Rise Like The Sun

CHAPTER THREE

NICK

He's never been in so much trouble before.

It's the funniest thing.

Teachers are outright glaring at him for making their lives a misery, pulling him out of class repeatedly for stunts that he hasn't even pulled. Stunts like setting fires and smoking and breaking school equipment. He's been accused of doing so much that Nick is beginning to wonder if he isn't actually pulling these off in his sleep or something.

The school can't expel him because of his mother's name but that doesn't mean that he can't undergo every creative punishment Redwood Academy can think to carry out, save from actual expulsion.

Nick thinks he might be breaking some kind of record.

It's an honour, really.

They want him to drop out of school and put them out of their misery. But that's just making Nick want to stay even more. Even the students are eyeing him with distaste and suspicion, but it just makes Nick laugh, if anything.

They are no threat to him.

They're scared of him and it's nothing new, but it's never made him laugh more.

Roaring in on his motorbike, Nick takes off his helmet, running a hand through his messy hair in an admittedly pitiful attempt to tame it. He feels his phone vibrate and shoots a dramatically dark look towards the bundle of students who are eyeing him. Most of them look scared of him, some are intrigued, eyeing him with something like interest, but in the end, they all scurry away like frightened mice.

Nick smirks to himself and picks up his phone.

"When are you hauling your ass back here, Cinderella?" Jacob echoes through the phone loudly. "The top 1% getting you down with all their fancy cars and finger food, yet?"

He winces briefly at the noise and rolls his eyes. Jacob thinks that just because he's not in the same city, he's on another planet. "I'm not on the other side of the world, Jake," he drawls. "And I told you, you think I'm going to give all this up for Mitchell and his crew? Do I look stupid?"

"Mitchell's been asking for you," Jack says and Nick stills. "Me and the boys have told you're gone for good but you know him. He's getting antsy, Nick."

"Tell him I've gone on to bigger and better things. I'm not going back there," Nick says, snorting. "Not until my lovely mother finally gets sick of me, anyway."

Even when she does, Nick's pocketed away enough money and things to sell that he'll be financially secure for, well, the rest of his life. Like he said, he's no idiot.

"You know Mitchell," Jacob says and his voice is rather strange. "He's a bastard but he's always hated you. You should be careful anyway, Nick."

"It's Mitchell who should be careful," Nick tells Jacob, smirking as he enters the school, "not me."

While he doesn't deny that Mitchell isn't an idiot enough not to search for him and find where he is, Nick doubts any of Mitchell's crew or even Mitchell himself could take him down. A lone wolf he had been, Nick admits, on the streets but his claws were sharper and wilder than any other. Nobody had dared to mess with him in the city, having heard of his no-nonsense, dangerous reputation and ability to send a person to the dirt, screaming.

If only sleepy Redwood would get the message, too.

*

It's only lunchtime when Nick has received a total of three detentions, been sent out of class five times, and called back after school to write lines, of all things.