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I sat, shredding Sarah Norman’s diary with my bare hands.

Sniffing, ripping, crying, crumpling, all in the privacy of the girls’ toilet cubicle.

As much as I obliterated the pages with my Hulk-smashing hands and tears dripping onto the pile, it still did little to wipe away the memory of seeing ‘Ellie is a whore’ scrawled in thick black marker across the pages.

For the past few days, the rumour that there had been something written about me in her diary had been circulating.

I’d heard the whispers and the sniggers, pretty hard to ignore when Sarah and her bitch squad always seemed to sit behind me in every class, glaring at the back of my head.

When I had made mention of my little fan club to my parents they had simply sighed and said, “Kids can be cruel.” But being on the actual receiving end of it all, I had my own theory.

Girls (in particular) are just downright utter bitches.

My one and only friend was Tess McGee: the yin to my yang, the lightness to my darkness.

Where I was considered the ‘whore’, Tess was an innocent, virginal wallflower who was smart and shy and just faded into the background.

Right now I would have given anything to be invisible, to simply blend into the background instead of having to vandalise Sarah’s property in an act of revenge.

By the time my rage was complete, I wiped my tear-streaked face and took in the mess before me: what once was a diary now looked like an upended shredding machine scattered before me in a pile of paper and cardboard.

For the momentary satisfaction it served destroying it, I now had a more pressing reality.

“Oh, shit,” I breathed. Maybe I could have gotten away with it, flushed the remnants down the toilet, a plausible solution if I hadn’t have actually snatched the diary out of Sarah’s hands and legged it down the corridor with the entire Year Eleven class being able to witness the theft.

I closed my eyes and thudded my head against the door.

“I’m such an idiot.” I should have donned a black cat suit and snuck in at the dead of night and simply broken into her locker, but no, I had to make a public spectacle of myself, running away as if fire burned under my feet, daring not to look back at the screaming banshees.

I straightened: hold on a second, I was the victim here.

I was the one suffering from an acute case of slandering and character defamation.

I had every right to see what was in her diary; after all, it was about me.

I should have grabbed it and marched straight to the staffroom, handing it in and highlighting the abuse of school equipment.

I had visions of Sarah’s name being called out over the PA, and a little smile curved the corner of my mouth until my eyes dipped to the mess, the evidence that was now destroyed.

“Idiot! Such an idiot!” My vision blurred once more as I buried my hands into my face, thinking of the ghastly repercussions of what I had just done. My despair was short-lived; hearing the sound of footsteps close in, I lifted my head and stilled.

Oh God, they’ve found me.

My eyes widened. I dared not move, but I had to, holding my breath and edging myself away from the exposed gap of the door.

I could climb up onto the toilet seat and lift my legs up, but the shredded debris of the diary was a bit of a dead giveaway, and to scoop and dispose would most certainly expose me.

Instead, I scrunched my knees up, wrapping my arms tightly around my legs, squeezing my eyes closed and inwardly praying they would go away.

I was doing quite well at being as still as a statue; I was pretty impressed with myself …

still and silent. But just as I thought I might have become invisible and the footsteps were moving away in the room, they stopped.

I slowly opened my eyes, my chest heaving as I sat silently, my head cocked, straining to hear.

Had they gone? Oh, thank God they had …

BOOM!

I jumped, stifling a yelp with my hands over my mouth.

BOOM-BOOM!

The footsteps were moving, making their way down the long line of cubicles, kicking each door open like a nightmare.

Kick-BOOM, kick-BOOM, kick-BOOM.

The time to worry about silence was over.

As I scrambled to the toilet, spinning around, bracing each hand on either side of the wall, I stared wide-eyed at the door, waiting for it to burst open at any moment.

The eerie shadow loomed underneath the gap, standing waiting, taunting me.

The room was deathly silent now, save the beating of my heart that was ready to barge its way out of my chest.

This was it; this was what death looked like.

I had never been in a physical fight before, never had my head flushed down the toilet either.

I had made it all the way to Year Eleven relatively unscathed; what a cruel turn of events to nearly be free of the confines of Onslow High only for my time to end so dramatically, and all before my debutante too.

I closed my eyes, trying to keep my shallow breaths even.

