Damon nods. “Yeah, I…But I mean with counseling and stuff…” I can see him faltering, working up in his head how it’s probably not that much of a big deal. It can’t get to that. He needs to feel bad. Guilty. He needs to hate what he’s doing to me, especially in a time where I’m broken. Fuck the fact that none of it is true.
I squeeze a couple more tears out and add some more oomph to my lies. “My grandmother’s dying, Damon. My dad’s not taking it too good and he’s gotten…aggressive with my mom lately,” I whisper that last part, making it seem like I’m ashamed. His jaw just about hits the floor and there’s real, real, real, sorrow swirling with the pity in his eyes now. Hah!
Damon pulls me close, cushioning my head against the brick wall of his chest. “Eva,” he whispers. This used to feel so good. Now, it just…it smells like her. Cheap perfume and impending sin. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s not your fault,” I say. “Honestly, you’re like the only non-stressful thing in my life right now.”
Damon doesn’t answer to that.
Of course he doesn’t.
At least the bastard has a conscience.
Chapter 6
NOW
It was a chemistry class, so the explosion wasn’t completely unexpected. Anytime you combine teenagers, chemicals and open flames, you run the risk of combustion. It wasn’t the explosion, or the shattered glass, or even the rancid smell that made everybody panic. It was the flames. The flames were new. They burned a weird green before settling down into a familiar orange, and the purplish smoke didn’t just stink, it choked and stung your eyes.
“What the hell!?!” Mr. McCoy rushed over with an extinguisher, his normally red face looked pale and his green eyes were rimmed in red. The students who didn’t have the good fortune of wearing goggles at the moment of the explosion were already tearing up and gagging. The whole thing looked like the aftermath of the world’s worst smoke bomb.
The whole thing was so sudden that even I forgot, for a moment, that it was my work station burning. It was my experiment that was ruined. And since I was conveniently heading out of the class with a hall pass, it would all seem like I had planned it that way. After news of my alleged “bomb-making exercise” circulated around school, coupled with the display in drama class, it was no surprise that I’d added a new label to the list of unofficial titles I collected that year. Terrorist.
“She’s seriously trying to kill us,” whined Lauren. One of a small group of girls whose position in the far corner of the room protected her from the worst of the fallout.
I didn’t even get a chance to respond. I looked around the room and saw all of the eyes turn on me as they choked on purple smoke. It didn’t matter what I said at this point. The idea was already circulating, and as soon as the period ended and kids could use their phones again, it would be buzzing around the school.
Anna the terrorist tried to kill everybody in her Chemistry class.
Lauren’s stupid, smug smile told me that if she wasn’t the one who sabotaged me, she was the mastermind behind it. And I’m being very generous when I say mastermind. She was mostly a selfie junkie with a talent for self-promotion, but every once in a while she stumbled on a good idea. I wondered for a moment how she turned my perfect experiment into a smokey nightmare and then decided I didn’t care.
I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of looking hurt or shocked. Instead, I smirked, turned on my heel, and left the room. I had to pee, and she would still be a bitch once my bladder was empty.
I took my time, walking calmly through the hall and waiting for the water to get scalding hot before washing my hands. By the time I got back to class, almost everybody had returned to their own experiments. Almost nobody even looked up when I returned to class. That was typical. One moment they were ready to crucify me for an exploding assignment, and the next they couldn’t care less about my comings and goings. The rumors would still be started, though. That much I was certain of.
“Miss Henderson, can you see me for a moment,” Mr. McCoy beckoned me over to his desk at the front of the room.
“Sure thing.”
He crossed his arms over his chest and looked down at me. His eyes were still red, and his carefully gelled hair seemed a little less immovable than it was when I left.
“Miss Henderson, I know you’ve been having a hard time lately and I know you are a good student despite your recent troubles,” he began. “But, I am responsible for the well-being of all of the students in this classroom. I cannot have anyone failing to follow instructions.”
“I followed the instructions,” I interrupted. “You saw my experiment. I was done.”
“Be that as it may,” he said, and took a deep breath. “I don’t know if you thought it was a great joke to asphyxiate your classmates, but it wasn’t funny at all. Somebody could have been seriously hurt.”
“I agree. The only problem is that I didn’t do anything,” I argued. He looked skeptical but I was beyond caring at that point. “Are we done here?”
Mr. McCoy stood there without saying anything for a long time. He stared down at me and I stared right back at him. I was not going to be intimidated by him. Whether he believed me or not I wouldn’t let him shake me. If I showed weakness now, Lauren and all of the knuckleheads like her would be on my ass like white on rice. McCoy nodded slightly, as if he had made a decision about something and then handed me an incident report form.
“Maybe. Maybe some of your classmates get a kick out of setting you up. I don’t know for sure, but I do know that it was your station that caught fire and I can’t cover that up. I’m not recommending any disciplinary action, but I need to be able to say that we talked about lab safety and that you understand. You do understand, Anna. Don’t you?”
