Laney
“Laney?”
I glanced up from my seat in the school’s main admin office to see Ms. Flores smiling at me. She directed me into her office and shut the door behind me.
“Take a seat,” she said. “Do you want a drink? Tea, coffee, water?”
I shook my head. “I’m fine, thanks.”
“All right.” She sat behind her desk and tucked her hair behind her shoulders. “I’m glad you made an appointment to see me. I was hoping you would.”
My face turned warm. “Because of what happened on Friday night?” I said in a small voice.
“Not exactly.” She cleared her throat and leaned forward. “The thing is, I’ve been hearing some not-so-nice chatter in the hallways, and I’m concerned. So I have to ask: are you being bullied?”
I nervously twisted my hands on my lap. I shouldn’t be embarrassed to admit I was being bullied, but I was. It felt like I was admitting some sort of shameful weakness.
There was another insidious thought wriggling around in my brain, too, telling me there was a chance I actually deserved it. Like there was something I might’ve done to incur Hunter’s wrath, and I’d just conveniently forgotten all about it.
It was the same when I was assaulted by my piano teacher all those years ago. I spent months afterwards feeling terrible guilt and confusion, wondering if I’d done something to provoke it, even though the logical parts of me knew I was completely innocent.
That was the thing about bullies, rapists, abusers, and other nasty pieces of work out there. They had a way of making you feel like the abuse was somehow your fault. As if things would’ve been different if you’d just done everything the right way. Theirway.
“Laney?” Ms. Flores tilted her head slightly to the side. “This is a safe space. You can tell me anything, and if you don’t want it to leave this room, it won’t.”
I took a deep breath and finally spoke up. “It’s been pretty bad,” I said softly.
She let out a short sigh. “So it’s true.”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry. That’s awful to hear,” she said, brows pulling downward. “Tell me as much as you can, and I’ll see what I can do to help.”
I haltingly went over everything from the start—the blacklist, the cruel pranks, the mean text barrages, the abuse hurled at me in the hallways, the lottery trick at the charity gala, and most recently, the dorm break-in.
I hoped she would believe my side of the story when it came to that incident.
I knew I wasn’t crazy. None of that night was a dream, aside from the actual dream I remembered having. Hunter obviously got in my room to terrorize me, and he wrote all that stuff in my bathroom before I woke up, knowing I’d run in there to escape.
That was why he didn’t enter the bathroom, even though he obviously had keycard access. He just knocked creepily, like a horror film serial killer, because he wanted to scare the absolute shit out of me. He also wanted me to feel trapped in there so that I’d be forced to go out the window and down the trellis to escape. That gave him and his minions time to clean up after themselves, making me look like a crazy liar when my room came up empty after I ran screaming for help.
In hindsight, it was clear how they did it. I was a fool for thinking my keycard simply fell into a different pocket in my bag the other week when I was changing at rowing club.
Hunter was there that day. He must’ve sneaked in and swiped the card from my bag while I was changing. Then he cloned it and returned it to my bag, thinking I’d never even notice it was gone.
I’d done a bit of Googling over the weekend, and I’d discovered that it was surprisingly easy to copy keycards with handheld electronic devices. Anyone could purchase these things online, as long as they had access to the deep web and the right amount of money.
Once they had the device, all they had to do was take a keycard and swipe it through the side. The information stored on the card would copy over to the device, and then it could be loaded onto another card.
Quick. Easy. Barely any chance of getting caught.
I was willing to bet that on Friday night, Hunter ordered a couple of his Princes to hang around outside my door while he terrorized me. As soon as he heard me go out the window, he let them in, and they all went into my bathroom. It would’ve only taken them two or three minutes to wipe the abusive graffiti off the walls together, if it was written with special craft paint for kids that was designed to wipe straight off most surfaces.
After that, they probably spent a few more minutes aiming my hairdryer at the walls to make sure they didn’t look wet from the clean-up job. Then they left my dorm, ran across campus to their cars, and sped away from the academy before I even managed to find the security guard who helped me. Either that or they simply hid in one of their cars until everything died down. That would explain why no one saw anyone suspiciously returning to the lake party around that time. If the remaining party guests were telling the truth, that is.
Even though Sanders didn’t think it was possible for anyone to have pulled off such a cunning attack, I’d spent the last four days going over it again and again, and I knew it wasn’t just possible for Hunter and his friends—it was easy.
It took me a good eight to ten minutes to make it down that trellis, painfully-slow and petrifying as it was, and then it took me another couple of minutes to recover from the fall into the garden below. After that, it took five more minutes to find the security guard.