Manic: A Dark High School Bully Romance

by Savannah Rose

  Find the prick responsible for her terror and eliminate him.

  13

  “All right, mixing up the routine, never in the same place at the same time twice.” It was finally Saturday, which was only a slight relief. Weekends hadn’t deterred the note-leaver before. Of course, as far as I could tell, the note was complete—which only left two options. Either they would start a fresh round of terror, or they would escalate to action. What that action would be, I couldn’t even begin to imagine. I didn’t want to find out the hard way, either, so I did what Blayze suggested.

  I bounced down the stairs in yoga pants and a strappy tank top and sports bra duo. Mom looked up at me with a smile. “Where are you off to today?”

  “Going to go find a gym,” I told her. “The one down the street seems to be a haven for homeless people. Not that I begrudge them their haven or anything, but I kind of stick out there.”

  Her eyes twinkled knowingly and it struck me that she must think I was going out with Blayze. Dad was sitting at the table drinking his coffee. I really needed her to not say anything about Blayze in front of him. I gave her a very serious look.

  “Seriously. There has to be a decent gym in this town, right?”

  “I’m sure there is,” she said with a grin. “And I’m sure you’ll find it. You always end up finding what you’re looking for.”

  I hugged her tight enough to whisper in her ear. “Please don’t tell him.”

  “Of course not,” she whispered back. “But you should.”

  “Hm? What’s that?”

  Mom turned to dad, her eyes alight. “I was telling her that I haven’t tried the women’s gym across town, but she should.”

  “Mm. Good luck, drive safe. Don’t hang out on any street corners.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Daddy—”

  “I don’t want to have to prosecute my own kid. Love you.”

  “Love you too, even though you’re paranoid,” I said with a giggle. It sounded nervous and I cleared my throat. “See you later!”

  I looked through the window on the front door before I opened it. Paranoid, I told myself. But is it really paranoia if someone is actually after you? I shook my head and stepped through, holding my breath unintentionally. There was nothing on the porch, but it was early still. Nobody lurking in the bushes across the street, nobody behind the trash cans. My heart raced as I opened the garage, as if someone would be waiting to jump out at me from the other side.

  “Maybe talking to Blayze did more harm than good,” I grumbled as I checked my trunk and back seat before sliding behind the wheel. “Now I’m pestered and paranoid.”

  Mocking myself didn’t help the matter as much as I’d hoped. So, still shaking like a leaf, I locked my doors and pulled up every gym in a ten-mile radius on my phone, plotted a route, and hit the road. I wasn’t really intending to go to all of them, maybe not any of them, but I at least wanted to feel like I had a purpose beyond avoiding a stalker. Or a beat down. Or worse.

  I turned the radio up as loud as it would go and pulled into the street. I was exhausted. Emotionally as well as physically—I hadn’t been sleeping well since the whole thing started, and it was finally starting to take a real toll on me.

  I blasted the radio and screamed along to every song, trying to purge the gunk from my soul. There had to be a better way to deal with this, but I couldn’t think of how. The world I came from, the one I was raised in, was so different from this. The things I’d been dealing with would have been unthinkable back home. This problem I was having wasn’t the kind you fixed with a therapist. As for the police, somehow, I was very certain calling them would make the problem worse. It’s not like they could lock up an entire neighborhood and, truth be told, if I called them, it would be the entire fucking neighborhood who was after me for messing with one of their own.

  I drove slowly past the first gym on my route, taking in the building and trying to imagine when its days were better. Obviously, once upon a time, everything in this place was new. Somehow it seemed impossible to imagine the gym with fresh paint and no graffiti. There was a low wall outside of it, surrounding decorative shrubbery which was mostly dead. Within the space reserved for shrubs, half a dozen people were existing; sleeping, reading, drinking, and scribbling on cardboard signs. The light turned red, so I stopped. I sat there long enough to watch the gym manager come out and shoo them all away as if they were pigeons or stray dogs. By the time the light turned green, they were all drifting back to their places again. How it was possible for so many people to fall so far, I hadn’t a clue. It hurt to think that life like this existed. It also hurt to think that there were so many of us so much better off, just…guarded from this reality. Not caring. Moving on with our lives and wealth and our fortune.

