Her state of panic had almost made me panic. I watched as she sat there on the chair, blinking her eyes open every once in a while, but letting them stay half closed the rest of the time.

She was trying to fight it, she was trying to send that anxiety away, but fighting wasn’t a good idea. So, I let her hear my heart, forced myself to be calm for her, to give her the good vibes.

Her breathing started evening out, but her heart rate resisted and remained well about one-fifty.

“Did you know that there’s a group of fungi called ‘zombie-ant fungi’?” I asked her to distract her. “They infect poor ants and use them to produce spore and survive,”

“Oh?”

“Do you know the function of all three hearts of an octopus?”

“No…” she muttered curiously, forcing her eyes open to look at me.

“One sends oxygenated blood to the body, the other sends the deoxygenated blood to the gills, while the third one acts as a courier system,”

“That’s interesting…”

“Also, you know, strawberries aren’t actually classified as berries, but bananas and avocados are. Also, the trees can communicate to each other by releasing chemicals into the soil,” it wasn’t working. The curiousity was dimming, despite how much she loved biology. “Do you know that female pandas have a sort of ‘hostage kink’?”

“What the-” she immediately turned her head to look at me properly as if to make sure if I was being serious.

“Yes…Pandas are cute to us, but the male ones suffer really hard. They have like their panda version of ‘The Bachelor’…” that made her snort. “And male jumping spiders dance in front of the females like doing a tango. And their way of saying ‘I love you’ is sharing a fly with the female,” she laughed, and I felt her pulse rate drop. One-twenty. I had a long way to go…

“And porcupines are hilarious. The male porcupine urines over the female and for some weird reason, the female falls spikes over heals for that. It’s like a champagne toast…” she laughed again and her pulse rate lowered further. “The male giraffe tastes the female giraffe’s pee before mating to know if she’d fertile. So first, he sniffs her genitalia and she urinates into his mouth,” more laughter and her pulse reached a steady hundred, calming me down. “The snails can go at it for almost an hour, you know. More than most men…”

“Okay, okay, stop now,” I realized that she had retreated her hand from my chest and was clutching hers to control her laughter. “That’s a hell lot of things I didn’t want to know…”

Her pulse rate was eighty, and so, I freed her wrist and smiled at her, her laughter doing things to me now that I wasn’t worried about her health.

“I have more…” I did. I had bought books after books in ecology because I knew she loved it. I would tell her a hundred more if that meant that she wasn’t having a panic attack.

“Thank you,” she whispered, smiling at me like I was some sort of a hero. And that smile made everything I had done so far in my life to lead to that moment worth it. “Won’t you get into trouble?” she asked, the weakness still lingering in her voice. “For meeting a student outside of the school,”

For going on a date with a student, is what she meant to say.

I shook my head, smiling internally about the fact that she had no clue. She had no clue that my family was a big shareholder of it, and that I was a trustee myself. She had no clue about how I had first entered the committee before establishing myself as a teacher. 

All to put myself in her vicinity.

“I’ll be fine,” I assured her, but she still looked concerned. Concerned for me. This time, my smile was external as well.

She stood up and strengthened her back before offering me another smile and turning around and leaving the classroom.

I watched as the door closed behind her and she disappeared down the hall.

“‘Evening, mother,” I spoke as my mother answered the call.

“How are you doing, Cas?” she asked and her voice was just enough to make me smile wider. My mother had something about her that put all her children at ease- my psychopathic older brother Kai included.

“I am fine. Actually, no, scratch that, I am doing more than fine. Everything’s just so…great, mum,”

“You met her, didn’t you?” she asked, a smile evident in her tone. She had found a picture of January from her socials in my pocket in which her face was almost entirely covered but her smile was the widest, and my mother had never let me hear the end of it. Now, however, her tone wasn’t teasing. It was loving, as if she knew exactly what I was feeling and was happy for me.

“Yes. And I might not know her well, but I know that she’s the most wonderful woman on the planet,” the dreaminess in my voice wasn’t something she could’ve missed, but I didn’t care. “I can’t wait for you to meet her,”

“I cannot, either. But, be patient, Cas,”

“I know, mum. I intend to be,”

“That’s my son!”

We talked for a few more minutes: about Sam and Kai and Bella, my little sister. We avoided my dad, for they had gotten divorced a year after Bella and Sam’s eighteenth birthday and I didn’t like bringing him up in front of her because of how he had hurt her.

I had to end the call when the bell rang and it was time for me to head to my class.

When January came to visit me for tutoring, she still looked down. She did try to hide it by offering me a sing-song ‘Hi’ but I saw through her act.

