Aria turned to the newcomer Cecil. He towered over her, being she was small for her age and probably five years younger than him. “Unless you know where we can find about a hundred fluorescent tube lights and at least a thousand circuit breakers, and someone with enough knowledge and technical awareness, not to mention awareness of the layout of the school, to repair them in the pitch-black, we won’t be able to turn the lights on. Didn’t you just hear me say that all the devices that were plugged in got fried? Also, everyone is freaking out right about now. They’ll welcome a sense of order.”

She grinned at Jack’s comment about “fully-fledged badass” and nodded, her pale skin glowing with the light from the phones. “Of course, Jack. I’ll get them there. I won’t let you down.” She turned and melted back into the blackness, using only the dim display on her phone as a light source. She got back to the library to find the kids huddled around a laptop, looking un-amused.

“Okay, everyone. We’re all to assemble in the auditorium and Jack will help sort us out from there. Jack Smith? He’s in charge, and it’s under his authority that I’m telling you this. So shut down the computers, all of them. We need to save as much of their battery life as we can. All of you except Jared, shut down your phones.” When they raised their voices she held her phone in the air, and they quieted. “Just shush, all of you, and follow me to the auditorium. If we’re going to figure out what’s going on you all need to be there, so everyone’s on the same page and so Jack only has to explain things once.” When they hesitated she snapped, “Hurry and shut off the laptops, or they’ll waste all their batteries and then we’ll truly be screwed.”

They followed her orders, finally, and formed into a ragged line behind her. She held her phone up. “Jared, go to the back of the line and hold your phone up.” He obeyed, thankfully.

They’d just gotten into the hallway when the scream started, a loud unending keening wail that sounded like heartbreak and terror personified. Aria stumbled, the blackness suddenly confining, suddenly feeling like she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. Her knees buckled and she fell on the floor gasping, overwhelmed by pain like she had been five years previously.
[i] “You’re a freak, Aria.”
“A stuck-up goody-two-shoes who goes crying to her mommy whenever anything goes wrong.”
“Always thinking you’re better than us.” A kick to the ribs that left a broken one or two.
“Always trying to turn our friends against us.”
“Buttering up the teachers so they fail us.” She was picked up and slammed into a wall.
“You don’t deserve to live.” They started ripping the clothes off of her in the dark. She shied away but they were always there, on every side of her, leaving her no way to escape.
“S-Stop, please! P-p-please leave me alone.”
“Why, [/i]darling[i]? So that you can go back to the principal and report us?”
“Just know that if you do, your reputation will be shredded. No one will trust you ever again as a tutor or as a teacher.” The one behind her put his arms around her now-bare shoulders, running his fingers down her chest.
“J-just l-l-leave me a-alone and I’ll n-n-never bother y-you ag-again.” She was sobbing in terror, clawing at them, trying to fight through them. But to no avail, for she was just a little thing and they were all much bigger and older.
~~~
Hated and feared. Impure, unwanted, unloved. A freak. The words went through her head, every one leaving an emotional gouge on her heart and a very physical one on her forearms. A suck-up. An outcast. Belonging nowhere, always desiring friendships that were impossible to have.
A scream worked its way out of her throat, a broken, truly hopeless sound, and there was a pounding on the door, and then the light burst into the dark room and with it her mother, sobbing, and then a whirlwind, and finally blackness and silence.[/i]

“Aria? Aria. ARIA.” A voice in her ear, a hand on her arm. She hissed as the scars on her forearms twinged in a memory of pain. “Aria, it’s okay. Come on, on your feet.” She placed the voice with the name; Connor. One of the other tutors who must have been on the way to the library when the lights went out.
“Aria, Adam,” he mentioned his twin, “took your group to the auditorium. You had them all freaking out. What happened?”
“It was nothing.” The lie felt heavy on her tongue.
Connor sighed, but didn’t question it. “Do you want to go to the auditorium?”
Aria shook her head. “No, I’ve got to go find Jack. I was supposed to help him figure out what the bleep was going on, but I don’t think that’ll happen now. And I need to walk down there myself… Go join the rest of the kids in the auditorium and have most of them turn off their phones. We need all the battery life we can save.”
“Alright… Are you sure you can find him alright?” Connor asked, clearly nonplussed at the idea of sending an emotionally unstable girl off into the dark school.
“I’ll be fine, Connor, but thank you.” She said, making a shoo-ing motion with her hands. Finally he turned to go back down the  hall.

Aria hurried back in the direction she had come, trying to keep her breathing even against the darkness that threatened to overwhelm her again. “Jack?”

She heard another girl say his name at exactly the same time. Vanessa. That was her name. They’d been in a couple of AP classes together, and had been rather acquaintances throughout the school year. “Hey, Vanessa. Jack, you’ll have two students from the tutoring room unaccounted for, Connor and Adam Anderson, because they were headed to the library for their shift at proctoring and they took my group down to the auditorium. I kind of…” She bit her lip uncertainly. “Freaked out at the scream.” She shook her head to clear the lingering terror. “Also, would it be alright if I took  a couple kids and went to check the offices? I’m thinking I’ll check the front office to see if there is any info, like a scheduled power outage or something. Not that I’m thinking there will be, but… Yeah. Then I’ll go to the computer lab and see how many laptops we have. We don’t have internet, because it was plugged into the main computer system and got fried, but they’ll work as light sources. Vanessa, I was wondering… You did a bit of medical school. If you’d come with me, we could take a tally of what all we have as far as pain killers, antibiotics, antiseptics, and that sort of thing. Then you could go to the auditorium and see if anyone got hurt in the rush of people?” She looked at Jack uncertainly. “If that’s okay with you, anyway, Jack. I don’t want to undermine your authority in any way.”

“As far as me, after we tally medicine, I’d like to inventory our food supplies in the kitchen. After that at some point I’d like a crew of seniors, maybe four or five, to go through all the supply cupboards and everyone’s lockers with me. We’ll need to see if we have running water, and if not we’ll have to get the Craftsmanship seniors and juniors onto it.” She probably wasn’t making sense but she just wanted to get all her ideas out into the air for Jack to hear.

“Oh, and for the elementary and middle school kids. I can maybe take them to the gym and give them something to do, like I may be able to rig something so that they can entertain themselves with finger puppets. They’re probably all freaking out in their classrooms right now. I know most of them will be scared of the dark; I certainly was at that age. In fact, if you send a group down there to get them, I can go find a way to entertain them once we figure out the food and the medicine. I think that’s the most important thing, that and figuring out if our water fountains work and making them work if they don’t.” She bit her lip, trying to figure out if she had forgotten to say anything. “Oh, and flashlights. The computers will work for now but I’d feel a whole lot better if we had half a dozen flashlights or so. And so would the other students, I’m sure.” She looked to Jack for confirmation, hoping he wouldn't take her piles of suggestions the wrong way. She couldn't help that her mind was overactive, or that she tried to blurt out all those thoughts at once. "Sorry, Jack. I'm not trying to tell you what to do, I swear to God. I just... I think too much and if I don't say whatever I'm thinking I go mad trying to keep it all hushed." She rubbed her temples at the dull headache that formed like it always did when she thought too hard.