Words Unsaid - Degrassi, PG-13

Notes: Occurs between episodes 606, “Eyes Without a Face (Part 2),” and 705, “Death or Glory (Part 1).”

“What do you mean you can see all my internet activity?” she asked incredulously. “But that’s private! It’s wrong!”

Snake raised his eyebrows in mild disbelief. “Actually, it’s school policy. I can’t see exactly what you were doing, but I can see what sites you’ve been visiting and I know those aren’t the sites you should be viewing during my class time.”

“This is so unfair,” she huffed, turning on her heel and stomping out of the room. Snake sighed loudly once she was gone. He hated having to confront students like this, but he didn’t have much of a choice. She’d be understandably pissed for a couple days and that’d be the end of it.

So he thought.

For the week that followed, Darcy was not only pissed, but intolerably so. She made a point to show up to class just seconds before the bell, she begrudgingly answered his questions when he called on her, and she fled from the room as soon as class was over. She chewed gum loudly and pointedly walked out in the middle of his lectures to use the bathroom. Somehow, she knew just how to straddle the line that, when crossed, would have her sent to Ms. Hatzilakos’ office. Snake unfortunately couldn’t reprimand her for being a general pain in his ass.

A full hour after classes ended the following Friday, as he was descending the school’s front steps, she charged up to him and thrust a pile of photos into his hands. “There,” she said simply.

His eyes widened at the images before him: Darcy, posed suggestively in a Catholic school uniform, unbuttoning her blouse, wearing lingerie. He quickly tossed the photos back at her, seething and wildly uncomfortable. “Darcy,” he began, then stopped. He blinked, not knowing how to continue.

“Figured since you were so curious,” she said, feigning nonchalance. “You said you couldn’t see exactly what I was doing, remember? Well now you can. I didn’t want to leave you in suspense.”

Snake folded his arms across his chest and looked down at her, hoping to reassert his authority, or something. But the situation was so foreign to him that he could barely articulate his thoughts.

“What?” she prompted. “Don’t you think I’m sexy?”

“Darcy, I don’t really think that’s the issue here,” he answered irritably.

“Well...” then she stopped, flustered. “Do you, or don’t you?” He opened his mouth to respond; with what, exactly, he had no idea.

“I—” Snake began, swallowing hard. Yes, he was pissed, not to mention completely dumbfounded, but he had been teaching for almost a decade and could sense when a problem was deeper than it appeared on the surface. He forced himself to be professional. “Look, Darcy, we all feel insecure sometimes. It’s part of being human. But exploiting yourself on the internet probably isn’t the best solution.”

She looked away. “I wish you had told me this last week.”

He stared at her blankly, trying to process how that statement could possibly make any sense. “You—hold on. First you yelled at me, horrified, asking how I could possibly dare to monitor your internet activity. Then you made my class a living hell all week with your nasty attitude. Then you purposely wait around after school to show me pictures of yourself practically naked, and then you tell me that I should have warned you last week, before I had any real clue what was going on?” He stopped himself then. “Darcy,” he asked softly, “What’s going on?”

She sat down on the steps. “I took those photos for a guy I met on the internet. He paid me for them.”

Snake inhaled sharply, anticipating where this story was headed. He sat down beside her. “So I guess that he—”

“Yeah,” she cut him off, “he found me.” Quickly, she added, “but nothing happened. My sister called the cops and they took him away, and then they took away my computer for evidence.” She released a shaky sigh. “I’m so stupid.”

Snake turned and looked at her seriously, even though she continued to stare into the distance. “You’re not stupid. You made a mistake.”

A small, disbelieving laugh escaped her. “Right. Have you ever made a mistake that idiotic?”

Snake turned and gazed out at the landscape before them. The leaves were just beginning to show hints of color, symbolizing change and renewal, or maybe just death. It was tragic and beautiful all at once. “I’ve made mistakes far more idiotic than that,” he finally admitted.

“I doubt it,” she said sincerely.

He glanced at her and smiled, surprised to see her smiling back. “Trust me on this one.” He picked up his bag, intending to leave, but found himself compelled to clarify. “There’s a reason I haven’t gone home yet.” Immediately after the words left his mouth he regretting saying them, but now, of course, it was too late to undo.

He braced himself, hoping Darcy would fail to grasp the full implications of his statement. Either she really didn’t, or she chose to spare his pride. “It couldn’t have been that bad,” she offered.

Snake sighed and placed his bag back down, wondering how the focus had suddenly shifted to him. All he could do was sit unmoving and whisper, “It was.”

“Well, I don’t think it matters. You’re smart, you’re funny, and everyone at Degrassi loves you. You’re basically perfect.”

He didn’t want to say it. Partly because he wasn’t about to reveal his deepest secrets to a student, but mostly—and more selfishly—because he didn’t want to distort her image of a perfect Mr. Simpson by revealing the unspoken truths of his infidelities and lies. So he did what he always did and deflected his discomfort by making a joke. “Perfect? Close, but you know, I am losing my hair."

She smiled satisfactorily, as if she had won an argument that was never an argument at all. “That wouldn’t be so noticeable if you let it grow a little!” She startled him then by reaching out and touching his hair with the tips of her fingers. Their eyes interlocked. In that moment he swore the entire world shifted; he was losing balance. He knew he was supposed to push her arm away, but he didn’t. Instead he sat there, stupefied, watching her and wondering what she would do.

Gently, slowly, expertly, almost as if she had rehearsed, she traced her fingers down to his cheek and brought her other palm up to cup his face in both hands. “Darcy,” Snake whispered, wondering if she noticed his irregular breathing, or if she could hear his pounding heart.

She closed her eyes and pressed her lips to his, kissing him chastely at first before crushing into him more urgently, waiting for him to respond. He didn’t move, allowing her to kiss him for another second or two before jolting back to reality and abruptly pulling away.

“Damnit,” she muttered. Darcy never said damn. Before he could stop her, she leapt up and ran inside. Snake waited for less than a minute before following her.

She was sitting in a storage closet, her knees tucked up to her chin. He stood awkwardly in the doorway.

“Darcy, look... you don’t need to feel bad about what happened. It was... I mean... it was barely anything.” She refused to look at him, so he bent down to her eyelevel. “It was just, a thing, a moment, and we were silly enough to get caught up in it. But it doesn’t matter.”

Her response was barely audible. “It matters to me.”

He cocked his head and looked at her more seriously, studying her, as if he were trying to see something that was not quite visible on the surface. He opened his mouth to reiterate what had already been said, but then she glanced up. “It’s not going to repeat itself,” she assured him, almost bitterly.

“Okay.” It was all he could say.

And that was the end of it. They became so good at pretending it never happened that Snake soon came to wonder if it actually did, or if he had hallucinated the entire afternoon.

Yet six months later, with a marriage just as miserable as it had always been, and his deep unwanted secrets harboring themselves deeper, she confessed to him—of all people, him—that she had been raped.

And this time it didn’t seem quite so necessary to keep his feelings hidden, or his words unsaid.