Concentrating so hard, but then something broke my train of thought.

The footsteps were moving away, I thought as before, but then my short bout of relief was over.

The footsteps were moving all right, to the next cubicle.

I knew it the second I heard one foot, then the other make that unmistakable indentation of weight-on-top-of-the-plastic-toilet-seat sound.

Oh God, they were coming over the top.

My head whipped back so quickly I swear I pulled a muscle as my eyes, wide with horror, looked on as an elbow hooked over the partition, then another.

Oh God.

Then a face popped over, peering down on me with a blinding smile.

I blinked.

“A-Adam?”

“You look like you’re sitting in a giant rat’s nest,” he said, his smile still broad.

I followed his eyeline to the pile of shredded papers that were clumped around my feet and I laughed, laughed before the tears came, unexpectedly, but then I recognised the feeling. I was so utterly relieved to see Adam.

“O-oh, and there she flows.” Adam’s voice trailed down.

I heard the creaking of the toilet lid, followed by feet jumping to the concrete floor.

A tentative tap sounded on my door this time. “Come on, Parker, open up.”

It took me a minute to wipe my eyes and attempt to pull myself together as if by some strange way I would unlock and open up the door and convince Adam that he was seeing things—I wasn’t crying.

But as soon as I unlatched the door and he pushed it open, the moment I saw those questioning, dark brown eyes I lost it again.

“Hey, hey, hey, what gives, Parker?” Adam glanced behind him before stepping into the cubicle and shutting the door behind him, snipping it closed.

Adam moved forward in the tiny space, his feet scraping amidst the shredded diary.

I thought he would grab me by my arms and pull me to my feet, telling me to snap out of it.

Instead, he crouched down to my level; the very same elbows that rested over the partition moments before were now resting on my knees.

He pushed back one half of the curtain of hair that framed my face and pinned it behind my ear, smiling.

I looked down at him, the sad, yet still humorous curve of his mouth.

I waited for him to soothe me with words of comfort, tell me everything was going to be okay and not to worry.

Instead he breathed out a little laugh and shook his head.

“You’re a bloody lunatic, Ellie Parker.”

I frowned, moving to unravel some toilet paper from the roll beside me as I blew my nose. “Gee, thanks. You really know how to make a girl feel special.”

Leaning on my legs as leverage, with his bony arms he moved to stand.

“Ouch, watch it,” I snapped, rubbing my legs.

Adam sighed. “Come on, let’s get out of here before someone sees us and a whole other set of rumours circulate about us in the girls’ dunny.”

I momentarily flinched at the very mention of the word rumours; it didn’t take much these days for a rumour to circulate about all the supposed boys I had hooked up with at so-and-so’s party.

Sarah Norman and her stupid minions had been the ones to generate most rumours.

I looked down at what once used to resemble her diary, toeing the rubble with a little smirk; somehow I felt less guilty about what I had done now.

Adam watched my foot, a small line of confusion pinching his brow.

“Wow, you really did a number on it.”

I sighed. “I am so suspended; right before exams too. Great.”

The Sarah Norman war had been happening throughout the year, and my less-than-cool-headed reactions to her had me on my very last warning. Vandalising student property was the final nail in my coffin, I knew it, and by the looks of Adam’s grim expression he knew it too.

“You really don’t do anything by half measures, do you?”

I shrugged. “She said I was a whore.”

Adam’s demeanour darkened; as much as he was light-and-carefree Adam who everyone liked, there were moments, usually ‘Ellie-related’ moments, that would cause all that good nature to slip away and be replaced by a burning anger.

It was unnerving to see, but there was also a little piece of me that found it endearing, that caused my heart to tighten a little over Adam’s loyalty.

Through every poignant moment of my life there was Adam.

Schoolyard bullies, broken bones, first jobs, first loves, small-town dramas, heartbreak, summer road trips … it’s always been Adam.

That’s what best friends are for, right?

“Right, you get going. I’ll clean this up,” Adam said, rubbing his hand through his hair.

I laughed. “Right, always cleaning up my mess.”

But when Adam met my eyes, what I thought was just a joke became clear that he was deadly serious.

“Oh, A-Adam, you don’t have to—”