Heart and Soul [bxb]

Chapter Fifty

The day after the fight, it was clear a good portion of the school had already heard about it.

Although the real dispute had happened with no witnesses, practically the whole team had been present for the first altercation. In their school, all it took for news to spread was one pair of eyes attached to a mouth, and they'd had several. Plus, when one of the football team's captains stopped being one of the football team's captains, word was bound to get around fast.

Nonetheless, Carter and Seth sat at their usual table at lunch. Joey was sitting directly in front of Carter, but he hadn't quite met his eye yet. Jenna and Mel sat at his side, deep in conversation with a few other girls from the cheer squad. The boys' sour mood had yet to transfer to them. The same thing applied to the rest of the table. Especially Bobby and Scott.

Chaz sat in a far end of the table, surrounded by cheerleaders, with one of them sitting on his lap. Bobby and Scott, though, were sitting way too close for Carter's comfort. He could hear them holler and laugh, like their day couldn't be going any better.

At some point, Scott looked at Carter with a sneer on his face as he said something to the guys around him. Carter glared at him, but Scott didn't look away. The side of his face, especially bellow his eye, had swollen considerably. He looked even worse than Bobby, who had a broken nose and a bruised chin.

Scott laughed at something Bobby said, without peeling his gaze away from Carter, and he lost it.

"Do you have a problem?" He snapped. "Besides your face."

Everyone in a six-people radius quieted down to look. It wasn't usual for Carter to snap like that, let alone in front of so many people. When a few heads started turning, the whole table gradually stopped their conversations to look.

Scott smirked. "Not at the moment," he answered. "Do you?"

"At the moment," Carter repeated, "I have two." He looked between Bobby and Scott pointedly.

He felt Joey staring at him through furrowed brows. Jenna put her phone down, ceasing the tick-tick of her long red nails on the screen, to shoot Carter a curious look. Mel bit back her lip as she took in the intense hostility in Carter's look.

"Maybe you should get Nancy Mason to suck you off. Get that chip off your shoulder," Scott scorned.

"Did somebody told you homophobia was a personality trait? Or is your skull too thick to even grasp the concept of a personality?"

There were a few 'ooh's and 'damn's around the table, and Jenna whistled. In other tables around them, people from other groups were slowly starting to take notice of the tension.

"Calm the fuck down, Parrish," Bobby spat. "People might start thinking Coach's son really did turn you into a sissy."

Carter felt his blood boil. "He didn't turn me into anything."

Scott snorted loudly, leaning back on his chair as he laughed. "So you were a faggot all along?"

Carter stood up, feeling his chair screech against the floor behind him. "Better than being a brainless bigot who overcompensates with the size of his ego," he hissed, before taking his tray and walking away.

He was halfway through the cafeteria when he realized he had absolutely no plan and would wind up eating in the toilet or something, if he didn't come up with an impromptu one quickly.

As though on cue, his eyes fell on a table to the corner with most of its seats empty. The ones that weren't free were occupied by three kids. A dark-skinned sophomore with a shaved head, a raven-haired girl with her combat boots propped on the chair next to her, and Frankie, with his lips parted and eyebrows raised.