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[right][b]Interactions:[/b]  Tuyen and Tommy mentioned
[code]A sad bed in a sad room[/code][/right]
[hr]

Vicky had been pretending a lot since the party.

She pretended that she was grateful when her cheerleading coach “temporarily” removed her as captain of the squad so that she could properly mourn the death of Chef, even though she was only pretending to be sad, or rather, she was sad, but she was pretending to be sad for the right reasons. She had pretended that she hadn’t read those ugly text messages her friends had sent about her and she pretended like it didn’t bother her when they had given her the cold shoulder at school, ignored her in the hallway, or moved tables away from her at lunch. She pretended that she didn’t know how gum got on their seats, or why they hadn’t seen it before they sat down, or what kind of psychopath stuck thumbtacks in the gum, like that was so dangerous and not funny at all, “Gosh, were they okay?” she would ask, pretending to care. 

Vicky pretended like she wasn’t ignoring Tuyen. Vicky was fine, everything was fine, if she said she was fine that meant she was fine, except the times that meant Vicky was not fine, which was most of the time, but seriously this time she was actually fine. Seriously, she was. She was fine. She was just busy. Busy with what? Magic stuff. Magic, y’know? That special thing Vicky had and Tuyen didn’t, which Vicky somehow always managed to bring up anytime they ever talked, and then she’d have to pretend how it didn’t make her feel happy, just like she’d have to pretend that she didn’t live to experience that tiny look of disappointment from Tuyen anytime Vicky blew her off. 

The look lasted only a split second but was still always there and Vicky loved it, because people should be upset when Vicky was ignoring them, that was normal, not the other way around, which was how things were now, and it was fucked, and insane, and absolutely not fine and so unfair and stupid and dumb. Then, the look would go away, and everything would be better, because then they’d be just two girls pretending they were fine like they had always been since they entered high school together. Why fix something when they could just pretend that it was working?

Vicky only had to look to her parents to realize that never truly worked, but still, she could pretend. 

She got why her dad had left Diane and understood why he would want nothing to do with his son, but leaving Vicky behind? That was a dick move. She hoped loudly that something terrible had happened to him, and she prayed quietly that he was trying to come back for her but he couldn’t, that it was like Tommy said, even though contradictory she still pretended that the bike ride to the edge of town didn’t take longer and longer each time she did it, just like she pretended that the reason she didn’t cross over wasn’t because she was afraid of what would happen if she did despite knowing the reality check would break her, just as it had broken everyone who had tried leaving Cornell before her to only come stumbling back defeated, depressed, and done with everything. 

Even now, as Vicky laid in her bed, pretending that she hadn’t been there since Friday night, getting up only to go to the bathroom, get a cup of water, or force a shitty microwaved dinner down her throat so that her stomach stopped grumbling, she found herself immensely tired of pretending. So what if it made her a quitter? She was tired. The game of life was so unfair and rigged completely against her. It was stupid to even try. All the adults before her, everyone else in the world before her, they all had a chance to get out, whereas Vicky never, ever, EVER even got her chance, struck out before she got up to bat. 

Bullshit. 

It was utter bullshit. She wrapped herself up tighter inside of her comforter like it was some kind of protective cocoon, staring at the wall of her room, the dim glow of her television the only source of light as a sitcom played, the laugh track laughing at how much of a loser she had become, or that she was, that she had always been, and that she always would be. No boyfriend. No friends other than Tuyen. No future outside of Cornell. She had magic, but all that was good for was keeping people from hearing her crying in the bathroom during school lunch. If she was Tyler, she could teleport away. Again, bullshit. 

Her phone dinged. It had to be Tuyen. Vicky couldn’t. She just couldn’t pretend that she was fine right now. She rolled herself up tighter. She was starting to sweat inside of the comforter and it was starting to stink, but she kept tightening it around her. If she made it tight enough, maybe air wouldn’t come in, and she would pass out, get some rest that was riddled with nightmares, and reemerge, reinvigorated and reinvented, like she had done years ago after her brother’s “incident”, or maybe she wouldn’t get back up, and she’d just live inside of her blanket forever, and that would be okay too, even if that was quitter talk, and she wasn’t a quitter, she wasn’t, she really wasn’t, she was just tired, and did her phone just ding again, seriously, Tuyen, what the fuck, she was so annoying sometimes! 

