Grand Ridge - Main Building.
Three dimes, two nickels, and six pennies. Five playing cards of assorted suits. A bottle cap and a pop tab. Two pens and four number two pencils. Nine paper clips. Three bobby pins. One dart. All in all, thirty seven small, miscellaneous items peppered the makeshift styrofoam target as if they had been blasted from a cannon. The sixty three other items were strewn about the floor, lost in the mix of chemical bottles, mopheads, dustpans, and discarded trash. Penny wiped the blood from her nose with the back of her arm and glared at the mess around her. She needed to work on her accuracy, but first she needed to work on this disaster scene around her before the janitor came back on Monday to discover what she had done to his closet. She took one step and, oh, the world spun and she spun with it, dropping to her knees as a sharp pain shot through her brain like a ice pick. Okay, okay, first things first, she needed to recuperate as she sniffed and tasted the iron in her mouth. Gross.
It had happened the first time while she was on one of the boats getting the hell away from the unstoppable JuggeReese. She had been gripping tightly onto a splintered piece of door when that entity—monster—whateverthefuck had reached out towards them with one of its black tendrils. Instinctively, Penny had chosen to fight, and without a thought the piece of wood blasted out of her hands and flew through the air like a missile at the living nightmare. If it had hit, if it had done anything, Penny would never know; the tendril had gone for another boat, and she had made it safely to shore with the others, her only thought being
What the actual fuck? repeated ad nauseum.
Since that day she had been trying to replicate the incident. After a prolonged period of trial and error in the woods behind her house, she finally managed to repulse a ground stake from her hand into a tree—when she had a grip on the items they seemed to struggle to move, but when she tossed them it was almost second nature. She didn’t know how, but it was somehow tied to the new tattoo that had been imprinted on her chest since the incident—or at least she assumed, because the more things she pushed away the more her chest tightened and ached, as if her heart was about to explode. It wasn’t nearly as painful as the headaches that came with this unnatural ability, nor was it nearly as terrifying as the occasional bouts of blindness and flood of blood from her nose like they were the elevator doors in the Shining.
Her newfound vision was even harder to control. Seemingly at random, she found herself shifting into the, for lack of a better term, psychic plane...or would it be more accurate to call it a physics plane? The first time it had happened while she was driving she had nearly crashed her car, the trajectory of all of the other vehicles on the road completely overflowing her senses. And then she had discovered what happened to her body when she just let the vision keep running its course. She was lucky it was Billy that had seen her collapse and not her parents, otherwise she would’ve spent the night in a hospital bed instead of shivering, vomiting, and wanting to die in her own room. At least the latter didn’t come with any probing questions.
She coughed into her hand and felt something wet in her palm. She didn’t need to look to know that it was blood. Even with all of this practice, she was still stupidly pushing her limits. She felt like the night her father had made her smoke an entire pack of cigarettes as a lesson to stop smoking (which had the opposite effect) or the one time she had drank a liter and a half of wine in a desperate attempt to attract a boy that definitely wasn’t interested in her. Smearing the blood on her thigh so that it would be hidden by her dress, she stumbled to her feet and then continued stumbling until she collided into the wall, shaking loose a couple of brooms as she steadied herself and tried not to vomit in fear of spitting up a few vital organs with the refuse. She let out a pained, shaky laugh, took a deep breath, and...paused. A few more minutes on the wall. The wall was safe. The wall was a friend.
Why was she even doing this again? She knew it was tied back to the incident, but outside of the fleeting vision on the boat all she remembered from the campsite was a feeling of fear that was heavily outweighed by a feeling of duty. Of course, she knew what had happened at the campsite—it was too fresh for the town to pretend that it had not happened—but the events of it all seemed blurry. Distant. Nearly erased from her mind. A defense mechanism, perhaps? Forgetting traumatic experiences to preserve her sanity. Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe it was the Illuminati, or the Government, or the PTA putting shit in the water so that they could conveniently cover-up the fact that the Sheriff’s son went on a killing spree. Whatever it was, things were foggy, and getting foggier by the days.
Okay, let’s try this again. Stand up, walk to the door, don’t pass out. Penny pushed off of the wall and slowly, slowly, slowly eased her way towards the door. Unlocking it, she slipped the key back into her jacket and stepped tepidly out. The goal was the bathroom—clean the blood off of her face, maybe drown herself in the sink until the splitting headache went away. It took her a second too long to recognize that the throbbing in her head wasn’t entirely her own mental strain but also the sound of a fire alarm. Okay, so bathroom it wasn’t, new goal was outside. Which...happened to be right past the bathroom. Well, that worked out. She guided herself along the wall, feeling a slight hint of strength coming back with each step, and she no longer felt the blood trying to escape from her nose.
Good, these were all good things, everything was going to be okay, everything was going to—“Lawson!”
—
aw, fuck me to the moon and back.
Grand Ridge - Bathroom.