  The second gym on my route wasn’t all that better. Sure, there weren’t as many homeless people crowding the front, but there were several women who all looked tired and drawn approaching men as they left the gym. I watched two of them get rejected with a flick of the wrist. One of the women, clearly offended, threw trash at the man who rejected her. A third woman, younger, but not young enough to be a minor, sauntered up to another guy, who was very much interested in what she was offering. Together, they strolled over to his truck. I couldn’t imagine reaching a point in my life where hooking would be acceptable; but then I couldn’t imagine a life without money, either and so I wasn’t exactly in a place to judge. People did what they needed to do in order to survive. If I looked at the way the teachers conducted their classes, the blind eyes they turned to so many things, it wasn’t hard to understand why education wasn’t what was going to be anyone’s ticket out of here. It took so much more than that.

  After driving around for a few hours, passing gym after gym without going in, I decided to stop somewhere for lunch. There was this little Mexican place where Blayze used to take me, back when we were still together. I hadn’t been there since he broke up with me because it hurt my heart to even think of it, but now that we were at least on speaking terms again, it didn’t seem so bad. Besides, it was close and I was hungry.

  I passed three rough-looking men with cardboard signs, one filthy man who screamed at the sky, and a woman playing a beat-up guitar with “God bless” scribbled across its face in sharpie. Now that I’d started noticing these people, I could see them everywhere. I don’t know if it was because I felt so suddenly vulnerable or because I’d been taking a long hard look at my life lately, but I couldn’t stop thinking about what it would take for me to end up like them. Or what it would take for them to end up like me. I couldn’t see the path that would take me to a street corner, but a wildly anxious part of my brain was insisting that it was not only possible, but likely. Take away the money and the luck and pile on years of struggling. People did what they needed to do to survive and even pride eventually took a backseat to survival.

  So lost in thought was I that I didn’t even glance at the crowd of people eating at the outdoor tables until I had already pulled into a spot and put my car in park. I grabbed my purse, took a deep breath, reached for the handle, looked up, and froze. There, at my favorite table under the lilac bush, was Blayze. Across from him, pouting prettily and playing with his fingers, was Sam. A hot, violent hurt rose through my core, balling up and getting caught in my throat. I threw my purse into the seat beside me and turned the car back on. I backed out and drove away before either of them could see me.

  “Damn it, Blayze,” I gasped through the pain. “That’s our place! Ours! Why would you take her there?”

  Fat, hot tears spilled down my face. With everything else that had been going on, I hadn’t really processed the fact that he’d moved on. That it was no longer me who got to cling to his laughs and share his smiles. I couldn’t deal with it a few weeks ago because I didn’t have room for it. All of the other fear and hurt and isolation had blocked my view, had made something as serious as a breakup feel like a bee sting in comparison. But his sudden kindness and the heal
ing steps we’d taken—the way he’d held me while I fell apart—my mother’s assumptions, which I didn’t want to correct—they’d all built an illusion around me, an illusion that somehow Blayze and I could still be okay.

  Sobbing, choking on my sobs, I let my heart break into pieces and poured those pieces like crumbling crackers into the soupy mess of harsh words and accusations he’d left in my memory. My appetite was gone, but my need to work out was suddenly very, very real.

  I drove as far away from the restaurant as I could, bought myself a membership to a place whose name I can’t even recall, and beat the hell out of my body in the one way I’d always been taught was acceptable. I worked out until I couldn’t tell the sweat from the tears, until the ache of my body overwhelmed the ache in my heart.

  14

  “I just don’t understand why you want to talk about her,” Sam pouted, rolling her eyes and flipping my fingertips up off the table. I hated it when she did that and she knew it. It was her little way of asserting dominance. “I’m bored of her. She’s all anybody’s been talking about for weeks.”

