Chapter Four

I never told Amy about what I heard in the bathroom, but she clearly noticed my silence and her demeanor changed over the next few days. She asked me what's up on my ass, in no better words, and I told her that I was wrong about Luke being Principal Edgerton's 'someone', but that was all I said. I didn't want her to know that the girls' comments about me in the bathroom really struck a nerve on me. It wasn't only them, but also several other girls in Swimming class and History. Even in the hallways, when I wasn't with Amy.

I didn't think I had ever been accused as a slut before. Arrogant bitch, self-absorbed asshole, yes. But never a slut. I was never even involved with anyone in the academy. Up until Luke's punching incident, my sex life and the nonexistence of it was never even talked about. But suddenly, just because some guy named Jack whom I didn't even know said I should have won the contest and incidentally got into a fight with Lucas Island, I was suddenly a slut.

How did that even make sense?

On Thursday, Amy overheard one of the girls talking about it at lunch. She turned the girl's noodle into maggots, a simple illusion trick that did enough to scare off them. I thanked her, and she shrugged, saying, "I hate hypocrites." Fortunately, no one reported it to the principal, so Amy didn't get into trouble.

In Archery that evening, I unleashed all my frustration on my arrows. Hit after hit on bull's eye, I finally stopped when I accidentally inserted magic to one of my arrows and burned the target face. The fire caused momentary panic in the field, until our archery coach diminished the fire with a spell. Fortunately, the coach accounted it as an accident and didn't see any need to send me for another detention.

By Friday, it was clear no spell was going to help me write an essay. So after dinner, I went to the pond, escorted by one of the mages. He left, though, when Baby Face and Luke came not a minute later. I was confused, at first, and then I realized that Luke's detention must be the same as mine. Great. An hour with Luke and the guard-whose-name-I-should-have-learned-by-now. As long as no girls saw us, I hoped it wouldn't escalate into a rumor of me having a ménage-a-trois.

"Why don't I get a guard to keep me out of trouble, too?" I drawled at Baby Face.

Instead of answering me, he crossed him arms and stood like a statue. I could see Luke rolling his eyes in the dark before he handed me the cleaning tools. "You do it from there. I do it from here."

Pressing my mouth, I took the tools from him. At least he wasn't trying to make me do all the work. It wasn't actually his fault that the slutty rumors had spread around, but I couldn't help resenting him for being the source of the girls' overactive imagination.

For the first thirty minutes or so, we worked in silence. The pond was definitely bigger than common fish ponds in suburban backyards. Pond was probably the wrong word for this body of water—lake was more befitting. It was about one and half times the size of our swimming pool in the stadium, and that alone was already huge.

Before I even had a quarter of the pond cleaned, I was already regretting all the times I ever threw in a plastic cup into the pond before. Maybe after tonight I should support the Go-Green campaign one of those freshmen witches were all the rage for lately. It sucked because if it was any other lake, I would have just needed a simple spell to remove the rubbish floating on the water and cleanse all the excess mud in the water at the same time. This manual way, even with two people working, it'd take hours to get all the rubbish off alone.

At some point, I was sweaty despite the night air, and I threw my tools to the ground, yelling at Baby Face, "Hey! Why don't you come over and help us out here?"

I thought for second he would blast me with one of those famous combative magic spell mages were very well-known of, or worse, put me into the Council's dungeons or something like that. At the very best, he'd ignore me and stayed a statue for another hour. That was why I was so surprised when he actually went to pick up some tools and without speaking, began to drag off the rubbish.

Well, I guess the faster we're done with our job meant he'd get off his work to guard Luke faster, too.

Pushing my luck, I attempted to strike up another one-sided conversation with the mage. "So what's your name?" He didn't answer, but since he didn't walk away, either, I said, "You know I can't keep calling you Baby Face in my head."

At that, he looked at me. "My name is Carter."

"You are capable of the form of communication called speaking! I'm impressed!" It might have been a trick of light in the dark, but I swore I saw him smile a little. Pushing further, I asked him, "So what kind of name is Carter? You sound more like someone's granddad Carter where people still say things like 'this young lad Carter' instead of 'this Carter dude'."

I thought for sure this time he would finally snap, but he said, without turning to look at me, "What kind of name is Riley for a girl?"

"Well, I used to look and act like a boy when I was kid. I kind of gave myself the name." I was surprised at myself to give away that information. Being an orphan without any birth certificate lying around kind of gave me that privilege. I never told anyone about that, mostly because no one ever really asked me. "Besides, it's pretty androgynous these days. Like Jordan and Alex." Feeling Luke's gaze on us, I said much louder, "I thank Upstairs Guy every day that my name is not based on a piece of dirt surrounded by water."

Luke called out from the other side of the pond, "Quit the flirting and get back to work, Williams!"

"Screw you, Isla!" But I did get back to drawing out the rubbish from the pool. I wasn't flirting. I wasn't.

By nine o'clock we had cleared most of the trash on the surface water, except for the ones pooling in the middle. We had no choice but to use the small boat to get there. Besides, we had to clear the mud as much as we could along the way with this giant filter tool. There was no living fishes in the pond, but there had been a rumor that a giant monster lived under the water and came out during moonlights. I never thought it was plausible, seeing that the pond was so dirty there couldn't be any living organism on it, except for algae and a bunch of leeches, maybe.

Still, getting on an old boat with Luke and Baby—oh, Carter—in the middle of the night with only my phone working as the flashlight, and the fact that our magic wouldn't be working while we were in the pond—it was kind of spooky.

"Why don't you swim there and clean the mud, Aquaman?" I demanded Luke as I hiked up my skirt and got into the boat. The additional weight swayed us, and for a second I thought we were going to fall into the murky water. The boat was more like a small wooden canoe, barely enough to fit all the three of us in. I wanted to tell Carter that he didn't have to come with us, but I couldn't really trust Luke not to push me into the water if I pissed him off too much, so I handed him the paddle. "You guys paddle and pick up the trash while I flash the light."

I thought Luke might have muttered something that sounded just like 'lazy slob', but I let it go because my life was practically hanging in his paddling right now.

Yes, I was scared of dark murky waters.

We circled the pond a few times to make sure every single trash we spotted was picked up. The principal had made it clear that we would get another session of detention if she found any remnants of plastic lying on the pond. I wasn't sure how long exactly we spent on the water, but when the last of the trash was picked up, Carter said, "That's enough. I'll drop you off to the girls dorm first, and then Luke's."

"Okay," I said. I turned off the flashlight on my phone, which was already losing so much battery on standby for hours. I was about to slip it inside my blazer's pocket. And then, maybe because my hand got too sweaty, it slipped out of my grasp and fell into the water. Panicked, instinctively, I reached out to grab it. In the process, I disturbed the balance of the boat and somehow the three of us fell into the water, along with all the trash we'd picked up.

The thing is, holding my breath in a clear swimming pool, even if I was chained to the bottom, was something I had done so many times, I was kind of trained to keep my eyes open even if they burned. Inside the muddy water of the pond, however, blackness was everything I could see, and despite all my training, I let out a yelp that made the water rush quickly into my lungs, suffocating the only airway I had. The key about staying under is to keep your oxygen from the beginning. If you've lost it before you even began, there was no more hope for you.

I wasn't sure what happened after that. I had this brief thought about dying because of my phone and the ironic joke fate played on me because I would die by the very thing that won me trophies for years. What was the term? Poetic justice?

Well, maybe I did remember one thing before I died. I remember someone saying my name.

Not Riley.

Williams.