"And then Mom died. And Emma - my- fuck it hurts to call her my friend, but she was, we were like you and me - She let me cry on her shoulder, was my rock... Until the summer. She stopped answering my calls. Got rude. And then we went back to school and she has this new friend, Sophia, and she told me, in front of everyone, that my dad had told her dad it was all my fault."
That isn't in the file, except in the bare details. 'Bullied by former friend, involving verbal abuse, theft and violence, escalating to an incident resulting in hospitalization and power debut.' She taps incident with her finger, biting her lip.
"It got bad. This isn't all in here, but it's important, because - it made Skitter. A year of bullying, until I was this... this small, dead thing. Didn't interact, didn't react, didn't try to make new friends. Didn't fight back. Ate my lunches in the bathroom. They found me there too.
"Then Christmas break." The hum of her bees in the yard pitches up a note, but she keeps them from coming to her. "They stuffed my locker - the cabinet the school gave me to keep my books in - with all the trash from the girls' bathroom, after class got out so I didn't know. No one knew, for the three weeks of break, and it just rotted in there. Then the morning we came back, they were waiting for me to find it. Everyone around me laughed, and then Sophia shoved me into it. Slammed the door. Locked me in.
"I still don't know how long I was in there. Felt like hours. I-" She inhales, enough to feel her chest expand, to know she has the space to do so. "I fought. I pushed out as hard as I could. Broke a bone in my wrist doing it, and at some point, the bugs- joined me. I just suddenly could feel these thousands, tens of thousand things in the dark with me. Twitching and moving and eating and wanting, every single one pouring all its senses into me. I didn't know what they were. It was like blinding noise and deafening light and every taste and smell all at once, while I was split into thousands and thousands of awful little bodies."
no subject
That isn't in the file, except in the bare details. 'Bullied by former friend, involving verbal abuse, theft and violence, escalating to an incident resulting in hospitalization and power debut.' She taps incident with her finger, biting her lip.
"It got bad. This isn't all in here, but it's important, because - it made Skitter. A year of bullying, until I was this... this small, dead thing. Didn't interact, didn't react, didn't try to make new friends. Didn't fight back. Ate my lunches in the bathroom. They found me there too.
"Then Christmas break." The hum of her bees in the yard pitches up a note, but she keeps them from coming to her. "They stuffed my locker - the cabinet the school gave me to keep my books in - with all the trash from the girls' bathroom, after class got out so I didn't know. No one knew, for the three weeks of break, and it just rotted in there. Then the morning we came back, they were waiting for me to find it. Everyone around me laughed, and then Sophia shoved me into it. Slammed the door. Locked me in.
"I still don't know how long I was in there. Felt like hours. I-" She inhales, enough to feel her chest expand, to know she has the space to do so. "I fought. I pushed out as hard as I could. Broke a bone in my wrist doing it, and at some point, the bugs- joined me. I just suddenly could feel these thousands, tens of thousand things in the dark with me. Twitching and moving and eating and wanting, every single one pouring all its senses into me. I didn't know what they were. It was like blinding noise and deafening light and every taste and smell all at once, while I was split into thousands and thousands of awful little bodies."