"Tonight. You'll get what's coming to you, you freak. I'm going to make sure."
It seemed like seconds, but when she woke up again there was somebody kneeling next to her, and it wasn't Monica or her nail-polish mafia; it was Erica, who had the room at the top of the stairs, four doors down from Claire's. Erica looked pale and strained and scared, and Claire tried to smile, because that was what you did when somebody was scared. She didn't hurt until she moved, and then her head started to throb. There was a red-hot ache near the top, and when she reached up to touch it she felt a hard raised knot. No blood, though. It hurt worse when she probed the spot, but not in an oh-my-God-skull-fracture kind of way, or at least that was what she hoped.
"Are you okay?" Erica asked, waving her hands kind of helplessly in midair as Claire wiggled her way up to a sitting position against the wall. Claire risked a quick look past her up the stairs, then down. The coast looked Monica-clear. Nobody else had come out to see what was up, either - most of them were afraid of getting in trouble, and the rest just flat didn't care.
"Yeah," she said, and managed a shaky laugh. "Guess I tripped."
"You need to go to the quack shack?" Which was college code for the university clinic. "Or, God, an ambulance or whatever?"
"No. No, I'm okay." Wishful thinking, but although basically everything in her body hurt like hell, nothing felt like it had broken into pieces. Claire got to her feet, winced at a sore ankle, and picked up her backpack. Notebooks tumbled out. Erica grabbed a couple and jammed them back in, then ran lightly up a few steps to gather the scattered textbooks. "Damn, Claire, do you really need all this crap? How many classes do you have in a day?"
"Six."
"You're nuts." Erica, good deed done, reverted to the neutrality that all the noncool girls in the dorm had shown her so far. "Better get to the quack shack, seriously. You look like crap."
Claire pasted on a smile and kept it there until Erica got to the top of the stairs and started complaining about the broken lock on her dorm room.
Tonight, Monica had leaned over and whispered. You'll get what's coming to you, you freak. She hadn't called anybody, or tried to find out if Claire had a broken neck. She didn't care if Claire died.
No, that was wrong. The problem was, she did care.
Claire tasted blood. Her lip was split, and it was bleeding. She wiped at the mess with the back of her hand, then the hem of her T-shirt before realizing that it was literally the only thing she had to wear. I need to go down to the basement and get my clothes out of the trash. The idea of going down there - going anywhere alone in this dorm - suddenly terrified her. Monica was waiting. And the other girls wouldn't do anything. Even Erica, who was probably the nicest one in the whole place, was scared to come right out on her side. Hell, Erica got hassled, too, but she was probably just as glad that Claire was there to get the worst of it. This wasn't just as bad as high school, where she'd been treated with contempt and casual cruelty - this was worse, a lot worse. And she didn't even have any friends here. Erica was about the best she'd been able to come up with, and Erica was more concerned about her broken door than Claire's broken head.
She was alone. And if she hadn't been before, she was scared now. Really, really scared. What she'd seen in the Monica Mafia's eyes today wasn't just the usual lazy menace of cool girls versus the geeks; this was worse. She'd gotten casual shoves or pinches before, trips, mean laughter, but this was more like lions coming in for the kill.
They're going to kill me.
She started shakily down the flights of stairs, every step a wincing pain through her body, and remembered that she'd slapped Monica hard enough to leave a mark.
Yeah. They're going to kill me.
If Monica ended up with a bruise on that perfect face, there wasn't any question about it.
Chapter Two
Erica was right about the quack shack being the logical first stop; Claire got her ankle wrapped, an ice pack, and some frowns over the forming bruises. Nothing broken, but she was going to be black-and-blue for days. The doctor asked some pro forma questions about boyfriends and stuff, but since she could truthfully say that no, her boyfriend hadn't beaten her up, he just shrugged and told her to watch her step.
He wrote her an excuse note, too, and gave her some painkillers and told her to go home.
No way was she going back to the dorm. Truth was, she didn't have much in the room - some books, a few photos of home, some posters.... She hadn't even had a chance to call it home, and for whatever reason, she'd never really felt safe there. It had always felt like...a warehouse. A warehouse for kids who were, one way or another, going to leave.
She limped over to the Quad, which was a big empty concrete space with some rickety old benches and picnic tables, cornered on all sides by squat, unappealing buildings that mostly just looked like boxes with windows. Architecture-student projects, probably. She heard a rumor that one of them had fallen down a few years back, but then, she'd also heard rumors about a janitor getting beheaded in the chem lab and haunting the building, and zombies roaming the grounds after dark, so she wasn't putting too much stock in it.
It was midafternoon already, and not a lot of students were hanging around the Quad, with its lack of shade - great design, considering that the weather was still hovering up in the high nineties in September.
Claire picked up a campus paper from the stand, carefully took a seat on the blazing-hot bench, and opened it to the "Housing" section. Dorm rooms were out of the question; Howard Hall and Lansdale Hall were the only two that took in girls under twenty. She wasn't old enough to qualify for the coed dorms. Stupid rules were probably written when girls wore hoopskirts, she thought, and skipped the dorm listings until she got to OFF CAMPUS. Not that she was really allowed to be living off campus; Mom and Dad would have a total freak-out over it, no question. But...if it was between Monica and parental freakage, she'd take the latter. After all, the important thing was to get herself someplace where she felt safe, where she could study.
Right?
She dug in her backpack, found her cell phone, and checked for coverage. It was kind of lame in Morganville, truthfully, out in the middle of the prairie, in the middle of Texas, which was about as middle of nowhere as it was possible to get unless you wanted to go to Mongolia or something. Two bars. Not great, but it'd do.
Claire started dialing numbers. The first person told her that they'd already found somebody, and hung up before she could even say, "Thanks." The second one sounded like a weird old guy. The third one was a weird old lady. The fourth one...well, the fourth one was just plain weird.