Bully Me: Class of 2020

by Shantel Tessier

  It’s a bit macabre, giving out insect corpses as gifts, but Crescent Prep has been doing it for years, since long before Mama Jane even attended. I’ll admit, dressed up and mounted as they are, some of them surrounded by crystals and beads and even precious gemstones, they’re beautiful.

  “Lucille Perdue,” one of the masked students calls out, their mask dripping with leaves and bits of dangling vine. Luke rolls her eyes, but raises a hand anyway, and the student places a red velvet cupcake, complete with jewel-toned ruby frosting on the desk. Beside it, she sets down a pair of red jewelry boxes. Luke cocks a brow at me, and I grin.

  “Only one of those things is from me,” I say as she carefully lifts the lid on one of the jewelry boxes. Inside, there’s a bracelet made from black tourmaline, a crystal that’s supposed to protect the wearer from negative energy. Yeah, we’re a little weird over here in Devil Springs, Arkansas, population two thousand and seventy-six. “Just be careful with it; black tourmaline breaks easily.”

  “Oh, I love it,” Luke croons, slipping the bracelet onto her thin wrist. “But if you sent me this, then who’s the cupcake from?” She pulls the little napkin out from underneath the plastic container and smiles at the petite, feminine handwriting. “April.” Luke passes the napkin over, so I can read the note. When I was desperate and alone, only your smile shone through the crowd.

  “Aw,” I murmur, feeling a genuine smile tilt my own lips as another student volunteer calls out my name—Karma Sartain—and gives me a cupcake of my own. So glad we’re having a baby together. Chicks over dicks. Love, April. I chuckle and tuck the napkin into my pocket for safekeeping as another set of jewelry boxes is set on my desk, and I quirk a brow of my own.

  “Again, I only sent one of those things,” Luke says, opening her second jewelry box and pulling out a beautiful brooch made from the shiny green body of an emerald ash borer. She frowns and checks the card, face flushing as her dark eyes flick up to find the back of Sonja’s head. Luke reaches up to ruffle her anime-blue hair and then glances toward the row of windows on our left. I decide not to press, but if one of the Knight Crew sent a present, then we’re in for a really fucked-up Devils’ Day Party.

  I open my own boxes up, the first one a present from Luke: it’s also a black tourmaline bracelet. Laughter escapes in a rush as she turns back to look at me, and I hold up my matching bracelet.

  “We’re so similar it’s scary.”

  “Basically the same person,” Luke agrees, taking the bracelet from my hand and cocking a brow. “May I?” She slides the bracelet onto my arm as we grin at each other. “I sent one to April, too. You?”

  “Yep. It all works out though, right? One bracelet to protect her from negative energy tonight, and one to protect the baby.” I wink and pop open the top on the second box, frowning as I peer down at the butterfly inside. It’s black, with orange-tipped wings, and it’s most definitely not on the list of invasive species that the Devils’ Day committee uses to make their jewelry and shadow boxes with.

  “This is a Diana fritillary,” I tell Luke, holding out the box for her inspection. “Not only is it the state butterfly of Arkansas, but it’s endangered.” My teeth clench as I look down at the necklace, the butterfly encased in what looks like amber, its wings speckled with red that could very well be blood. Or paint. It’s probably paint, right? “Who would send me this?” I check the box for a note, but there’s nothing. Pushing up from my chair, I head out the door on the heels of the committee.

  “Karma!” Luke calls out, but it’s too late. The door closes behind me, and I grab the shoulder of the girl with the leaf mask. She turns back to look at me with a raised brow. Pretty sure she’s the heiress of some big hotel chain or something. For the life of me, I can’t remember her name. Unsurprising, considering nobody in this school has ever bothered to remember mine.

  “Who sent this?” I ask, showing her the butterfly necklace, still carefully tucked inside the red jewelry box. The girl frowns down at it before lifting ice-blue eyes to mine. “And how did this end up in the committee’s Devils’ Day sale? Culling invasive species to make jewelry, I get, but this is fucked.”

  “We never sold any of these,” the girl says, taking the box from me and then lifting her eyes accusingly to mine. “Mr. Aldrich would never allow it.” She tries to hand the box back, but for some reason, I’m hesitant to take it. The butterfly’s still form stares accusingly up at both of us. Mr. Aldrich is one of the biology teachers on campus, with doctorates in entomology and environmental science. He most definitely wouldn’t have allowed his students to kill and display an endangered species. “Is this a Devils’ Day trick? Because I’m not in the mood.”

  The girl drops the box when I refuse to take it, and the amber casing around the butterfly shatters to pieces as she tosses raven hair over her shoulder. I drop to my knees, scrambling to pick it up as I stare at the torn wings in horror. The damn thing was already dead; the least we could’ve done was respect it.

