CHAPTER TWO- Facing the Consequences
The breath she hadn't even realized she'd been holding left Genevieve in a whoosh, and she laughed breathlessly. "Is that all?" she asked incredulously. Tutoring seemed mild compared with the hype the headmaster's punishments had gotten from the student body at large.
"I have a certain student in mind," Dunmore pressed on. "And though he suffers greatly in all his subjects, he seems to have a particular weak spot in the historical realm of study." The headmaster glanced at the papers on his desk as though checking records. Picking up a fountain pen, he made a few marks on the paper, looking like any other professor making notations on a student's official file.
From where she sat, however, Genevieve could not discern what the headmaster was actually doing-sketching a phoenix.
"He?" she repeated. "So it's a boy I'm tutoring."
"Your skills of deduction are wonderful," Dunmore responded, abandoning his sketch to smile up at her beatifically.
And then the door opened, making his smile stretch even wider.
"How nice of you to join us, Mr. Mallory! You're only several minutes late."
Gen barely restrained herself from a pained groan as she turned to survey the young man in the doorway. A right bastard was Drake Mallory, and a right bastard he'd always been. Always gadding his money about in everyone's faces and lording it over all of them. She recalled more than a few instances where she'd been on the receiving end of that blade-sharp, judgmental, superior tongue of his.
Now that right bastard stood negligently in the headmaster's doorway, one solid shoulder propped against the doorjamb. His odd, silvery hair stood up in deceptively careless-looking spikes around his head, and his eyes were hidden by black sunglasses. The uniform they were all required to wear had been defaced to minimum recognition, the shirt buttoned only halfway and displaying an expanse of defined chest, the tie hanging at loose ends around his neck. Completing the ensemble was the suit coat, slung over one shoulder.
And despite the state of his clothes, the gleam of money all but screamed off him.
Of course, that might have been due in part to the car keys he had dangling off his fingertips even though a scant few of the students could drive, much less did.
"You can't possibly mean for me to teach him history," Gen said, a note of desperation creeping into her voice as she turned to face the headmaster. He'll kill me, she thought, flicking a sidelong glance at the upperclassman in the doorway. Though if I'm lucky, he won't even bother showing up to the sessions. One hand crept up to toy nervously with a stray tress of hair and she kept her wide brown eyes fixed on Dunmore's blues.
"Please remove the tinted spectacles, Mr. Mallory. I assure you my lights are not that bright." Dunmore gestured to a seat and eyed the young man.
Intrigued by the vignette before him, Drake hooked the sunglasses in the deep vee his button-up formed and quirked a pale eyebrow. "What's this about history, Dunmore?" he asked casually, lounging in the stiff wooden chair beside Genevieve, turning his head to stare at her. Even as he looked at her in profile, he saw her cheeks burn red.
"It had come to my attention you are making failing marks in history, Mr. Mallory. It has occurred to me you could use some motivation."
Drake would have spoken in his own defense, but before he could, the redheaded Wesley mite had sprung from her chair. Just as well, Drake thought, propping one black-booted ankle to his knee. It saved him energy.
"I'll take detention," she said, shaking her head in emphatic negation. "I'll take a whole month of it!" How many times had that overprivileged git picked a fight with Rob? And how many times had he gotten away with it?
Both of Drake's eyebrows winged up at her statement. "Careful, apple-polisher, you might hurt my feelings."
Calm in the face of Gen's pleas, Dunmore held up a steady, long-fingered hand. "I'm afraid the decision has already been made."
And unbelievably, Drake snorted.
The pointy bastard actually snorted, Gen noted with disbelief.
"Well, well, what'd the little bum-kisser do to warrant so much trouble, I wonder?" Drake drawled, pinning those freakish eyes on her again, his long fingers tapping the earpiece of his sunglasses as he watched her, wide-eyed and expectant.
"Mr. Mallory, your tone," Dunmore said, but he sounded… well, a bit bored.
As though he'd heard it all before.
"Funny you should ask, you chinless toff," Genevieve exploded, unable to hold her temper. "As it was one of your girlfriends who started a row with me." At his steady, bemused, and silent gaze, she huffed out a breath. "Melissa Bullfrog," she said sarcastically, intentionally butchering the girl's surname.
