I felt how the scorching heat of sunrays penetrating through the thin and orange see-through curtains burned my skin. I brushed my eyes using the back of my hands, they were numb. My vision blurred the moment I opened my eyelids. My head spun in nauseating circles.

Then I heard a voice.

Wait. No.

I heard voices.

There were two.

"Daryll, look!"

"Oh, God! Finally, you're awake now!"

"Where. . .Where am I?" I asked, a lump on my throat was holding my voice back from making it out.

"In your room," answered Klyde Arvin, another friend of mine. The strands of blonde curls dangling on his forehead told me it was him.

"What time is it?" I asked again, but this time, facing on the other side of the bed, away from the opened window. "Morning, I assume?" I added.

"Wrong," Daryll swiftly said. "It's already lunch time. In case you wanna know, you've been unconscious for almost twenty-seven hours!"

"There's a lot for us to tell. Also, there's a lot for you to digest." Klyde stood up from the monoblock chair and moved to my bedside table. He filled a glass with water and handed it to me. "I'm not sure if this helps but here, drink first."

After belting down some liquid, I got up and sat on the bed, legs crossed, and tried my best not to move frequently and excessively. I refrained myself from making too much gestures because everytime I attempted to do one, it felt like my brain had been poked with needles.

Stuck in the same position, I asked them to walk me down the memory lane of the past twenty-seven hours that I'd been dead. Partly dead. Or so I thought.

"I'd like to say that it was my fault," Daryll started. "But because I don't normally admit my mistakes, I'd just say that what happened was an accident."

Klyde laughed.

I snorted. "Can you just fast-forward it to the part where I actually passed out? I don't need your explanation or introduction or disclaimer or whatever that is. This isn't an essay writing."

"Essay speaking," Klyde chimed in, "He's not writing it so, technically, it's essay speaking."

"Haven't heard of that. Quite not sure if that's even a thing," I answered back to Klyde, deadpan. "Anyway, continue."

And then the guys told me what really happened before I'd been knocked off of my consciousness.

According to them, this was how it all went:

I was in the corridor. We all were.

Daryll accidentally bumped my arm with his belly.

The key plunged to the floor.

I followed it, crawling past everyone's feet.

Then someone kicked it away.

I followed it, again.

I got it.

I looked up.

There he was. Principal Hemmings. Angry. Upset. Defeated.

A foot skewed straight to my face.

My body surrendered to the floor.

The end. Temporarily.

Of my story, at least.

Afterwards, I fell in a deep twenty-seven hours of slumber.

"Not really helpful." I pouted my lips and looked at the opened window. "Everything's still clear to me except after I'd been blown unconscious. That's the part I want to know more about. Any deets? Like, what happened to Principal Hemmings next? Were the class suspended? How about Jackson Crest? Was he really kicked out of the school?"

"You mean, the irresponsible, scatterbrained scandalmonger, Jackson Crest?" Daryll blurted out in a playful manner.

I rolled my eyes away from the window and into the door. "You're rude," I whispered, unsure if Daryll heard it or not.

"But not rude enough to invalidate a victim of rape and pedophilia by siding a creep and tolerating oppression."

I heaved a heavy sigh. "All right. But have you seen him, though?"

"I did!" Klyde Arvin horned in. "I was late, right? I arrived in the shool about ten o'clock and I saw him sitting on the wooden bench at the mini forest, drinking his usual morning coffee from the vendo."

"Around ten o'clock?" Daryll asked. He looked at me all of a sudden to throw me a question. "Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it the same time Principal Hemmings had his final walk on the hallway?"

"Or the same time I lost my senses?" I asked him back.

A short silence swept the room, followed by a blow of wind coming from the opened window. The curtains danced like ghosts in the morning.

"Dickheads, how would I know?" Klyde narrowed his eyes. "Anyway, I am convinced he got a word about his suspension already, but what did not seem to sum up to me is seeing him unbothered about it. If I was him, I would have been crying a river already instead of sipping coffee inside a campus brimful of people holding a grudge against me."

Daryll added, "That is not shocking at all. Jackson Crest is often labelled as a high-functioning sociopath because he doesn't care about other people's feelings. All he only cared for is his name; the bravest and the youngest investigative journalist the Central Firmcreek University has ever produced. But you know what? I don't get his point of doing that. I don't get why he feels like there is a need for him to snoop into people's lives and announce to the public whatever he finds out about them. I would like to think that he is the villain here."

"Then think of it that way if that's what you want," I answered. "Just don't assume things and conclude right away especially if you are yet to know all the sides of the story."

And that was it. The end of the conversation. After that, we never mentioned Jackson Crest anymore. We never talked about him, his mysterious personality, and the mounting reasons why he deserved to leave the school and have the rest of his life fucked up big time.

Jackson Crest. Oh, poor Jackson Crest.

I never saw him in person. Not even once. I only heard of him on the radio and tv. I only read him on newspaper magazines. Everyone-- except me-- had been hating him constantly since his opinion article about Principal Hemmings blew up in the internet. But despite all this, I still had this little flicker of hope inside me believing that he was a good person.

Maybe he really was a good person.

People would usually pull good people down, and that's what's happening to him now.

He's being pulled down.

Until he'd reach the rock bottom.