This is a Prompt for anyone trying to come up with an idea, I’m giving one word, and you can run however you please (just please refrain from adult content)

Today’s word(Drumroll please)… SCAPEGOAT!

If you don’t know what that means, even better! Whatever comes to mind when you read that, write about it!

I’m excited to see what you come up with, especially with a word so interesting!

I’ll likely write my own chapter, but don’t know when, but it’ll be interesting to see how one word can spiral into thousands of worlds.

Thanks to Riot45 for starting this format.

-RedCat

generated by N.O.R.M

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It wasn't me.

I've repeated the phrase so many times it's gone stale in my mouth, like one of those years old pink wafers Mum keeps in the back of the cupboard. I've gotten used to it now: the revulsion, the pity, the utter contempt that washes over people's faces. It used to sting. It doesn't anymore. Like a cut in seawater, it doesn't stop hurting: it just stops stinging. It started in the playground, the stares, the whispers, the one kid, Jenny Hall who threw a half shaken can of Coke at me from the jungle gym. Mum believed me at first, and so did Faye, even if she teased me for it when I got home, but something changed, about two months ago.

I did not push Harry Brown, and I definitely did not make his father kill himself.

I want to tell you what actually happened, because nobody's asked me in two months. Not since the police showed up, and I managed to look miserable, and happen to be young enough that they filed it away under 'accident' and 'court mandated counselling' at the grey old community centre that smelled like mothballs, with that awful old woman who just made me draw crayon pictures like I was a little kid.

It was his fault, or his brother's really, letting him rent that dinghy with a storm incoming, but they said it was mine, because Harry dragged me up to the cliffside and dared me to jump off into the sea with him. I didn't hate him, even though he was always getting us into trouble: the crab racing, the shoplifting from Nisa, the time we set off the fire alarm at St. Bede's because he wanted to see what the sprinklers looked like. He was my mate, he had been for years, but apparently that all changes under the bureaucratic light of the one shoplifting charge he had me take th fall for. Motive, they had called it, even though I remember saying no, and Harry called me a coward and then he jumped anyway.

I didn't push him. I've never pushed anyone in my life, not even Faye when she's winding me up and calling me names.

What I did do was scream. I screamed so hard something tore in my throat and I tasted copper for three days after. I didn't jump in after him because I can't swim past the flags. Everyone at school knows that, and Jenny and her mates would laugh at me from the deep end at the leisure centre while I kicked around in the kiddie pool in my stupid Batman trunks. The rock was just there, because this is Cornwall, and the coast, and rocks are bloody everywhere. Not because I wished it there in some dark corner of myself that I've spent two months excavating for evidence of. I swear.

I think what it was, was that Mrs Brown couldn't do it, couldn't fathom it, the loss of one boy because of the fault of the other, and the loss of her husband, three Browns taken out by one event, and she decided she needed a third boy. That third boy just so happened to be me.