He turns around and stalks down the empty hall. I chase him, choking on my own saliva. I’m too stunned to produce tears. My life as I know it is about to be over. I trip over my own legs, grasping his backpack so I don’t hit the ground. He turns around sharply, growling.
“Hands off, Followhill.”
“You can’t do this to me.” My knees hit the floor. How fitting. From this angle, I can finally see the view for what it is. All my mistakes, the people I chose to affiliate myself with—the jocks, the fakers, the popular kids—are ricocheting back at me. Gus holds my future—my reputation—between his sausage fingers.
“Please,” I say, stripping off my remaining pride. “I beg you. I will do anything else. Tell me what to do. I can’t get to Penn. No one can get to Penn.”
Penn is the tin man.
Gus smiles politely, grabbing the collar of my dress and yanking me up to my feet.
“I actually think you’re a very resourceful girl, Daria. Figure it out. Or I will bury you.”
“We need to talk.”
These are the words I could have imagined myself telling my mother, my future boyfriends, my friends, my family…not my principal. Yet here I am standing in front of Principal Prichard, telling him just that. I just threw up my nonexistent breakfast into a toilet bowl and cried my eyes out, and I probably look like just as much of a mess from the outside as I am on the inside.
When I walked in, I closed the door without his explicit order to do so, the first sign that something was off. Normally, I submit to him, awaiting specific instructions. That’s how it’s been since my first entry. The Via entry. When I walked into his office in middle school, I expected him to call my parents, set off a chain reaction, and fix my error. Fix me.
Instead, he tipped a jar of M&Ms he kept on his desk over the edge, his eyes never wavering from mine. Colorful chocolate pieces rained down the floor, rolling at my feet like marbles.
“Pick them all up, Miss Followhill. On your knees, as I read your sins to you.”
It became our ritual.
Over the years, he barked at me to rearrange the shelves in his office, clean his carpets, shine his shoes, and more recently, after Penn entered the picture, he’d strike the inside of my hands with a ruler. Where the red welts could be explained away by my grueling cheer workouts.
He always read my sins slowly behind his locked door, pausing melodramatically when he got to the juicy parts.
Most sinners say Hail Mary.
I atone for my sins in strokes of his ruler.
I deserve it. I deserve the pain. I distribute so much of it to others, I can’t even blame Principal Prichard for putting me through all of this.
Principal Prichard says our sessions are about discipline. Putting me back on the straight and narrow. But honestly, we both know I’m not getting any better, and the more the years pass, the deeper the misery in which I drown.
I always figured we were both just two fucked-up people doing screwed-up things because no one else around us would understand. It wasn’t until Penn that I realized Principal Prichard was possessive toward me. And that lust feels better than the striking. It feels glorious when experienced right.
Since then, Prichard’s tasks have become more radical and meticulous. The strikes of the ruler harsher.
“I beg your pardon?” He doesn’t look up from the paperwork he is signing. It has the Saints logo, so I know it’s football related. Everything seems football related these days. Rumor is Gus is on Xanax and has been hitting the bottle to deal with the stress.
I sit down on the chair opposite to him. His eyes snap from the pages. “Were you invited to sit down, Miss Followhill?”
“We have a problem.” My lips wobble. I reach out, putting his pen down for him.
His eyes narrow into slits, zeroing in on my hand. “Quite right. Get your sin book out.”
That’s what he calls it. It always drives me mad. As if he’s above sinning.
I take a deep breath and release it all at once. Here goes nothing. “I don’t have it.”
“What do you mean, you don’t have it?” His jaw flexes.
“Sylvia Scully stole it from my room last night. She lives with me now, as you know. Gus has it, and he is threatening to go public with it unless I convince Penn Scully to throw the play-off game.”
They probably planned it together and laughed all the way throughout. And me? I was stupid enough to buy into Penn’s distraction. I helped him clean himself up while she was upstairs, stealing my most valuable possession. The one thing that could destroy me. Principal Prichard’s lips twitch. With dark circles under my eyes, and the tiny red bursts of blood inside them, I’m sure I’m not the same pretty girl who lured him into this arrangement. I didn’t put on makeup this morning, and my hair is a tangled mess.
“I wrote about you in the book,” I add matter-of-factly to remind him how grave our situation is. Prichard is featured in my journal many times. I squeeze my eyes shut and blush when I remember all the things I shared there.
Entry number one hundred twenty-two chronicles how one time, when I went into his office and he wasn’t there, I rubbed myself against his executive chair. When he arrived, he made me lick the traces of myself from said chair. It’s the most sexual thing we’ve ever done, and it did not involve touching each other, but it’s enough to bring both of us down.