Correction: everybody was always so annoying and she hated everyone and she wished that they would all just go away and leave her alone and [b]Ding![/b] [i]ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME ANOTHER![/i] Vicky bolted upright with a feral scream, thrashing her arms around violently to free herself from her comforter cocoon, and grabbed her phone. She was about to hurl it across the room when she saw the text was from Tommy, not Tuyen, the latest message asking her to meet at the school cafeteria. Vicky let out a weird noise that she was unaware she could even produce, something between a squeal and a yelp, a squelp, as she threw her phone in a panic as her mind raced and her heart fluttered with excitement or acid reflex.

A boy, a boy, a boy had asked her out! Even if it was a weird boy, even if it was a scary boy who had a knife and might actually be doing this to murder her (that was kind of exciting, too, wasn’t it?) but he also had a car and that car could go fast and if they went fast enough maybe she could escape Cornell and holy shit, when was the last time a boy had texted her? Or anybody that wasn’t Tuyen for that matter? 

But wait, it was super weird that he wanted to meet at the school, right, like whose idea of a first date was breaking into the school, unless they were breaking into the school to setup an act of revenge or something, but Tommy was a lame-oid who’d given her a “with great power comes great responsa-whatever” speech, so it probably wasn’t that, unless he had been paying attention to how horribly everyone had been treating her, and he had to be, what guy wouldn’t, and clearly he realized that she was being treated so unfairly so he wanted to show her the nailbomb he was going to put in Gwen’s locker for her which, frankly, she deserved even if it was a bit too extreme of a gesture, like, wow, Tommy, Vicky got it, if she was a guy she’d kill to be with a girl like her too, but seriously, that was kind of—[b]FUCK HER PHONE![/b]

[color=32cd32]“Oh nooooooo,”[/color] cried Vicky, freeing herself fully from her blanket prison, as she picked up the phone and saw the spiderwebbed cracks on the screen. 

She poked desperately at the screen, but it no longer responded to touch, preventing her from viewing the earlier messages. She hung her head and let out a whine. This was the third screen this year! Ugh! Just another example of how unfair life was for her generation. Things were just designed to break. She hadn’t even thrown it [i]that[/i] hard! Vicky gave the screen a few more hard pokes before throwing the phone again and let out another little scream like a hissing tea kettle. 

[i]Why’d she do it again!?[/i]

She was all discombobulated. This was Tommy’s fault. Finally, he had done it! She had given him her number so long ago, and she was really starting to feel like shit when he hadn’t taken the bait—not, not, not that she was excited that he’d asked her out, ew, no, ew. [i]I mean I guess he’s kinda…[/i]weird! No! Stupid! 

Like, it wasn’t like, she didn’t actually, who was she even trying to justify things to, there was nobody else around but her and her thoughts, still it was just like, if he did snap (even though he was super boring and wasn’t going to snap, but like, imagine if he did), perhaps he wouldn’t stab her if she hung out with him a few times, y’know, as friends, just friends, definitely not a rebound, definitely not, like, dating dating, just hanging out, nothing serious, seriously, nothing serious, she’d totally make that clear.

Vicky frowned as she picked up her phone, the screen so shattered that it looked like nothing more than a thousand dollar kaleidoscope. 

Maybe she’d wait to set hard definitions until after she got Tommy to buy her a new phone. 

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[right][b]Interactions:[/b] Tommy[@Blizz] and a buncha bitches [@Evil Ghost Note]
[code]Cornell High[/code][/right]
[hr]

This was weird, right? 

This was weird, this was definitely, definitely weird. 

Vicky chained her bicycle up to the rack outside of the high school, slipped her sneakers off of her feet, and swapped them for the heels in her bag. For something that was totally just a casual hang sesh, a normal, no-strings attached breaking and entering between a girl and a boy, she was dressed up as if it were a date.  

A hairband kept her hair out of her face, the blonde waves styled and sprayed so that not a single strand was astray. She wore the amount of makeup that a teenage girl thought she should wear, that is to say a bit too much, but not so much that she looked like a clown, or a stripper, or a clown stripping to pay their way through clown college, the standout from the blend being a bold, sparkly eyeshadow the color of toxic waste. She was dressed more like she was sneaking into a club than a cafeteria, her outfit skintight and lowcut, and even the wind had not been enough to blow away the cloud of flowery perfume that hung around her like a thick miasma. 

