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I turned in my seat to look directly at her. “Or, they could’ve not been raping, so fuck that.”

Her eyebrows rose into her bangs. “You do realize the awkwardness of putting the word rape in a sentence and telling it to fuck itself?”

“Yes. I am fully aware. I stand firm by my grammar choices.”

“This is why I love you.”

“And that is why I love you, and not Darius, who is currently kind of stupid.”

Lacey pulled her car into a spot and parked. “He’s a boy. He’s stupider than we are by definition.”

“Totally,” I agreed, and we both got out of her car.

After the weekend I’d had, school felt…surprisingly normal. No one had taken down the prom decorations, so signs urging us toFollow the Yellow Brick Road! were still hoisted overhead. Yay school, yay Redson, yay prom.

Lacey and I went to our lockers, and despite feeling like there was a target on my back, nothing was weird.Yet.

“You want me to walk you?” Lacey asked. Her class was at the opposite end of campus from mine. It didn’t make sense.

“No. I’ll be okay.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah. I won’t be alone all day. You’ll walk me in. You’ll walk me out. I’ll eat lunch in the library, Mrs. Frost won’t let anything happen to me there. I’ll only pee with hall passes during classes, not between.”

“You’ve put a disturbing amount of thought into this.”

“Maybe. But you saw what I did to your mom.” I rubbed sweaty hands against my hips. “I may or may not have accidentally killed a dog doing something similar a mere night before that, so I’m not real worried about them hurting me? But I don’t want to get cornered.”

“Yeah, I don’t know why I’m worried about you, not them.”

“I’ll be fine,” I said with false bravado. “Trust me.”

“Okay,” she said, slowly backing away, facing me in case I changed my mind.

“Really,” I said, and waved her off.

Shortly after that, the attacks began.

I took three steps out into the river of kids going to their first classes, and caught a backpack to my left shoulder. I whirled a little, said I was sorry, and then walked on—and got hit by another. Same shoulder. Then my right shoulder, coming the other direction. “Hey!” I shouted, and Andrew walked on like he didn’t hear me—and then the next one landed, a messenger bag swung at my hip.

This one I danced away from in time, but I looked over, as Andrew stared right on by, like he didn’t see me at all—and I got clocked by another one from behind. I turned. “Excuse you!” I shouted, but it didn’t matter—they were all so careful not to do anything that couldn’t be construed as accidents—just twenty accidents piling up here on the accident line. I hunkered down and started stomping as quickly as I could to history, hoping none of them would hit my face, because if they did I didn’t know what I’d do.

These were people who didn’t know me, who didn’t know anything other than the fact that Mason and Danny had said to gang-up on me—underclassmen I’d never met, upperclassmen who previously would’ve never given me the time of day—it was like I was one of those salmons swimming up a river in Alaska and all the bears had clawsandtasers.

“Just—stop it—okay?” I said aloud between buffets, knowing none of them would, hearing the way the words come out of my mouth, knowing they made me sound weak.

I made it into history, ready to cry, and sat straight down. And just then a text flew in, source anonymous, as always.

Everyone hates you.

I stared blankly at the chalkboard. “Yeah. I know.”

Biology was just down the hall. I slunk there, doing my best to keep a wall to one side. Fifteen hits and a few near-misses later, I slid into the door with a physical sense of relief and then I saw Sarah, sitting at our lab-desk, doing a righteous imitation of my mom.

I couldn’t run out now, she’d seen me, and besides, where could I go to? Mrs. Frost would kick me out if she caught me in the middle of the day.

So I crept over to Sarah and sat down. “Hey.”