  “Well you know why,” I said reasonably.

  She sighed heavily and her voice dripped with sarcasm. “Yeah, yeah. It’s all my fault because I’m the one who told everybody who her dad was. There, you happy?”

  I shook my head slowly, watching her face. “You know as well as I do that it would have blown over in a week, probably less, if that was the only reason.”

  She gave me big eyes. I’d probably call them puppy dog eyes if they held anything remotely close to innocence. Dipping her chin, she wiggled her head in an aggravating “dumb bitch” act. She wasn’t dumb and we both knew it, but she was defensive and that never looked good on her. “Well it obviously didn’t so…” she trailed off with her mouth but made a silent point with her eyes.

  “So,” I said patiently, “They aren’t letting it go because someone keeps drawing them back to it. Throwing new meat on a dead horse to keep the wolves interested.”

  She made a face and rolled her eyes. “Gross. So what, like, the posters and shit?”

  I nodded. “Those, and the fliers, but even they wouldn’t be enough to keep this going for this long.”

  She narrowed her eyes in confusion. “Why not? They’re all in everybody’s face all the time.”

  “So are the anti-bullying posters,” I pointed out.

  Her eyebrows almost disappeared into her teased, jutting bangs. “We have anti-bullying posters?”

  I grinned. “And now you see my point. People go blind to the stuff they see every day. The posters and fliers are still there, but they haven’t changed. People should have gotten used to them by now. The urgency should have worn off. I could see it developing into a habitual cold shoulder, but people—a lot of people—are still actively targeting her. That takes energy and intention. It has to be coming from somewhere.”

  I was trying to lead her to a realization or trap her into confessing, but neither thing seemed to be working. She was acting like this was all new information to her, down to the darkening of her eyes and the softening of her sassy posture. She was thinking and she was thinking hard. But whether she was trying to solve the puzzle or trying to figure out how to wriggle out of the spotlight, I couldn’t quite tell. She took a long drink through her straw, her thoughtful gaze fixed on a dirty corner of the windowsill. Then she pulled out her phone.

  I sat back, annoyed. “Really? Now?”

  “Shut up,” she said absently.

  I raised my hands and let them fall again, huffing out a sigh. “Look, I know you don’t like her. You think I do? Her dad put my brother away. But there’s justice and there’s revenge, and this is definitely way beyond justice.”

  Her thumbs flew furiously over her screen, alternating now and again with her index fingers. I was moving past annoyance and way into anger.

  “See, this is the kind of shit that makes me wonder why I ever got with you in the first damn place. And got back with you. We were right in the middle of a semi-important conversation. I was interested. Hell, I was invested in your opinion. Then you just go off and dive into your goddamn—”

  “Are you ever going to shut the hell up?” She asked calmly, her eyes still fixed on her screen.

  I scowled down at my plate. If I hadn’t been her ride home, I would have left right there. Hell, I was still thinking about it. She was a grown woman, she could find her own way home. Wouldn’t be the first time she’d navigated the bus system on the fly.

  “Here,” she said suddenly, then passed her phone to me. “Look at this.”

  “I swear to god Sam, if this is a meme—”

  “Oh my god you idiot, will you just look?”

  I snatched the phone from her and glared at the screen. Fugwidem—an anonymous social media app which automatically grouped users by zip code and deleted every new post within 48 hours—was open on her screen. As I read the post she’d pulled up, heat rushed up my neck, touching the edge of my vision with red.

  The guilty should die. Arlena Drake is guilty of murder by proxy, stealing a man’s life for her own selfish ends. She’ll come after you too. Protect your secrets. Protect your lives. Protect your families. She’s not worth your freedom; she should die by her own hand. It is our responsibility to make her wish she was dead, every single day, until she kills herself. --Anonymonster

  “Who the hell is this prick,” I growled through my teeth.

