The Death of Innocence

[Caine]

A thin body slammed into a row of lockers in the locker room, skeletal fingers reaching to prod the back of a skull covered in a layer of dirty blonde curls to check for fractures or blood. Finding none, Caine lifted sullen eyes to face his attacker with a bland expression. At fifteen, he was a good head and a half shorter than all of the other boys in his grade; even the younger ones were taller. (He wouldn’t hit a growth spurt until the summer before his senior year, sending him hurtling to being one of the tallest in his graduating class.)

“You’re such a creep, dude. Why don’t you just go kill yourself like you killed your brother?” The biggest of them, Mark, sneered, already muscular and fit from playing football. He was the typical athlete, showing his prowess by picking on the smaller kids to show how tough he was as if being able to bench press an impressive weight and tackle boys twice his size weren’t enough.

Caine didn’t answer, earning him a punch to the face. He stumbled back into the lockers, placing his palm over his eye but not giving the ring of schoolmates the satisfaction of a noise, a retaliation. His eye would swell shut and it would be bruised for a while, a disadvantage when avoiding conveniently placed feet. The bell rang, and with it the students left like following a Siren’s call, dispersing from the locker room to leave the smaller teen to his own devices.

He painstakingly dressed in his regular clothes and hung his backpack from bony shoulders, going left from the gym instead of right, knowing the bus would leave without him but he had walked home before and this was important. The woman who showed him kindness, inspired within him an almost obsessive need to please, to show he was worthy of any attention she bequeathed him.

She was in her mid to late thirties, slender and pretty in that Southern Belle fashion, her accent creased with Northern inflection from her time at an upstate university. He swallowed roughly, faintly protruding Adam’s apple bobbing with the motion. She was perfect and Caine wanted to show her he wasn’t just there for pity; that he was smart and capable and deserved to be her student.

Approaching her classroom, he heard something he hadn’t before, low voices, breathy and stern. He recognized both, but not in this strange context. His backpack dropped gently to the floor and he crept towards the ajar entrance to the room, peeking in to see what was amiss. There was his teacher, skirt slid up her thighs to expose the tops of her stockings, hair nearly undone from its neat clasp with a man, no, a student standing too close, too far in her personal space for it to be casual. She murmured something and gave a low, throaty chuckle, something about how they needed to be more careful than this as it was practically begging to be caught. It was her job on the line.

His stomach soured, bile rising in his esophagus as he finally put a voice to the buzzed brown hair, the stocky, muscular build and the discarded Letterman jacket on one of the chairs. It was Mark. It was Mark running his hands over the silk blouse, rumpling it as he touched her breasts. It was Mark who had her mouth against his neck, sighing into skin and it was Mark who was defiling this treasure, this precious, earthly angel.

But she wasn’t an angel at all, not anymore. Caine’s vision cleared from the haze she had rendered over his senses and saw her for the harlot she was. His hand gripped the pocket of his baggy jeans, sitting so uncomfortably on his bony hips. Fingers curled around the pocket knife he had filched from the corner store, liking the way the metal glimmered in the evening light. Without realising it, he moved into the room, flipping the blade open.

They were too busy with each other to notice the skeletal blonde approaching with knife in hand.

They were too busy, too slow to react as the blade sunk savagely into Mark’s neck, severing the jugular almost immediately. He tore the knife back out only to stab it back in, rending flesh until it was just a mass of mutilated tissue. His teacher screamed, so the blood-soaked teen turned to her and started slicing into her chest, following the path that Mark’s fingers had gone before he turned her pretty, elegant swan neck into an unrecognizable mess.

Breathing hard and trembling, Caine openly cried, running from the room with knife still in hand, only remembering to snatch his backpack before he escaped into the woods, sobbing harshly for innocence lost before he stopped to retch, disgusted with the vision he had seen instead of the carnage he had caused.