I had prepared for that in advance. I opened my drawer and pulled out a question paper I had a friend make that was similar to the Olympiad in case there was day when she’d be too upset to study.

January liked problems and she absolutely loved solving them. She prided herself in being a master at filling up the sudoku and solving a cube.

“A club needs the room for a few hours. We’ll have to move to the garden,”

“The garden? Aren’t there any other empty room?”

“Best to study biology surrounded by it, right?” I opened the classroom door and she followed me to the garden. There were tables everywhere for people to sit and relax, or to study, or simply just to eat and have fun.

We took our place at one of them, under a tree’s shed. January was always in her room, so, I knew for a fact that open air was going to be good for her.

She eased up a few minutes later, her muscles and expression relaxing as she turned her focus to the questions. I sat there, eying the questions alongside her, making sure that her answers were right, which they mostly were, and I explained her errors whenever she went wrong.

Half an hour later, I concluded that she was going to be fine on her own for a few minutes and rose, “I’ll make sure Rhys is in the detention,”

He was there, sitting with an irritated expression on his face, looking far from guilty and I decided it was time for the little punk to learn a lesson.

I decided to pay the police station a visit after finishing things with January.

“You’re asking me to reopen a case of a teenager getting a minor head injury? Look, sir, we have rather significant cases to work on, and while I am certain Ms Decembers is important, even her parents let us write it off as an accident. It’s not as much of an importance as a murder or-”

“Mr Grey!” the sheriff greeted me with a smile, interrupting her subordinate. The guy stuttered for a bit, but probably pieced together that I and the sheriff were close, so, sealed his mouth.

“Hello, Lara, how are you doing?” I asked her, letting a charming smile take over my face.

“Great as usual, Grey. What brings you here?” she asked, gesturing the earlier guy to walk away so she could take his place.

“Remember that girl January Decembers? Was injured and then suffered from amnesia?” she nodded, so, I continued. “Well, I have an idea about who might’ve hurt her,”

“Are you willing to give us a statement?”

“I found January on the day of the incident outside the girls’ lavatory. She was crying and was in lingerie and I assumed it was because someone had bullied her and had stolen her clothes or something. She told me her friend Rhys Cornell had called her a slut and she was upset about it. There was a small fire in one of the classrooms, so, I offered her a ride. She looked miserably, so I stopped by a restaurant for a while before driving her home. There, I noticed Rhys Cornell, and I believe he was enraged about something, the blunt of which was taken by Ms Decembers later. I wasn’t certain about it, so, I decided it wasn’t of much important.

“Today, however, I found Rhys Cornell cornering Ms Decembers in a classroom. I heard bangs and when I reached the classroom, she looked pale and ashen and utterly grateful to have some outside company. I gave Mr Larsen a detention, but, I figured it would be for the best to let the cops know about it.”

“You did the right thing,”

“Also, there are cameras around their house,”

“But they don’t work, right?”

“As a matter of fact, they do. They must’ve lied to hide their own things,” I had concluded that after I had seen January open their feed. There was a lot of things wrong with their house, starting with the child abuse. They were rich, but their incomes weren’t justified well, and a lot of their spendings were done by cash.

Lara slowly looked away, everything clicking into places in her own head.

“Also, January is my student. I very recently saw her walk into the class with bruises everywhere. She claimed to have fallen down the stairs but I wasn’t sure. I asked the nurse about the past, and she told me that January had visited her a lot. Sometimes it was because her stitches from a suspicious injury would open up while the other times it was because she would faint out of nowhere. The school’s therapist told me that January was always afraid of speaking, but she concluded that it had something to do with her house. Even if we can’t prove it’s child abuse, we can get her new guardians on the basis of neglect. They’re always out of town, away on meetings, we can use that, right?”

Lara shook her head, a grim smile on her face. “Her family is too strong. We need evidence for the physical abuse, and even then, it won’t be that simple. January will have to move to a different place, with new people, and adjusting won’t be easy for her. Granted, her parents are abusive, but they’ll pay for her college and she won’t ever struggle in that arena. In a few months she’ll be out of there. But if we arrest her parents, she’ll suffer mentally for having to live elsewhere, and also financially in future,”

I would never let her suffer in any way, but I couldn’t say that.

“I’ll still look into it, but I am not sure whether we’ll be able to do anything about the abuse. However, I will investigate things further about Rhys Cornell.”

I nodded at her, before getting to my feet and leaving the room. I was almost outside the station when I received a message.

Rebecca and Carter Decembers are back in town.

Crap.