The First Time Evan Burned Sophie
burns me is in the dining hall at lunch. I’m sitting at my usual table by one of the windows, eating with a book propped against my tray. Evan doesn’t always join me for lunch—I never expect him to. But today, he stops at my table with an apple in hand. I look up, and my smile freezes on my face.
At his sides, Luca, Iakov, Séverin and Zachary, the most popular boys in the year, stand staring down at me. Their faces are closed and mocking—so is Evan’s.
I frown at them. “What do you want?”
“Nothing from you,” Evan says, the aggression in his voice startling me.
“Just having a look at Evan’s new admirer,” Luca says with a leer.
“What are you talking about?”
It’s like being awake in a nightmare, but a really realistic nightmare, where everything feels real but something is off.
I’m on the backfoot, underprepared and disoriented. My heart is beating fast, like I’m in danger. If I could follow my instincts, I would grab my tray, throw it at the whole group of them and run away. But they have formed an arch around me; if I wanted to walk away, I’d have to push past them, something I don’t want to do unless my hand is forced.
“Do you really think a girl like you stands a chance with one of us?” Luca continues. “Have you seen yourself?”
“I know what a mirror is, yes,” I answer. “Don’t you have anything better to do than tell me stuff I already know?”
“If you already know how disgusting you are, then what made you think it would be a good idea to try to get with Evan?”
I look at Evan, but his grin hides any true expression on his face. It’s impossible to tell what he’s feeling or what he’s thinking in this moment. But it’s clear that something happened. The Evan standing in front of me isn’t the Evan from English class. The Evan who sat next to me with his chin propped on his fist as he watched me playing chess. The Evan who gave me a tiny bear necklace for Christmas and hugged me outside the assembly hall.
That Evan is nowhere to be seen—I’ll never see him again after that.
“I’m not trying to get with Evan,” I snap. “So you can all go away and leave me alone.”
But by then, the damage isn’t done—it’s growing. A crowd assembles, not just Year 9s but Year 10s and Year 11s, too. Girls who have always found reason to look down on me are now gleefully observing the scene unfolding in front of their eyes.
And no matter what I say or reply, I’ve already lost.
I lost the moment I stepped foot in Spearcrest.
Voices rise, become faceless.
“She’s just been clinging on to Evan—so desperate.”
“Her parents are cleaners. She only got a place here because they begged the school to let her.”
“I’m so embarrassed for her.”
“I hear she has a crush on Evan—I’d be so offended if I was him.”
“Have you seen those gross spots on her face? Does she even wash?”
The voices all melt into one, anonymous, amorphous mass. But one voice stands out; the voice I know best.
“Yeah, at first I just felt sorry, because her parents are so poor and literally nobody likes her, but it’s like she’s obsessed or something, she’s always hanging about and trying it on. It’s just awkward—it’s not like I’m going to date her just out of pity, maybe that’s what she hopes. I guess she’ll just go for anybody who gives her attention.”
“Maybe you’ve been too nice to her, Ev,” Luca says with a cocky little smirk. “Poor people can’t tell the difference between a gift and a handout.”
But my eyes are fixed on Evan’s. Fury swells in my throat, my eyes are burning.
“I don’t want to be your girlfriend,” I say loudly, loud enough for everybody to hear. “I don’t want to be your girlfriend, or even your friend, and I definitely don’t want your handouts.” I pull on the necklace he gave me, snapping the clasp, and drop it into my plate of spaghetti. “So you can take it back.”
An expression flashes across Evan’s face, fast as lightning. A strange, unreadable expression, almost feral. Then it’s gone, and there’s nothing left but the amused grin, the cocky confidence.
“Nah, I don’t want it back. Keep it, Sutton.”
And then, with the quick strength of a school athlete, he flips my tray at me. I don’t even have time to react before spaghetti and apple juice fly at my face. Laughter explodes through the dining hall. I sit, frozen, sauce smearing my face, my white shirt. Pasta dangles in my hair, on my shoulders. Apple juice drips down my cheeks like tears.
But I’m not crying.
They can take everything from me. But not my tears. For as long as I’m here, I’ll never give them this. I’ll never let them see me cry.