He maintained eye contact as he talked the way you see in movies when a spy is trying to tell a civilian something important without blowing his cover. I glanced quickly at Lauren and her seatmate and he blinked but said nothing.
That was all I needed to hear.
I fumed all day. I wore my headphones through class, a clear sign to my teachers that I would not be participating in any class discussions. I was almost sure that they had all come together and decided that as long as I wasn’t disruptive they would pretty much leave me alone. After all, who wants to antagonize a terrorist?
By the time I got home, I’d made a decision. I wasn’t going to shake this one off the way I did most of the other “pranks” that I’d been subjected to. This time I was going to get even. But, I had to be smart about it. I couldn’t let them know that it was me. I was going to have to forego the pleasure of watching them avoid me for fear of retribution and settle for quietly watching Lauren’s world fall down around her ears, seemingly out of nowhere.
That would be good enough for me.
I had two things working in my favor. The first was that, since I’d become a pariah, I’d had a lot of free time, and cranky teenagers with free time on the internet was a recipe for trouble. You’d be surprised what you can learn on the internet, if you dig deep enough. For example, there were tutorials aplenty on how to crack into your school’s records and change grades or how to write nasty little viruses that did things like make photos disappear from your phone. I’d never had any real reason to try any of those tricks, but I was sure I’d just gotten one.
The second thing was that Lauren wanted one thing above all else; to be envied. She wanted to be the girl you wanted to be. And because of that, she spent a lot of time bragging about her adventures. Whatever she didn’t post on social media was simply common knowledge because Lauren could never keep anything to herself. That meant that we all knew she’d had her phone stolen by some hot guy she hooked up with while in Italy. We all knew she told her dad she lost it to avoid the embarrassment of having to admit that she was robbed by some guy she screwed in an alley. And we all knew she was either too lazy or too dumb to change all of her passwords to something completely original, so they were bas
ically the same, but spelled differently.
And now, the fun part. I’m not saying I’m proud of it. I’m not exactly ashamed either, but I admit this wasn’t the best way to handle my problem. But, I doxxed her.
I got all of her personal contact details, social media accounts, report cards (she wasn’t as dumb as she pretended to be) and anything else I could access online. Of course, I used my VPN to set up an Italian IP address to do it. Then, I posted all of her social media contacts and screenshots from her vapid posts to Chan-Chan, the internet’s clubhouse for every creepy loser whoever sat at his computer in his mother’s basement and ranted about why women don’t like him.
Then I did my homework. Revenge is important, but grades are still a thing.
Two hours later I checked back on my handiwork. As expected, Chan-Chan was on fire and her info had been shared dozens of times on all of the threads you would expect. I smiled to myself. I wasn’t proud of myself, but I felt some relief. I’d finally hit back. After months of remaining silent, I was finally bringing the fight to them and it felt good.
Actually, it felt damned good.
The following day there was something else to titter about in the halls of Donnerville High. I wore my headphones again so people would leave me the hell alone, but also so that I could comfortably eavesdrop without seeming obvious.
There was a lot of talk about Lauren and her older sister being forced to make their social media accounts private. No more updating the whole world about every pretty latte they sipped on. No more posting staged selfies that made her look thinner than she really was. No more bragging and boasting and faking how perfect her life was. The thousands of followers she had would be minimized to people she knew better than the palm of her hand. People her parents could track back. Cousins, best friends, people of those sorts. What used to be thousands of likes would no doubt dwindle into the tens.
The word was that Lauren was really upset, as one could expect. At least one of the creeps who flooded her DMs made threats and was certifiable stalker material. The hounds were circling, and they smelled blood. I admit that I felt a little bad hearing it. I didn’t care if she had to set her social media to private, but I never wanted her to fear for her safety. I didn’t want anything bad to happen to her, which is probably more than she could say for me, but I still liked to think of myself as a decent human being.
By the time I finally saw Lauren, two things were clear. The first was that she was genuinely very upset by the whole thing. The other was that she was LOVING all of the sympathies it was generating.
Her circle of friends sat around her with long faces, clucking their tongues at how “gross” and “mean” those “boys” were being to her. For her part, she created the perfect victim costume. Instead of her heavily accessorized uniform, she wore the standard-issue skirt and shirt with the bland, blue cardigan and brown loafers. Her severe ponytail and barely-there makeup made her look drawn and troubled, but still young and fresh with a little extra blush to her cheeks. She even managed to dig up a handkerchief from somewhere that she pulled out at regular intervals to dab at her eyes whenever she was “forced” to talk about her ordeal.
Watching her take advantage of the stupidity of others made that small guilty place in my mind even smaller. Or at least it did until I ran into Adam in the hall.
Well…I guess, ‘run into’ is the wrong phrase, more like spotted from across the hall. I looked up and he was standing there, staring at me with a nasty sneer on his face. A sneer that made me know that he knew it was me. Even now, after so long without a single word exchanged, he knew me so well. Far too well. It was a shame he was so blind when it really mattered.
