I opened my mouth to speak, but was interrupted by a knock at the door. It took me a moment to realize that two uniformed policemen stood in the entrance to my classroom.
“Can I help you, gentlemen?” I asked, my manners overriding my disorientation.
My gaze skittered over to King and found him still watching me. I shivered and watched his hands flex into fists on his desk, wondering if that meant he wanted to touch me or wanted to throttle me.
“Sorry to disrupt, Mrs. Irons—”
“Miss Irons,” the class, led by King, recited at the same time.
The cop from the town meeting, Officer Danner, the beautiful one with tawny blond hair and Clint Eastwood vibe that had most of the girls in the class tittering self-consciously, stepped forward. “Miss Irons, we are here to arrest Kyle Garro for the possession of illegal narcotics. Mr. Garro, stand up and put your hands behind your head.”
The air in the room solidified and I watched in shock as the officer moved through it as if through plasticine towards King who was already up and out of his seat. Still, his eyes were on me even as he remained quiet and calm while they patted him down and cuffed him.
“There must be some kind of mistake,” I said, finally snapping back to reality and stepping forward. “King is a bright, good student. There is no way this can be true.”
There was a way, given that The Fallen were the biggest weed distributors on the west coast, but there was no way that King would be caught with any, let alone hardcore narcotics at school.
“We had an anonymous tip that Mr. Garro was keeping narcotics on his person, Miss Irons,” Danner’s partner told me as he located King’s backpack tucked under the chair and unzipped it.
Everyone gasped as they caught side of the huge bag of white powder nestled between the textbooks there.
“Do you have a warrant?” I demanded, scrambling to think of any way to stop them.
The cops ignored me as they bracketed King and began to lead him through the desks.
The students all started to whisper to each other and a few of them began to speak up against what was happening, including Benny and Carson. The latter was even standing up and moving out the door with them.
“No way King would do something like that,” he was saying, his voice rising to a shout as they moved away from him and down the hall, which was filling with students. “No fucking way!”
I braced a hand on the doorframe to steady myself as I watched King being escorted out the doors, aware of the students and faculty flooding the halls, of the fact that King was gone, gone to prison, gone away before I could tell him I was stupid but also in love, so goddamn in love with him that I would die an excruciating death every day for the rest of my life if it meant I could be with him.
It started with a sound in my head, a cacophonous shatter and crash as my insides collapsed like demolished house. Every single thing I’d once been and thought important was in that house: my morality polished like Waterford crystal in the cabinets, my poise and elegance painted on the walls with my preconceived notions hanging like designer garments in the closets. I lost everything to the blast, everything razed to my truest foundation.
And at that foundation, I found the Cressida I’d become with King, one strong enough to give into temptation without guilt, one who fought for the things she wanted and spat in the eye of the people who judged her. It was that Cressida who felt fury light her up like the 1st of July and it was that Cressida who started off down the hallway towards the Headmaster’s office.
I ignored the looks of shock and the gossip about King, the staff that reached out to me as I powered passed them, Tiffany Calloway’s cry as I flew around her desk and burst into Headmaster Adams’ office without waiting to be announced.
He sat behind his palatial desk smoking a cigar.
I fought hard against the urge to put it out in his eye.
“Mrs. Irons, what in heavens are you doing?” he asked me.
So, I told him. Or more like shouted at him.
“You allowed the police to illegally search a student and arrest him during my class? Even if they came to you with their suspicions, you should have urged them to speak with him first, or at the very least, wait until after school hours to take him in for questioning. That you would allow this kind of thing to happen to one of our students is reprehensible. And don’t say that you would have act this way for anyone. You clearly hate the Garro family for their way of life and you decided to humiliate King because of it.”