I need to get out of here, it’s not safe, so I start walking up. My bare feet scrape over small sticks and stones and I’m quickly bleeding. The water was freezing and now that I’m practically naked my wet body is shivering violently in the cold air.
The first strike hits me in the lower back. I turn around in shock. I grab my back and my hand comes back covered in sticky liquid. What is that?
The next egg hits me in the front of my thigh. After the first couple, the floodgates open and all the students start pelting me with raw eggs. They hurt when they hit and then burst on impact. I start running to get out of there as quickly as possible.
I run up the hill through the hail of eggs. When I reach the top, there're fewer students and I see that the schoolyard is almost empty. I run past the entire building and straight out to the road in front—and I don’t stop.
I keep running straight to my foster home. People on the street turn to look at me in shock, but I don’t care. I imagine a girl running in her underwear and covered head-to-toe in goo is quite a surprising sight.
By the time I make it home, the bottoms of my feet are completely covered in raw bleeding skin from running on the asphalt. I’m shivering so violently I can barely unlock and open the door.
Thank god the foster mom’s sleazy boyfriend isn’t around to see me, he’d probably think I was trying to seduce him or something. That fucking pervert.
I race up the stairs and into the washroom. I turn on the taps to almost scalding and jump in. As the hot water defrosts my shivering body, I continue shaking, but for a different reason.
Daire and the other three guys had planned all of that. They tricked me into going out to that pond. They told the other students about it so that they would all be waiting for me too. They planned to almost drown me and then make me walk naked through the crowd as the other students threw eggs at me.
Tears start to roll down my cheeks and mingle with the hot water. I thought I was going to die.
I stay there until the water runs cold.
6
When Olivia gets home, I drag her upstairs and ask her what she heard about the incident. She hadn’t been in the crowd—I knew I would have noticed her. She says that she heard I fell in the pond and that Daire tried to help me get out. She heard that I had then stripped my wet clothes off and run up the hill in tears.
My blood runs cold as I listen to her.
“Why did you do that?” she asks incredulously.
I was planning to go to the cops and report them, but as Olivia talks I realize just how much power the Vicious Crew have over the school. They’d gotten a quarter of the student body, the ones that had been at the pond, to lie for them about what happened. Even if I went to the authorities, I had no proof, and no one would testify against them—even if someone wanted to help me they’d be too scared for their own safety.
“Oh, and some girl gave me your backpack. I guess you forgot it when you ran off?” she adds and hands it to me. Through pure luck, everything is still inside it and undamaged.
I tell Olivia what actually happened, and she’s annoyingly skeptical.
“They’ve always been friendly to me,” she says.
“I know, but please believe me. I wouldn’t lie about this. Just promise me you’ll stay away from them. Promise!”
I grab her arms and I must look so desperate and crazy that she can’t help but reluctantly agree to avoid them. I’m relieved, but know that we are still in great danger.
I take the next day off school. I don’t care if I’m reported to the foster care system for ditching—and it turns out that I don’t need to worry, the school staff are too busy dealing with stabbings and drugs to bother calling my house.
After that, I do everything in my power to avoid Daire or any of his gang. I sneak around the school like a fugitive. I walk into my classrooms right as class starts, and dart out the second it ends. In between, I hide in the creepy basement. No one ever goes there because the students are so far gone they openly smoke in the halls—they don’t need a secret place to hide like normal kids at normal schools where the staff have at least a little bit of control.
At home I hide in my room with the door locked and barricaded, and luckily for me Olivia—for once—does what I ask and avoids Brax and any of the guys who come over. I wear the plainest clothes I have to avoid drawing attention to myself—and it seems to work. Before, all the girls were trying to fight me and all the guys would say vulgar things to me as I walked by, but now I became invisible. Everyone just ignored my existence, and it was a massive improvement.
I continue in this miserable existence for several days, just scurrying around like a frightened mouse. It’s so different from how I used to be. I used to be the girl who would stand up for herself, the girl who didn’t take any shit—but yet here I was, hiding in an abandoned janitor’s closet, eating a protein bar I bought from a convenience store.
I sigh and look at my phone. Class starts in a couple minutes so I pack up and head upstairs. I walk through the halls, my eyes darting around, taking stock of everything that’s happening so I won’t be caught off guard. I catch the tail-end of a conversation as two girls rush past.
“—Olivia is volunteering for the pact… ”
My ears perk up and I look at where they are headed. They are rushing to a side door that leads out to the courtyard.
It’s probably not my Olivia, I reason with myself. Olivia is a common name—even though I haven’t met any other Olivias at this school. I should probably just head to class—but I can’t stop my feet from leading me to the side door.
I look out through the dirty cracked glass and see a large crowd of students. There are a couple of guys in the center. I recognize them as Seth, the guy with the green hair who harassed me the first day of school, and the others are the crazy-looking guys he always hangs out with. At one point in the halls I overheard someone say that they are called the “East Marters”, one of the gangs of Marter High.
I watch for a few seconds but nothing much seems to be happening. I’m about to turn away when suddenly I see my sister walk out of the crowd to stand with the East Marters and my heart drops.
“What the fuck?” I mumble as I throw open the door and run over.
I’m too far away so I can’t hear what’s happening. In desperation, I turn to the girl next to me and ask what’s going on. She looks and smirks when she recognizes who I am. She knows that’s my sister.
“She’s volunteering for the ‘Threesome Pact’ with the East Marters.”
“What the fuck is that?” It doesn’t sound good at all and my heart sinks even lower.
“Every semester they choose a new girl for the Pact. It means that she’ll have to do three things that they ask her to—and they can be any three things, and she can’t refuse or she’ll be a social outcast and tortured by everyone else for the rest of the year.”
“But what does she get out of it??”
“She’s now property of the East Marters so she’s protected and popular. It’s like a huge honor. Even after your semester is over you’re still popular. Being an ex-East Marters’ chick is still a big deal.”
“It’s sounds awful.” I look in horror at Olivia standing in the center of the crowd. She’s beaming, but I know her, I can tell that she’s scared.