“Norris,” said Penny, hiding her bloodied arm behind her back so that the professor and the security guard with him wouldn’t see the drying blood. “There’s a fire. I figure you’d be smart enough to know that means you should be going outside, not in. Now, if you would excuse me, I very much would like to not be burnt to a crisp.”
“Not so fast Lawson. I’m willing to bet you have something to do with this,” said Professor Norris, grabbing her by the shoulder. “I believe you were supposed to be in my class five minutes ago.”
“Are you fucking serious? It could’ve been bumblebutt over there,” she said, gesturing towards Nathan as he stepped out of the men’s room. Professor Norris gave the boy one quick once over before returning his stone cold glare to Penny. “I’m a little beyond pulling fire alarms to get out of school. I don’t go to your goddamn class because if I wanted to listen to an idiot lecture me about politics for an hour I would go have dinner with my tightwad W.A.S.P. of a father. It’s not like I don’t blow your kindergarten level tests out of the water regardless of whether I show up or not, so—shit!”
With a yank, Norris pulled Penny into the wet bathroom. He made a tutting noise with his mouth and waved his hands out in front of him, motioning to the flooded floors and shattered glass.
“Look at this. Destruction of school property. Triggering a false fire alarm. You’ve always been trouble, but now you’ve gone too far Lawson.”
“Yeah, for some reason I trashed a bathroom as a desperate cry for help. I’m so glad you’re here, Professor Norris. A smart fellow like you Sherlock will definitely be able to set me on the path of the straight and narr-are you an actually this stupid? Even if I did this, which I fucking didn’t, you have no proof, you have no right to hold me, and frankly I can sue you for endangering me because neither of us knew if there was or was not a fire until you dragged me into the women’s bathroom which, oh yeah, I also believe counts as a violation of privacy, you old fucking cre—”
Penny had begun waving her arms around as she protested; Norris, noticing the blood on her arm, snatched her wrist and held it hard.
“Cut yourself on some glass, did you? Looks like we got the proof we need right here. Johnson, make sure Ms. Lawson doesn’t leave. I’m returning to my office to make a few calls.”
Penny glared at Norris as he took his leave, and then she turned her stare to the security guard. “He doesn’t even know your name is Jackson? You aren’t going to let that twat tell you what to do, are you?”
“Listen, Penny, you did go a little far with—”
“No, you listen, Chris,” said Penny, pointing a finger at the security officer and taking a step forward. “I didn’t do this, but if you keep me here so that I can be framed for some freshman’s fucking prank then I’ll be sure to let them all know that you regularly buy pot from my brother which...I’m pretty sure would result in you being terminated. I doubt your wife will fucking let you see your son if you can’t even hold down job, so how about you make up some story about hearing another firecracker go off further down the hall and you fuck right off before I sing like a goddamn bird.”
There was a pregnant pause, and then Jackson gave a sigh of resignation and slowly shuffled away. Smirking, Penny washed the blood off of her hands and thigh and then headed to the door, pausing with her hand on the handle.
What had caused this mess? she wondered, her eyes narrowing as she scanned the room. They narrowed momentarily, focusing on an empty spot a few feet in front of her, and then she shrugged. It wasn’t on her to prove her innocence by finding a guilty party.
“Well, whatever,” she said, opening the and heading out of the bathroom. She was feeling fired up now, discounting the still throbbing headache, and hoped that the baby-faced boy was still hanging around. It’d be nice to continue to build herself back up by playfully tearing someone else down.
Grand Ridge - Outside Main Building.
Rita’s face creased as if she had bitten into something sour when Claire replied to her, but the girl did not break eye contact. She could feel her nails bite into her palms as her hands balled into fists, and felt bitter words push up and try to break through her clenched teeth. She swallowed them and turned her head away. It would be better to just move on from this. It wasn’t quite a reconciliation, but it was probably the best thing Rita could expect to get. She felt her pocket buzz. A message. A distraction. An easy out. She reached back with her left hand, the black lines on her fingers revealing as she touched her back pocket, and then she stopped.
Was she really going to let another person push her around? Was she going to spend college like her years in high school, between eating lunches in the bathroom and crying underneath the stairway? Caelea wasn’t the only person who had stopped to watch; a few of the students filing out of the building had stopped to gawk at the girls. School was Rita’s prison. If she didn’t stand up for herself now, she’d be viewed as a dumpy loser for the rest of her career her.
But, no, that wasn’t the right thing to do. Who cared what others thought of her? Wasn’t it better to forgive and forget? She should just make peace with Claire here and now and drop the whole thing. Nothing good would come from egging the other girl on. Plastering on a tender and fake smile, Rita looked back up at Claire and prepared to say something nice and sweet like the little timid deer that Claire despised her for being. Instead her smile turned vicious, like a rabid animal baring its teeth before it goes for the jugular, and her arms crossed over her chest. Her eyes burned with a quiet fury. Her left hand, tucked under her right armpit, glowed ever so slightly as the words came out of her mouth before she could even think to stop them:
”What gives you the right to always be such a bitch?” She clapped her left hand over her mouth.
"I...I didn't mean..."
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