It doesn’t take long for everybody to grow bored with the spectacle. Evan and his friends walk away without another backward glance. The crowd disperses. I sit, and don’t move until after the bell rings.
That was the first time Evan burned me, but not the last.
He burned me many more times after that, for years. Countless trays flipped, countless plates of food thrown at my face. Countless uniforms ruined. Notebooks wrecked, pens snapped, handfuls of dirt shoved into my backpack, my pockets, down my back. Hurtful words, unbearable humiliations, litanies of insults and mockeries.
But nothing hurt quite as much as that first burn. That scar still serves me as a reminder of who Evan truly is, and exactly what he’s capable of.
Evan
attention on making coffee: pulling out the filter, scooping in the grounds, evening them out—exactly how Dad taught me. Winding Sophie up is intoxicating, but I’m starting to realise the danger of it.
Flirting with girls is fun. It’s light-hearted and playful, like playing a game you can’t lose.
But what I’m doing with Sophie is different. It could never be just flirting, because handling Sophie will never be like handling just any girl. Sophie is something else, and so flirting has to be something else, too.
So this isn’t flirting. Whatever this is, it’s reckless, heavy and intense. Not like playing a game, but like sparring. It’s dangerous and wild, and it makes my blood run hot in the same way rugby used to. It makes my skin hot and my cock hard.
Sophie might think I’m stupid, but I know what I’m doing. Flirting with girls is one thing: I never have to worry about the consequences of that. But flirting with Sophie is like playing with fire, except she’s not the one who would end up in flames.
Because nothing ever gets to Sophie.
I should know. I’ve done plenty over the years to test her armour. I’ve never seen so much as a crack or a chip. Her armour is made of the most impenetrable ice. Sophie could walk through an inferno and it would never melt.
When the coffee is ready, I pour two cups and return to the kitchen island. She’s sitting with her chin in her hand, absent-mindedly doodling on a pale yellow sticky note. I slide one of the cups of coffee over to her and she gives me a wary look.
“It’s just coffee,” I say. “I know you need it.”
“Because you’re such hard work?” she asks with a pointed look.
I shake my head. “No. Because you look fucking exhausted all the time.”
She looks at me, blinking slowly. I can’t tell what she’s thinking, but she reaches for the cup and curls her fingers against the grey ceramic.
“Thanks,” she says eventually.
I nod and without ceremony, she resumes talking me through the key themes of Hamlet. Even though Shakespeare bores me to tears, there’s something mesmerising about listening to her talk about it.
Part of it is Sophie’s voice.
She has this very dry, kind of deep voice, like she has a sore throat all the time. It scratches against me as if there’s an itch so deep inside me I don’t even notice until her voice reaches it.
And another part of it is the way Sophie speaks about this shit. Normally, Sophie is curt and non-committal when she speaks, as if she wants to contribute to conversations as little as possible. But when she’s talking about stuff like the morality of revenge, the deaths of women and metafiction, she speaks long and eloquently.
She’s so interested in what she’s saying I can’t help but be interested too. When she reads aloud chunks of monologues like they are as beautiful as music to her, I want to hear what she’s hearing, feel what she’s feeling.
Shakespeare’s words, in her mouth, take on a whole new meaning. They sound heavy with implications, hot with desire, full of hidden emotions.
“And I, of ladies most deject and wretched,” she reads, her long eyelashes fanning on her cheeks as she looks down at her book, “that sucked the honey of his music vows—”
A sudden rush of blood straight to my cock startles me. This isn’t the first time her voice has made me hard—but it’s the first time Shakespeare’s words have. I sit up, the trance of her words now broken.
“Wait, what?” I interrupt, leaning forward. “That sounds dirty.”
She stops and raises a stony look to my face. “It’s not dirty. She’s saying that she’s miserable for having listened to all his sweet words and promises. She’s literally calling herself a sucker for falling for his bullshit.”
“Bit harsh,” I say. “Maybe it wasn’t bullshit. Maybe he meant what he said at the time.”
“How could he?” Sophie says. “You can’t take something back if you truly mean it.”
I tilt my head and watch her closely. She doesn’t give anything away, just watches me back with the same mild irritation as always. But this is interesting insight into the way Sophie thinks, the way she feels.