Our eyes met and I lifted my chin in defiance. I didn’t owe him anything anymore. Not even an explanation. But, god help me, I was dying to give him one. I was desperate to have him hear me out just once and believe me the way he used to. But, those days were long gone and I wasn’t going to let him see me shed a single tear about it.
In the middle of my next class, I got a text message.
Adam: It was you, wasn’t it?
Me: I have no idea what you’re talking about.
Chapter 7
NOW
After a week of relative quiet, things got weird again. Lauren was talking about possibly switching schools. This time she was really and truly upset. The sympathy she was receiving was warranted. Something bad had really happened and it was mostly my fault.
I know I doxxed her, but I hadn’t released any of her contact information. One of the trolls from Chan-Chan did that as “payback” when Lauren rejected him. He’d posted all of her contact info on Slippery. It had her email address, phone number, home address, and a pretty detailed list of her rates for certain sexual acts, two of which I had to look up. Her dad was furious and they contacted the site to get it taken down. Since she was still a minor, Slippery was pretty quick to act, but not before people got a screenshot of the ad and circulated it.
It was pretty surreal to watch it all unfold. This time she was truly devastated, and not just milking it. No one would talk freely with me around. With the use of my trusty headphones, however, I was able to pick up a lot of the story from other people’s conversations. As long as I looked zoned out enough, they didn’t have a problem blabbing their mouths.
Apparently Lauren’s dad had somebody look into the origin of the Chan-Chan thread, and that pinged back to Italy. All of that lead to her being forced to tell the real story behind her missing phone. Her dad was furious and called her all sorts of names. The kind of names that dads usually beat up other guys for saying.
Now that her address was no longer a secret, the whole family lived in fear that some crazy guy would show up at the doorstep and somebody would get hurt.
“I’ve lived there my whole life,” Lauren whimpered. “My parents just finished paying off the mortgage. Now they might have to start all over again.”
“It won’t be that bad,” a green-haired girl with a nose ring said. “I bet they won’t even have a mortgage, they’ll just roll the money from the sale of this house into the next one.”
“How could I be so stupid!” Lauren wailed, throwing her face into her hands. “What the hell did I do to deserve this?”
I wanted to chuckle, to laugh at her misery, but I couldn’t. What had she done really? She gave me a hard time, pulled a prank that could have gotten me in real trouble, but the truth of the matter was, it didn’t. Now her whole life was being ruined. Not just her life, but her whole family was suffering because of my little prank. I felt like an ass. I really did.
“At least your sister isn’t involved,” said green-haired girl.
“That’s because she went away to college and let herself go. She’s a fat cow now and she barely washes her hair. All she talks about is famine in Africa and human rights in China. She’s boring. Plus, she only had like five hundred followers anyway.” Lauren was adamant to make me feel less and less compassion toward her. The looks of the green-haired girl made me think that she’d take some offense to the way Lauren talked about her own sister. I was wrong.
“Wow, that’s all?” Green-haired girl tittered, and I began to like her much less. Maybe I didn’t have to feel guilty at all. Maybe people like Lauren just never learned their lesson. No matter what happened to them they would always be the same shallow, mean-spirited monsters they were born to be.
As soon as the bell rang, I was the first one out of class, pushing into the hall like nobody’s business. I had a free period next and I wanted to spend it in the library. It was a safe-space for misfits of all types and had been my home away from home even before half the school decided that I was an attempted murderer.
The architects of this school had added the library almost as an afterthought, which meant that getting to it required traveling in the opposite direction of most of the hallway traffic. It was just sort of tacked onto the back end of the school, unlike the gymnasium which was accessible from four d
ifferent directions and had its own parking lot.
Way to prioritize academic achievement!
I was nearly safely behind the stained glass doors that separated the library from the school when I was yanked up off of my feet by my backpack. I kicked out of reflex and connected with flesh before I was promptly dropped.
“What the fuck!”
I spun around and found myself face to face with a very angry Adam Randt. My heart skipped two beats in the space of one.
“What do you want from me, Adam?”
I miss you. Those were the words I wanted to say. It didn’t matter that he was looking at me like I was less than, I missed him. I missed him so much that it hurt.
“Why did you do it?” His face was still twisted in pain, but his voice was deep and steady as if the kick hadn’t hurt him at all.
“Do what?”
He leaned in. Gritted his teeth. “Don’t play dumb. You know what you did. Only you could’ve done it.”
I’m not playing dumb, I just want you to talk to me. Believe me. Trust me, just this once. Even if I am lying.
“I still don’t know what you’re talking about, Adam? Do what? You’re gonna have to be a little clearer here.”
“Lauren!” he barked. “Are you going to make me spell it out for you?”
“I didn’t do anything to Lauren. We never even spoke,” I said.
Adam sneered and shook his head at me. There was so much disappointment and frustration in his eyes that it was almost harder to look at him now. Not that it had been easy ever since the accident.
“A’ight, we’ll play your game. Somebody set those Chan-Chan guys on her ass and now her parents are talking about sending her away to live with some aunt in a shitty little town in Ohio.”
Filthy Pride: Dark Bully Romance Page 4
