Page 19 of Science Project

The bell rang through the hallway, and I strolled down the corridor to Akio’s locker. When I turned the corner, I spotted Akio dressed in an oversize black anime shirt, pulling books out of the metal compartment, his hair all over the place, as if he’d had a long night.

“Akio!” João shouted down the hallway, storming toward him.

Eyes widening, Akio slammed his locker closed and hurried in the opposite direction of João while juggling a stack of textbooks that he hadn’t gotten to put away. João stormed after him, seething.

“You’d better have it tonight,” João growled, catching up to him. “Don’t be late for work.”

“I can’t keep giving you drugs!” he whisper-yelled at him.

João seized him by the collar and slammed him up against the lockers. “You’d better?—”

With my heels clacking against the tiled floor, I ran across the hallway, grabbed João by his shoulder, and pulled him away from Akio, whose glasses now sat crooked on his nose. “Leave him alone.”

“This is none of your bratty bitch business,” João growled.

“Leave. Him. Alone.”

After looking between us, he snickered. “What, are you guys fucking now?”

I expected Akio to say no, but when neither of us said a word, João smirked and ripped himself away from me. “For the first time in my life, I actually have some respect for you, Akio.” He headed down the hall. “But you’d still better have the shit tonight.”

Once he disappeared, I turned to Akio, who readjusted his glasses.

“So,” I said with a small giggle, “you’re a drug dealer.”

“Don’t listen to João. I don’t?—”

I gently pushed him. “It’s just a joke.”

But what had João said about Akio having the drugs for him tonight after school? Maybe he actually was working for his mother, selling drugs to the drug dealers themselves. But then why would they have the confidence to bully Akio? It should’ve been the other way around if Akio really was the dealer’s dealer.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“I’m fine. I have to get to class.”

“Wait.” I grabbed his wrist. “I want to talk to you.”

The second bell rang through the hallways, signaling that we were already late for our next class, which was, as luck would have it, science. Some of the good girls hurried to class, and the troublesome kids lingered in the hallways, waiting for restorative officers to discipline them.

Akio glanced over his shoulder at the troublemakers, who threw glances our way. “What’re you doing, talking to me here? We can talk about the project in science. You don’t have to go out of your way to?—”

“This isn’t about the project.”

“Then, what is it about?”

I paused, my stomach twisting at the thought of what had happened last night. What he had seen. How I’d reacted. And what I’d said to the poor, innocent kid who seemed to have had a crush on me for a long, long time now.

“I wanted to apologize”—I tugged him to a quieter section of the hallway—“for yesterday.”

“What about it?” he asked, fiddling with the bottom of his One Piece graphic tee.

“About what I said in the car,” I whispered.

Akio paused for a long time, then swallowed and looked away. “Which part?”

How could I say the you’re not my type part without saying the you’re not my type part?

He shouldn’t have come to my house, but all the other things that I’d said, I hadn’t really meant them. I had been trying to protect him from my father and from what any of those guys would do to him if they caught him.

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