Victoria’s trembling figure. It was like watching a lion assess his prey, only with less fur.

Orion smirked dangerously and it made Iris uneasy, scared to see in which direction this will be going. Questions swirled around her head. Surely, he had enough money to get away with anything. He wouldn’t ask her to sell her kidneys, right?

“Yes”, Victoria nodded, her ponytail loosening from the quick momentum. At that moment, Iris was convinced Victoria would allow him to drag her into a deep, dark alley to take her organs and sell them.

“Lick it clean.”

Blood roared in her ears, deafening everything out. Her cheeks flushed and she was sure everybody could hear her heartbeat as it thumped to a brutal beat. She was sure the crowd was giggling, phones at the ready to capture the scene of degradation. Once again, no one was doing anything and that made her furious, resentful enough to stupidly step forward and confront him.

“How about you lick it?” she snapped, standing in front of Victoria. Orion’s eyes flew to hers. She was a good few centimeters shorter than him. It was also the first time during this entirely absurd event that he looked at her.

“What?” he asked, actually sounding shocked to see someone try and stop him.

“I said, you lick it up.” Her voice slow and tight, talking to him as if he was a child who made her mad. She shrugged, “It is, after all, your shoe, is it not?”

He laughed mockingly. It was enough to reign in her anger, as it changed into nervousness. The consequences of her actions dawned on her and Iris thought that maybe she is indeed stupid. Orion Crawford was not some meathead schoolyard bully who beats up people, his hands cost too much to get dirty. His form of fighting was picking people apart by any means necessary, all the while ensuring that nobody could connect it to him. Although the entire school was aware of what he did to other students, they stuck with him, providing alibis and forming connections with him in hopes of getting something in return. It was like a romanticised teenage version of the 1920s Mafia.

Possible scenarios ran through her mind as she finally realised what she did. Horror iced her veins and her body felt numb. For all her bravado, Iris didn’t want to be on the receiving end of a Red Card. Finding one in your locker was the equivalent of social suicide. Iris would not be surprised if it has ended in actual suicide before.

Iris knew her thoughts reflected on her face when Orion’s smirked returned. He was enjoying this, watching her freeze up in front of him.

“Oh,” he gasped. He scanned her the same way he did Victoria. Iris tensed as she felt his heavy gaze move from her loose ponytail of scattered red curls down to her scruffed white-with-brown-spots sneakers. “I know you-”

“I doubt it.”

She really has to stop talking.

“- you’re that charity case the school accepted to fix the Academy’s image.” He continued, speaking over her as if she didn’t say anything.

Iris stopped listening after he called her a charity case, the vicious flush of anger bubbling in her stomach at a temperature hot enough to darken her red cheeks. She was no one’s charity case, she didn’t need help from people who’s only struggle is choosing between which pair of identical black shoes to wear that day. She excelled in academics, her fingers were littered with hard callouses created by her pens and pencils, her back muscles ached from the late hours she spent trying to complete all the work she received. Her fingers curled into a tight ball as angry tears gathered in her eyes.

“Look,” he mocked, throwing his hands at her direction in a ‘ta-da’ motion. “The poor thing has pride.”

The surrounding crowd took that as their cue and started to laugh, some had their cellphones out and were steadily recording the incident. Orion’s friends were watching them; Camilla was sizing Iris up with disgust as she looked at the state of her shoes, Andres and Lennon were chuckling and seemed to be placing bets on how they thought this would play out, and Howard was just observing silently.

Iris felt like that clown at the circus that gets beat up for the spectators’ entertainment. She wanted to punch Orion, wanted to scratch his pretty face raw enough to leave scars, wanted to show him what it felt like to be picked apart by your peers. She wanted to shout and scream and rave about the ridiculousness of their messed up hierarchy, wanted to do to the students what they did to her.

She felt something cold drip onto her hand and looked down to see what it was. In her clenched hand, she held the crushed cone of her chocolate ice cream. She was so caught up in this debacle that she completely forgot about it. It was expensive and Victoria bought it for her to cheer her up. Victoria, who has never been anything but kind and polite to everyone, even to Stephanie Nicholson who went out of her way to tease them.

Her throat felt clogged as she tried to swallow her tears. The past month’s events caught up to her, the names they call her echoed in her mind, the aches of now nonexistent bruises ghosted on her knees and her palms burned with the familiar sting she got after she stopped herself from kissing the ground when they tripped her. Emotions swirled in a wrathful whirlwind, heavy in her chest and too quick to differentiate.

“Tell you what,” Orion said, his body relaxing. He leaned towards her, his face right in front of hers. She kept her eyes on the leaking ice cream. “Your friend with the gawkish fish eyes can go, however, I want compensation for my forgiveness.”

Iris still didn’t look at him. She didn’t get her hopes up when he said Victoria can go. An idea was brewing in her head.

Orion stepped half a foot forward and Iris could feel his body heat as he closed in on her. He tapped his ice cream covered Italian shoe against her scuffed sneakers. He was too close. Iris was afraid she might suffocate in the presence of his arrogance.

“She can go,” he whispered. His breath tickled her forehead, scattering the loose wisp of curls there. “Judging by the state of your hands, I assume you’re used to cleaning up after others. So how about you lick it clean then?”

Slowly, she lifted her eyes to meet his. Due to the minimal distance between them, she could see that his eyes weren’t brown, just a dark shade of blue-green, and he had a small scar hidden just beneath his brows.

“You know,” she said loudly, taking a sudden step towards him, their chests just grazing against each other, startling him to take a step back. “I wonder just how small of a man you are to enjoy knocking people down.”

She unclenched her clean hand before lifting it, holding her forefinger and thumb a centimetre from each other. She deliberately looked towards his crotch and said, “I suppose size does matter to boys. I hear it can cause a severe inferiority complex.”

Orion’s eyes burned with hatred at her insinuation. The crowd went silent. She found her comeback humorous, they obviously didn’t. Of course, they wouldn’t dare laugh at his royal ridiculousness, especially not when it is easier to laugh at the court jester.

“Iris!” Victoria gasped and tried to stop Iris from continuing by grabbing onto the back of Iris’s uniform.

Iris ignored her.

“You’ve got some balls,” Orion snarled through clamped teeth. He was finally sounding like a teenage boy.

“They’re definitely bigger than yours,” she bit back.

The cruel sneer on his lips was enough to show that Iris may have just taken it too far, but she couldn’t find it in herself to care. Why should she, when Orion was the one constantly doing to others what she was now doing to him? She was only giving him a taste of his own poison.

“You are right, though,” Iris admitted. “I am very good at cleaning things. The question is: are you?” She slowly lifted her ice cream covered hand, eyeing his perfectly pressed white shirt. She didn’t even think about the possible consequences of her actions before she went through with her hastily thought out plan.

She smashed her broken ice cream cone on his face, dragging it down across his shirt.

Later she would regret what she did, but now, all she felt was relief.