At this, Drake let out a very loud-and very ungentlemanly-guffaw of laughter. Now oblivious to the headmaster sitting before them, Drake leaned forward, planting both feet square on the hardwood floor, his eyes cast up to the still-standing Gen. From this angle, she noted, one could almost believe he could live up to that bloody angelic look.
And then he opened his horrible mouth.
"One of my girlfriends?" he repeated. "If I were that desperate, pauper, I'd just go on and date you, wouldn't I?"
She leapt at him, eyes sparking angrily. She would have made contact, would have knocked the bloody hell out of him, had the headmaster not stepped between them.
"A smashing start!" he exclaimed merrily, clapping his hands as though to end the matter completely. "But I'm afraid I have other matters to attend to, my pupils, other pressing, urgent matters." He regarded Gen over the rims of his glasses reprovingly. "I trust, Miss Wesley…" Now he turned his attention to Drake, who only seemed amused by the barely diverted attack. "And Mr. Mallory, you will both be present in the library late this afternoon when your classes are completed for the day."
He walked between them to the door, standing firmly between them. Once they were in the hall, he knew they'd be likely to natter at each other once again, but they'd been given their instruction.
He knew both these young ones, and he knew they would follow their instruction, even if they did so in a roundabout way.
And as he closed the door to his office, the headmaster's hair and beard grew longer, the tweed suit morphing into robes, the smart spectacles thinning into half-moon lenses.
And Albus Dumbledore smiled.
~~~
She had more to say to him. Oh, of course she did, after that arsehole comment he'd made. But once Drake had exited the headmaster's office, the shades came back on and the school's baddest rich boy, its richest bad boy, strode away as though she didn't even exist, unbuttoned coat flapping behind him as he tucked his keys into his pocket.
Gen was absolutely fuming.
"It shames me to admit it, but I won't ever look half as good in new clothes as he does in wrinkled ones." The voice over her right shoulder was forlorn, but held an amused note unique to its owner.
"Connor," Gen said without turning around. She was hoping against hope it was actually possible to burn a hole in the back of Drake Mallory's shirt simply by staring at it.
Not that the git would notice a bloody hole. The shirt was barely on as it was.
"I… have to tutor… that prancing, taunting arse," she said once he'd been caught up in a crowd of his own kind, whisked out of her field of vision.
For the first time, she sincerely and truly regretted calling Melissa all those names. The gratification it had brought, no matter how intense, was not worth it.
"Are you going to teach him to read?" Connor Collins asked cheerily, a cheeky grin brightening his thin, often peaked face.
Though her mood was sour, Gen's lips twitched at his comment. "Worse. History," she said with a sigh.
Damn, damn, and double damn.
When would she learn to keep her big mouth shut?
~~~
Though the gaggle around him was going on about something-more likely than not, they were going on about him-Drake's mind was wandering. School bored him, as did the people around him. He had nothing to learn here. He would graduate, take over some of his father's superfluous business dealings, and get his feet wet all at once.
A history class wasn't going to help him with that in the least, or so he was convinced.
Besides, he had an image to upkeep.
Thinking such, Drake dug in the pocket of his mostly unbuttoned shirt, drawing out a slim silver case of hand-rolled cigarettes. Sure, no smoking in school, he thought, shuttling the case over long fingers and palming it easily.
He'd just save the smoke for a time when it would cause the most trouble.
He was twenty minutes late when he finally walked into his history classroom; his professor, when confronted with a tardy student whose uniform was in disarray, who had a cigarette dangling from his lips, who was wearing sunglasses in a brightly lit classroom, had no idea what to punish first.
So she kept her mouth shut and glared sternly, hoping everything she wanted to say was contained in that look.
Drake slid into a seat in the front of the classroom, stretching his long legs out in front of him and tilting his head back. Tutoring… it provided a whole new realm of distraction for him. And tutoring from a Wesley? Well, it was like taking candy from a baby. It was almost unfair what an easy target she'd make.
He gave her a week before she'd quit, running screaming away from the library with tears rolling down her cheeks.