Crowning all of this was the look of complete confidence on Vicky’s face, a look that scoffed and said,“Yeah, I always look like this and it definitely didn’t take two hours to pull off”, a look that didn’t crack when she scanned the parking lot for Tommy’s car and didn’t see it, a look that wasn’t worried at all even though deep inside Vicky knew that this was really fucking weird and she kind of wanted to throw up and was she nervous? Why was she nervous? She didn’t get nervous. There was just something off, and weird, and wrong, so she grabbed her invisible bat, and maybe she should just get back on her bike and go back to bed and—she saw her reflection in the glass of the front doors of the school, saw the look, and the look told her to stop being such a pussy. 

She reached for the door. It didn’t budge. Locked. Of course it was locked, of course it was, because this was a prank, right, that was it, it was a prank? 

No, no, no, the look told her, that couldn’t be it. He wouldn’t. He fucking wouldn’t. And if he did, she would break the windshield of his car with her bat, and smash the doors in so that they couldn’t open, and slam the trunk so hard that it wouldn’t close, and—she should check around back. The cafeteria was closer to that side, anyway, and if Tommy was breaking in then he was probably smart enough to not use the front door. So she circled the building, checking side entrances and fire exits, each locked door setting off more vows of vandalism, quickly running out of car parts so that she had to move on to body parts, getting to just above the knees when she found the unlocked door. 

See, she told herself he wouldn’t. Nobody would stand her up. Nobody would fucking dare. Especially not a loser like Tommy.

It dawned on her that she hadn’t replied. She couldn’t have, not with her permanently locked and very broken phone, but what if he wasn’t here and somebody else was? Or rather, something? She had seen stuff around town while riding her bike, quick little glimpses, gone when Vicky looked back to do a doubletake but there enough the first time to make her question if it had been human. Or was that just her imagination? Jumping at shadows, seeing monsters. Still, it put her on edge, and her heels, with their clack-clack-clacking, would guarantee that whatever was waiting for her heard Vicky first before she heard them. 

Unless…

[color=32cd32][b][i]“FUCK!"[/i][/b][/color] screamed Vicky, because it was the only word she could think of to scream.

The word did not echo down the empty halls of the high school. Instead, it was caught in a bubble of Yellow Lux and silenced as Vicky created a Shout-Out field around herself. The visual of the field fading while the silence remained, the clicking of her heels becoming a personal metronome that couldn’t escape the bubble as she pressed down the otherwise now deathly quiet hallway. What she knew of her magic was limited, but she knew she had to keep talking to keep the spell going, so she gave herself a little pep speech, the same thing she did every morning when she glared at the ugly bitch in the mirror. 

[color=32cd32][i]“There’s nobody else here, Vicky. Nobody else but Tommy. You’ll get to the cafeteria, and he’ll be there, and it’ll be a little weird, but you can handle it. It’s not a prank, it’s totally not a prank, and hey, even if it was a prank, who cares right? Who’s the joke on? You? No, no no no, no it’s never on you, not unless you let it be on you, and you won’t, because you’re strong, and you’re confident, and you can handle any[sub]thing. And, honestly, you kind of want it to be a prank, right? You want to walk into the cafeteria and Gwen and all her stupid fucking cunt friends are there and they all start laughing at you and they think they won but they haven’t won, no, they haven’t won, in fact, they just lost because that means that they’re just jealous of you, that’s what it is, they’re jealous of you, they’ve always been jealous of you and they should be jealous of you. And, and, and, honestly, when you think of it, it’s kind of sad, because imagine? Imagine being such [sub]a loser that you’d be jealous of someone like you, you stupid fucking bitch, seriously, whatthefuck are you even doing here, Vicky? Oh, oh, look at me, I’m better than everyone, that’s why I’m sneaking into the school cafeteria to meet with a little fucking freak who carries a knife around and is only friends with papermache animals, like, seriously, what is your fucking problem? What the fuck is your fucking problem? You’re talking to yourself. Fucking psycho, bitch ass loser. Why are you even here—wait, where is the cafe—but seriously, why are you even here? You that desperate? You really that desperate? Have some self-fucking-respect, see, see, see, this is why, this is why nobody…”[/sub][/sub][/i][/color]

Vicky trailed off. She noted Tommy’s car through the window, thank God, but then her eyes locked on to the trophy case displayed in the hall outside of the cafeteria—the smaller of the two trophy cases that were in the hall, the bigger and more prominent one dedicated to all the boys teams and all of their middling accomplishments. She always hated that she was featured in the smaller one, but at least there was something. Last month it might as well have been a personal shrine to the girl, with photos of the softball and cheer team, Vicky front and center as she should be, trophies they won, that SHE had won, lined up next to the photos. Posters for the Homecoming Dance (it had been delayed, right?) had been hung up over the team photos. She ripped down the one in front of the cheer squad. The photo was new, featuring the new captain, with Vicky nowhere to be seen. Whatever. It was fine. Cheerleading was stupid anyway.