  “Don’t know. Nobody does, that’s the whole point of the app. Duh? It’s completely anonymous.”

  “What the hell is the point of that?” I was too pissed to think clearly.

  She pursed her lips at me and cocked her head. “Now who’s being dumb? This is the point, Blayze. The point is to set up drug drops and call out people by name and stake out territory without getting caught. There’s a built-in location scrambler in the app. Police can’t even crack it, and nobody knows who built the damn thing so they can’t even subpoena information. Plus, if they could, the way it works makes it impossible to get old data. Cops would have to talk to a judge, get a warrant, find someone to hand it to, and fight their way through an air-tight system, all in forty-eight hours. There’s no way. Trust me, you can get away with anything on here.”

  As if to prove her point, the page refreshed to show a list of prices for various sexual acts, along with a description of the person who would supposedly be performing those acts. Then there was someone selling a gun, and another asking where they could get a whole lot of lye on short notice.

  I ground my teeth. “Why the hell do you even have this app, Sam?”

  She blinked at me coldly. “You know how many enemies I’ve made? How many drops go down on my street, sometimes right under my window? You gotta know shit to survive around here, Blayze. I thought you knew that.”

  “I do,” I snapped, giving her a dangerous look. “You know I do. But this is next level. This is anarchy spy shit right here. What would happen to you if the cops confiscated your phone for some reason and they found this on there?”

  She shrugged easily. “They couldn’t prove anything. There’s no record of your posts. Plus there’s a self-destruct feature. Wipes all memory of itself off of the phone, doesn’t even leave a ghost behind.” She tossed her hair nonchalantly, irking my nerves as the locks landed softly on her shoulders. “Besides, there’s no law against having a chat app on your phone, so there’s not a damn thing they could do about it, really.”

  I shook my head. “Still risky. So there’s no way to find this guy? Girl? Whatever?” I was still holding her phone, watching the darkest corners of the neighborhood blast their business shamelessly across the screen. I still wasn’t certain about Sam’s involvement in all this, if any.

  She shook her head. “Nope.”

  “Can you respond to the posts?”

  She cocked her head. “Kind of? Not really. You can take a snapshot of the post and post it as a picture and respond to it that way, but it’s kind of a s
hot in the dark if the OP will even see it. There’s no web of interactions the way there are other places. Too easy to trace relationships that way.”

  I frowned as I saw what she was talking about. Someone had posted a screen shot of the prostitute’s post. The caption attempted to haggle the price of the third thing down—a fetish that turned even my stomach, and I was no stranger to the weirder side of internet porn. I kept watching, waiting. Finally, when Sam’s patience was beginning to wear thin and my food was stone cold, I saw what I was looking for.

  Target: Arlena Blayke. Location: Burnaby High. Time: Monday lunch period. Weapon: Food. Destroy the princess’s wardrobe. The guilty deserve to die by their own hand.

  “There it is,” I said darkly, handing the phone back to her. “It’s not random, and it’s not some freak obsession. Someone is organizing this.” And it isn’t you, I added mentally. Those posts go up instantly. I’d had her phone, so it couldn’t have been her. If that wasn’t proof enough, the look on her face when she read it certainly was.

  “What is with that tagline? ‘The guilty deserve to die by their own hand.’ That’s very likely the most pussy-ass-shit I’ve ever seen in my life. Swear to god, kids are soft as hell these days. Can’t just jump the bitch and move on with your life, no, you gotta hide behind your little keyboard and fuck with her head.” Her eyes glittered with fury. She was shaking, actually shaking. I put my hand on hers and she jerked it away.

  “Don’t comfort me, I’m pissed. I’m all for a little street justice. I’m down to snub any bitch who deserves this. But this psychological warfare bullshit grosses me the fuck out.” She ground her teeth, glaring at the phone, then turned her intense glare on me. “Okay, Blayze. Listen, and listen good. I don’t like Arlena. I don’t trust Arlena. I think Arlena is a petty bitch who wouldn’t last a day in my life.”