  “I’ll let Mr. Aldrich know about this,” she says with a smirk, kicking the rest of the pieces aside with her shiny shoe and then leaning down to get in my face. “And don’t think he won’t roast you for this. It might just be a stupid bug, but he takes this shit seriously. Here’s to hoping you get expelled, Trailer Park.” The girl moves down the hall, the long vines on her mask trailing behind her.

  I clench my jaw as Luke steps out and bends down to help me clean up, my own hands shaking with rage. I shouldn’t be surprised at this sort of behavior. After all, I’ve lived with it for three years now. You’re almost done with this shitty school, I tell myself as Luke and I gather the pieces together and tuck them back in the box. The necklace is ruined, but I suppose it doesn’t matter. I don’t even know who sent it to me.

  “The Knight Crew?” Luke suggests, before I can even bring it up, lifting my gray eyes to hers. “That’d be just like them, to find an endangered animal to kill for fun. They probably kick puppies on the weekend, just for the laughs.”

  “If it was the Knight Crew, they’d send a note,” I say confidently, tucking the box into my back pocket. “They like their cruelty to be acknowledged. It’s always better with an audience.” Except for that one time, I add, but so only I can hear it. Luke already knows what happened with me and Calix. “It doesn’t matter. It’s Devils’ Day, isn’t it? I’d be more surprised if strange shit didn’t happen.”

  Luke doesn’t look convinced, but at least she nods and holds open the door to the classroom for me. As I head back inside, I take note of the Knight Crew and their desks, piled with gifts from their many admirers.

  Calix has the most out of all of them, smirking at me with an expression that reminds me of spiders and dead things. Raz watches me, too, but Barron refuses to even acknowledge that I exist. If we’re in the hallway together, he’ll walk right into me, knock me out of the way and then move on like it never happened. Sonja chucks her cupcake at me, bloody frosting hitting me right in the chest and staining my uniform.

  Our teacher, too occupied with a haul of Devils’ Day gifts on her own desk, doesn’t notice.

  With a snarl, I take my seat in the back and decide that maybe, just maybe, I did hit Calix’s car on purpose this morning.

  For years, I’ve endured whatever they could throw at me, fighting back just enough so they wouldn’t see me as a victim, but not so hard that they’d see me as an adversary.

  I’m just not sure I can take it anymore.

  “Don’t do something you might regret,” Luke whispers as I glare at the backs of their heads.

  “I won’t,” I reply easily, but I’m pretty sure I’m lying.

  No, I’m certain of it.

  Chapter Three

  THE TOWN OF Devil Springs where I was born and raised is, on most days, a fairly religious, conservative place.

  But not on Devils’ Day.

  On Devils’ Day, things get weird.

  At lunch, I sit with Luke and April in the outdoor courtyard
at the back of the school. Weather permitting, there’s a large window that opens up from the kitchen, allowing students to line up for food outside. Beyond the tall, black chain-link at the back of the campus, the Diamond Point forest sweeps up and away, blanketing the hills in red and orange leaves. Deciduous trees dominate the woods here, with occasional loblolly or shortleaf pines dotting the landscape with green.

  On the opposite side of the courtyard, one of the girls sits painting pentagrams on the foreheads and hands of her friends while the others unzip duffel bags and show off diaphanous dresses in red or black silk, sack-like white gowns that look like they’re meant for a witch on her way to the stake, and crowns made of thorny branches or antlers.

  “I wish it were Devils’ Day every day,” Luke says with a sigh, face planted in the palm of one hand. Her goblin mask is pushed up above her pixie-like face, dark eyes focused on the girls dancing in the center of the courtyard, the colorful ribbons in their hands knotted and tied with dried flowers. “This is the sort of world I want to live in, where people like Cami Alhambra wear gauzy fairy wings to school, and Barron Farrar sits and sketches like he’s an artist instead of an asshole.”

  I glance over and find Barron—tall, broad-shouldered Barron with his short, rainbow Mohawk—sitting on the bench of one of the picnic tables, a sketchbook on his lap, charcoal smeared across the side of one hand. His dual-colored eyes (he has heterochromia, meaning one is brown while the other is blue) are focused on the page, but when he senses me looking, his gaze lifts up and catches on mine. The leather mask on his face turns his cold expression into something dangerous, like an icicle ready to fall and impale me. I turn away.

  “I don’t know about that,” I say, tugging my own mask back into place. “The break from boring is nice, but I could do without all the weirdness. Last year, I found Cami and her friends naked and dancing in the woods like witches.”

