The Haven High Book Series (Wattys2017)

Enlightened Part 2 - Chapter 35

Lauren sat in the cafeteria on Thursday with the rest of her homeroom classmates eating her favorite lunch but she could taste none of the normally delicious Mac & Cheese. Zach sat at the opposite end of the table from her and she couldn't stop her eyes from lighting on him for the umpteenth time during her meal. He wouldn't even look at her. He'd been avoiding her since they got back and he'd only ever answered her numerous texts with a "busy". She was starting to feel like a class "A"creeper, stalker girl, but how was she supposed to feel? She'd been ghosted, by her best friend. The worst part about it was that he was still right here. She wondered for the hundredth time what she could have done to make him hate her so much.

Her reverie was interrupted when Zach started to speak. She wished she could say that the sound of his voice didn't make her heart leap with joy in her chest, but if she did, it would have been a total lie.

Zach cleared his throat to get everyone's attention and turned to look her straight in the eyes. Lauren felt his electric blue stare all the way down to her toes; and admonished herself when like a complete dweeb she blushed furiously.

"Lauren would you do your thing?" he asked nonchalantly.

Lauren racked her brain to recall what her thing was. Looking like a moron when he had to clarify.

"You know your anti-eavesdropping thing."

Lauren's duh moment was profound and she blushed even more heatedly then when he'd looked at her. The words 'Stop it stupid before you make a complete fool of yourself' might have crossed her mind.

No friggin' way are you going to let that happen. She berated herself.

But when she finally tore her eyes away from Zach she realized that everyone was now staring at her like she had two heads.

It was at that time that she began to wish the floor would open up and swallow her whole.

"Oh" . . . yeah . . . right . . . that thing." she laughed nervously to try and hide her embarrassment about being caught staring at Zach and muttered the incantation.

Afterward, Lauren went back to dejectedly shoveling tasteless pasta back into her big fat piehole and staring at her plate like it was going to do a trick and she was afraid she would miss it.

"I've been thinking a lot about what happened this past weekend," Zach began, "and I know a lot of you know what I told the council's guard that I thought it wasn't necessarily politically motivated. The council seems to think that the attack was done by someone trying to derail the peace talks. I think it was something else."

Cam sat forward in his seat eagerly and asked, "Who do you think did it?"

"I'm not sure, but I can tell you what I do know, the night school kids had something to do with it."

"What makes you think that, why would they even care about a war between two fullblood tribes?" Marley asked as she spooned all her vegetables on to Liv's plate, while Liv spooned all her meat on hers.

"That's just it, I don't. I think they wanted to send a message to the council in the most brutal way possible." Zach continued.

"But why, if they're halfbloods like you think, why would they want to hurt us?" Meg asked.

"I've been racking my brain for a motif. What would they gain from hurting us, but then it dawned on me they don't care one way or the other. We were just collateral damage. They saw their chance to strike at the council by killing a couple of fullbloods and they took it."

"There's no way Brah that a couple of high school student's hatched an evil genius plan like that." Kyle interjected before stuffing an entire hotdog in his mouth.