“You can say or feel something true, and then it stops being true,” I try to explain. “Doesn’t make it a lie, because it was true at the time.”
She scoffs. “Things are either true, or they’re not. If something was true and stops being true, then it’s no longer true.”
“I’m starting to understand why you have so few friends.”
For once, I don’t speak out of the urge to hurt or irritate her. It’s a genuine observation, a sudden realisation. If she’s offended by it, she doesn’t show it.
“Nothing wrong with putting value in sincerity,” she says icily.
“No, but the bar you set for sincerity sounds like it’s pretty damn high.”
“It didn’t use to be so high,” she says, “but all sorts of shit managed to get through.”
She’s smiling, something she rarely does, but this isn’t a true smile. It’s a curling at the corner of her lips that makes her look both sad and cruel all at once.
She’s talking about me.
This is interesting. I thought she had all but forgotten our fleeting friendship in Year 9, that she had left it in the past with her spotty cheeks and awkward feet. But it seems like that’s not quite the case.
I see this for what it is: the little loose thread I’ve been looking for.
Something I can pull on to make the tight knot that is Sophie come undone. Sophie is the kind of knot you couldn’t even cut through with the knife, she is wound that tightly, completely closed in on herself. But this is something to hold on to, something to pull on.
Except that today is not the day, now is not the time. This is something I’m going to have to approach carefully, tactically. Now there is a new battlefield on which to meet Sophie, I’m not going to show up unprepared.
“Looks like you’ve learned from your mistakes, then,” I say lightly, watching her. “Unlike our poor boy Hamlet.”
“You can’t learn from your mistakes when there are no consequences for them,” she retorts.
This time, the insult is even more thinly veiled. But right now I feel no anger, no resentment. I kind of enjoy this sudden act of aggression. From Sophie, it’s almost intimate. Like she’s stabbing me but has to be in my arms to do it.
“Let me make sure I write that down,” I say sweetly. “It would make a killer line for an essay. Mr Houghton would be very impressed.”
“He’d probably be even more impressed if you wrote down something he actually taught you instead.”
“I’ll pass, thanks.” I finish writing my note and look back up at her. “I’d much rather listen to you go on about Shakespeare.”
“Yes, because I’m much better than an Oxford-educated, professionally-trained teacher.”
I give her a slow smile. “Mr Houghton’s boring. You make Hamlet sexy.”
Her cheeks go slightly pink, but she still speaks in her cool, dry tone. “What could you possibly find sexy about madness and suicide?”
“I dunno, Sutton. Listening to you talking about sucking honey definitely made me a bit hard.”
Finally, the facade cracks.
Her mouth falls open. A dark, uneven flush spreads across her cheeks.
“And on that note,” she says, standing up and grabbing her coat off the stool next to hers. “Your two hours are up and I’m off.”
“So soon, Sutton?” I watch her with amusement as she wraps her scarf around her throat and buttons her coat all the way up. I glance at her clothes, letting myself imagine idly pulling them off her. “Aren’t you going to take the taxi back to school with me?”
“I’d rather walk,” she says, shouldering her backpack. “I need the fresh air.”
“So do I!” I exclaim, springing to my feet. I’m not lying, though I need fresh air for probably very different reasons to her. But now she’s going, I can’t bring myself to let her go—I want more. “I’ll walk with you.”
“I don’t think so.” She grabs the thickest booklet off the kitchen island and throws it over to me. “You need to finish working through this before you forget all the stuff I told you today. Don’t waste my time.”
“Fuck!” I glare at the booklet. “Can’t I do it later?”
“You know you won’t. Do it, or I won’t show up next week.”
I sigh and slump back down onto my stool. “For fuck’s sake, fine! You’re worse than Mr Houghton.”
“By all means, go back to him. I won’t stop you.” She gives me a brief wave. “Don’t bother standing, I’ll see myself out.”
She strides out of the kitchen and I shout after her, “Is it my punishment for saying you made me hard?”
The only reply I get is the sound of the front door slamming shut.
I’m still horny after she’s left and have no choice but to stroke myself to the mental image of Sophie sucking honey off my cock.
