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18
Four years ago:
Heat washes over my skin.I flinch, smelling the sulfuric scent of a match lighting. Flickering light begins to glow through my tightly closed eyes, slowly dragging me from sleep into reality.
With a bolt of fear, I sit up in bed, gasping at the nightmare.
Except, it’s not a dream. It’s real. My entire dorm room at Hemlock Estates is covered in flame.
I scream, kicking at the blankets and clutching at my chest as I shove myself into the corner between my headboard and the wall. My eyes are wide in terror, darting over the sea of fire before me.
And then, I hear the snickering. Then the giggling. Then my closet door yanks open, and four girls come tumbling out, laughing their heads off.
Stunned and confused, I yank my gaze back to the inferno swallowing my dorm. And then, with the clarity of being awake now, I get it.
My room isn’t on fire. It’s justblanketedin a sea of flickering tea-lights.
“Oh my fucking God!” Janelle from down the hall, obviously the ringleader based on her usual utter distain for me, blurts.
She gleefully dances over the candles towards me, holding a phone up to film my stricken face.
“You jumped like a fucking foot out of that bed! Aayy!!”
She jumps in the air, making the three girls behind her explode into giggles.
Anger, pain, and a stabbing feeling in my heart wrenches my breath away. I stare at them, trying to understand the hate and sneering cruelty in their eyes, but I’ve figured this out long before.
Cora and Naomi hated me because I was the physical embodiment of their lives being uprooted and replanted for the second time. I get it, even more now than I did then. Their mum died, they were living withNoel, for fucks sake. And then I came along trying to be their friend when all they wanted was someone to lash out at.
I get it. Even if it’s shitty beyond belief.
The girls at Hemlock Estates, though, hate me because most of them are just hateful people. It feels cliche to say that “I don’t belong here,” as I’m sure almost everyone in a place like this says.
But I really don’t.
I understand clearly that what I did was bad. I mean I stabbed Noel. But the other girls in here are… different. Most of them, at least.
They all come from money, just like me. But I’m in here with actual, dangerous, mentally unstable people. When I stabbed Noel, it was out of blind anger and feeling like my back was to the wall.
When Janelle filmed herself breaking the neck of her mother’s dog, and then going on to do it five more times to the dogs of friends and neighbors, that’s just plain psychosis. When Aishia, three rooms down from me, was caught after months of slowly poisoning both her parents and her grandmother by lacing their food, that’s a much bigger issue.
It’s not thateveryonehere besides me does deserve to be here, though. There are other cases that break your heart even thinking about.
Raquel, for instance, whose crippling self-esteem issues manifested themselves as a compulsive sexual addiction involving much older men. Victoria hit the end of her rope with her uncle’s sexual abuse and shot him through the groin and then neck. Except, her uncle was a prominent and well-loved—and connected—judge. So guess how that panned out.
The world is a cruel, evil, horrible place at times.
But Janelle and her little gang of mean girls? They’re just psychotic bullies. No one even knows the real reason I’m here. But they hate me and torment me because they get off on it.
With a hiss, I lunge out of bed and grab the small fire extinguisher I keep under my bed. The other girls yelp as I unleash, dousing the room in white foam and snuffing out the candles. I whirl, furious as I cover Janelle in the foam, ruining her phone and making her shriek in fury. The other girls are next, until all four of my tormentors flee the room.
“What on God’s good earth is going on in here?!”
Seconds after my four bullies left my room, Mrs. Deermore, the head residency chaperon of our hall, comes rushing in, looking furious at being woken up in the middle of the night. She stops cold in my doorway, her face aghast.
“Ella!” she blurts in shock, looking around at the devastation—the sea of snuffed out candles and foam all over the place.
“What were you thinking!?”
