WREN FELT COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY HOLLOW. It was like someone had cut her open and pulled out all of her organs and emotions like a pumpkin preparing to get carved. She didn't even have enough motivation to grab the remote and put something on the TV. She just lay in her bed, staring at the ceiling and watching the fan go around and around.

On days like these, her mother let her stay home from school, and Wren was really happy about that because she genuinely didn't think she could move. She was too tired to sleep, even. She didn't even react when she heard a knock on the door, and after a moment, it opened. "Wren."

"Scott," she replied, recognizing his voice. She had been expecting it to be her mother, but she wasn't too surprised at his presence. Whenever she was having a really awful day, he usually stopped by to cheer her up.

He stepped closer into the room, closing the door behind him. "How you doing?"

"Not great," she answered. She meant to smile at him, but the corners of her lips barely twitched upwards.

He raised his eyebrows at her once he reached the bed, playing with the picture on her bedside table of the two of them with Stiles. He asked, "Can I get you anything?"

"A normal brain would be nice," Wren told him. She often entertained the idea of being a regular teenager, but she also knew that there were a ton of people that had it worse than she did.

Scott collapsed on the bed beside her, lying down over the covers and placing his hands on his stomach. They were both staring up and speaking to each other. "I quite like your brain, though."

"Shouldn't you be at school?" she asked. He was failing multiple classes, and she was surprised that they hadn't kicked him off the lacrosse team yet.

He shrugged. He had a lot on his mind other than school. She knew that. He desperately wanted to make his mom proud of him with his grades, but when you're fighting Kanimas, it's hard to keep them up. "Yeah, but Stiles and I are skipping to interrogate Jackson."

"Aren't you slightly worried about the fact that you kidnapped him?" she questioned. Jackson was totally the kind of uy to be a bitch about that, even when they were trying to help him. "It's Jackson."

"We might be screwed," he responded with a sigh. After a moment, he rolled onto his side so that he was looking at her, and she knew that he wanted something. "Do you happen to want to come to the hospital with me to talk to Danny?" he quizzed.

She frowned because she really really wasn't up to it, but she could feel his puppy dog eyes bearing into the side of her face. "I don't know, Scott."

"Please," he begged, sitting up and staring down at her. She stuck her head under the covers, partly because she looked like crap and partly because she wouldn't be able to say no to him. "He likes you, and when we're done, I'll get you ice cream and binge Criminal Minds with you."

She finally groaned, "Fine."

《❀》

"ARE YOU SURE EVERYTHING'S OKAY with you and Jackson?" Scott asked Danny as he got ready to be discharged from the hospital.

"Yeah. Everything's fine." The other boy nodded, and the two best friends mentally groaned at the lack of answers. Danny looked inside his wallet and rolled his eyes in exasperation. "Did the cops have to take my fake ID?"

Wren sighed, pretending to think that that was incredibly unfair. "How dare they take the thing that allows you to illegally drink?"

"You didn't do anything to make him angry?" The McCall boy questioned, ignoring the blonde as the Mahealani boy shot her an unimpressed look.

Turning back to Scott, he chuckled. "How angry?"

"On a scale of one to ten," the werewolf responded, and Wren stared at him with an uneasy expression, wondering where he was going with this. "One being kind of irritated and 10 being wanting to kill you violently."

"Jackson's kind of always at a four, but we're good. I was actually doing him a favor," Danny told them, which grabbed their interest a bit as they leaned forward in question with their eyebrows furrowed.

Remembering what the boy had told her the day before in chemistry, Wren's eyes widened in realization. "The video."

"What video?" Scott asked as Danny nodded to the blonde, confirming her thoughts.

"I was recovering a video for them. I put it on my tablet," the Mahealani informed them before realizing where said tablet was. "Which is in the trunk of my car and probably still at the club."

The werewolf in front of him continued with his questions. "What was on the video?"

"I'm not really supposed to say," Danny responded after a moment of hesitation. His stare shifted to Wren, giving her a look that told her not to say anything.

"Why can't you tell us?" the blonde quizzed smugly, stepping toward the boy as he pulled his shirt over his head. "I mean, it was just a video of him sleeping, right? Nothing special."

The boy glared at her as Scott sighed, trying to convince him to tell them what else was on the video. "Danny, what if I told you this could be a matter of life and death?"

"I'm not supposed to say," Danny insisted, not giving in, and Wren rolled her eyes in frustration. Damn it. Why did he have to be such a loyal friend? It just made things that much more difficult.

"Okay," Scott muttered before coming up with something else that might sway the boy when he pulled out his wallet again, staring down at it in disappointment. "What if I told you you can get your fake ID back?"

That peaked his interest.

After getting the information that they wanted out of Danny, Scott and Wren ran out of the room to share it, but unfortunately, they were stopped by none other than Melissa McCall.

"While I think you being here to check in on your friend is all sorts of commendable, I've got to play tough mom right now, even though I'm not very good at it."

"Right now?" Scott questioned. They were really in a hurry, not wanting to leave Stiles alone with Jackson for to long. There was no telling what he would do.

Melissa nodded, "Yes, right now. I got a call from your principal. You are failing two classes?"

"I know," the boy told her, and Wren's eyes widened. How could he be failing? She gave him the answers to literally every single assignment. To be fair, she failed a lot of those assignments as well. "And that's why we're going to study with Stiles right now."

"Do you know that if you fail even one of your midterms, that they're gonna hold you back?" the woman questioned with a stern voice that lowered when she realized that she was telling the entire hospital that he was failing.

Now, Scott was worried. "He said that?"

"Yes," she answered. "All of your friends are going to be juniors while you're still a sophomore. Do you understand, Scott? You cannot fail. Get Wren to help you. She's smart."

"I know. I will," the younger McCall assured her, glancing at Wren whose mouth was frozen in a smile, not sure what to do or say at that awkward moment. She wasn't a genius, but she was decent at everything. The problem was that most of the time, she was either too depressed to feel any kind of motivation or too amped up to sit and work.

Melissa nodded gratefully at her son, believing the lies he was feeding her. Not all of them were lies. He was going to try to get his grades up, but with him skipping school every other day, that was most likely not going to happen. "Thank you."

"It was nice to see you, Melissa," Wren told her with a grin.

As they began to walk away, Scott muttered to her. "Maybe we need to do some studying before Criminal Minds."