She ripped down the one in front of the softball team as the Shout-Out field around her faded due to her not speaking.

In the cafeteria, everyone would hear a voice screaming from the hall.

[center][h1][color=32cd32]“FUCKERS!”[/color][/h1][/center]

Vicky’s scream was still echoing through the cafeteria as it was joined by the clack, clack, clacking of her heels. She entered the cafeteria like a hurricane, throwing the crumpled up posters on the ground, her face flushed and full of fury, as she locked eyes on Tommy (how did he beat her to the cafeteria?) and only Tommy, the girls moving tables and chairs lost in the sea of red that was crashing in on her as she continued her tirade. 

[color=32cd32]“The swim team? The fucking swim team? They took down [i]my photo[/i] and replaced it with one of those stupid sluts? It’s not even a school team, Tommy! It’s a community swim team. A. Community. Swim. Team. Like, are you fucking kidding me right now? Who are they teaming up to swim against anyway? Beavers!? Unbelievable. This is un-FUCKING-believable. Ugh, this week, this fucking week. I’m so glad you’re here, Tommy, you have [i]noooooooooooooo[/i] idea what I’ve been…”[/color] Vicky’s eyes widened as she finally acknowledged that they weren’t alone. [color=32cd32]“...through. Oh.”[/color]

Maybe if she was lucky, they just happened to be here and Tommy had invited her to the cafeteria to stab her to death. She glanced between Kari and Zakira and, oh, goddamnit, Lupe was here too? She began to hear sirens wailing inside of her head as her stomach twisted and knotted inside of her instead of mercifully being sliced open by a switchblade and spilled out on the floor. She felt so many things in that moment: embarrassed, confused, disappointed, but terrified most of all. The fear flashed upon her face briefly before she was able to rein it in and slap her game face back on.

Okay, okay, so she had no clue what was going on here, but that was fine, that was totally fine, it wasn't like they knew why she thought she was here anyway. Just be cool. Not hard. She was cooler than all of them still, even if she no longer had the approval of her peers.

[color=32cd32]“Oh. Oh! I’m so glad you three are already here! I was worried that nobody else would show.”[/color] Show? Show for what? Why were they here? There were a bunch of tables and chairs in the middle of the room. Why were there a bunch of tables and chairs? [color=32cd32]“Is this everyone, Tommy? We should start if we wanna finish before it gets dark out.”[/color] 

Of the tables there was one that had been centered with a semicircle of tables forming around it, making it stand out as the most important one. Vicky had to take it. She slipped past Kari, accidentally bumping her in the ribs with her invisible bat without apologizing, wondering why everybody was staring at her like she was some kind of asshole as if the rules of social hierarchy didn’t still apply here. They were at school, and at school you got out of Vicky’s way. They could’ve gone to a Dairy Queen if they wanted equal footing, because it didn’t matter what those stupid little bitches said, at Cornell High she was still the goddamn queen. 

She didn’t take a seat at a chair, instead Vicky ascended the center table and sat upon it like it was a throne. She crossed her legs and silenced any dissenters who wanted to contest her seat of choice with a stare, ensuring that once all the little peons sat down that she would be well more than a head above them. It was clear, likely intentionally, that the way she had positioned herself that Vicky had made herself the most important person in the room, the one that could not be ignored, the one that everyone would see first when they entered and make them immediately know that this was still her cafeteria, this was still her court, and she was in charge of this. 

Whatever [i]this[/i] was. 

Pretending again? Always, always pretending. Exhausting.

[color=32cd32]“Lupe, you always have something to say. Why don’t you get the ball rolling?”[/color] demanded Vicky, stifling a yawn as she pulled at her absolutely battered phone and lobbed it at Tommy. [color=32cd32]"Hey, car guy, you can fix that, right?"[/color]