  “Exactly!” Luke says, slapping her hands on her thighs and standing up. She spins to face us, reaching up to ruffle her short, blue hair. Crescent Prep used to have strict rules about unnatural hair color, eye color, tattoos, and piercings, but I think after a while they realized they had more important things to deal with and dialed back the dress code a bit. Part of me wonders if Raz wasn’t responsible for a big portion of that. He spit in the vice principal’s face freshman year when she asked him to remove his red contacts.

  Corralling troublesome kids in the middle of the woods is hard enough. Harder still when most of them have the net worth of a small country. They might be in exile, but they get what they want anyway. Most of the things the Knight Crew puts their energy into are awful yet on this one thing, I applaud their efforts. My own purple hair dances in a quiet breeze.

  “Exactly, what?” I ask, raising a brow as she steps directly between me and Barron, cutting off his intense stare. I shiver as I look up at her.

  “I want to live in a world where I’m free to be as weird as I want without judgment, where other people care more about living their own lives than they do about how I live mine.” She glances over her shoulder at Sonja and Calix, their faces close as they whisper about something that I just know is going to end badly for me. I don’t just get to hit the Knight Crew’s leader’s car this morning and walk away unscathed. “Tonight, I’m making a move on Sonja.”

  “Stupid idea,” I murmur as April sips a fruit smoothie, her pale green eyes nearly hidden behind the thick, black frames of her glasses as she listens intently to our conversation. The pair of black tourmaline bracelets rests against the pale skin of her left arm.

  “Really? Because I let you make the worst decision known to man last year, and I didn’t say anything about it.”

  “What decision?” April asks, sitting up and groaning as she cups her belly with one arm. She’s, like, maybe five foot two and pregnant as fuck. It’s a bit terrifying to look at sometimes, her dress shirt untucked, purple blazer unbuttoned to accommodate her belly. “I feel like I’m missing part of a story here.”

  Luke turns to her with a puzzled expression, and then flashes a grin. I give her a warning look in response, but I can tell she’s undeterred. Maybe I’m just not that scary? If I were, maybe I wouldn’t be subject to so many awful Devils’ Day pranks. Like, for example, the one I just know is about to come out of Luke’s mouth.

  “Last year, Calix Knight”—thankfully she lowers her voice some—“confessed his supposed love for Karma.”

  “What?!” April squeaks, sitting up and leaning forward, her mousy brown hair plaited into pigtails and slung over her shoulders. Her mouth hangs open, the straw from her smoothie stuck to her bottom lip. I roll my eyes and stand up, but Luke isn’t done.

  “Oh, it gets better. Not only did he confess his feelings, he told Karma he’d been in love with her for years, that he thought about her every night, touched himself to the very idea of her …”

  “Luke, come on,” I say, crossing my arms over my chest, my pleated wool skirt dancing against the pale white of my upper thighs. “I think she gets the picture already.”

  “After that, Calix took her up to one of the treehouses—the fancy ones meant for tourists—and fucked her virginity sweetly away.” Luke casts a disapproving glance in my direction as I frown, my cheeks flushed with heat. I try very hard not to glance in Calix’s direction, but it happens anyway. He’s staring right at me, his devil’s mask an ebon black to match his eyes. I look back at Luke, willing her to shut the hell up with every fiber of my being. “And I mean all of her virginity. I’m not sure there’s a position or variation on the sex act they didn’t cover.”

  “The sex act?” I choke out, shaking my head, and adjusting my own mask, glitter smearing across my fingers. My mother—not Jane, but Cathy this time—made it for me. She’s a professional artist. They both are, actually, and they own a shop in Eureka Springs that manages to support our family. Of course, we do live in a trailer park, but I’m not ashamed of it. The trailers there are all nice, well-maintained, surrounded by flowers and winding paths made of local limestone.

  “The sex act?” April repeats, casting a sympathetic look my way. “That’s what my parents called it when they caught me in bed with my boyfriend. Come on, Luke, up your vocabulary.”

  “Well, I happen to still be a virgin,” Luke says, touching her fingers to her chest and then frowning. “Although I’m not sure I even believe in the concept. I think virginity might be a social construct presented to us by the patriarchy.”

  “As much as I enjoy conversations about the patriarchy,” I start, noticing that Barron’s finally stood up, his multi-colored eyes on me. “I think we should go.”

  “Why?” Luke asks, brows furrowing as she glances back in the Knight Crew’s direction. They’re all looking at me now, them and their cronies, their groupies. I try not to judge the hangers-on. After all, they’re drawn to the power, the danger, the impossibility of the Knight Crew. But yet … I can’t help wrinkling my nose at the small crowd around Calix’s table, the gleam in their eyes that says they’ll work for snacks. Like dogs. Pathetic.

  “Let’s go,” I say, standing up and grabbing my bookbag. I barely make it three steps before I’m slamming into Raz’s chest. I hadn’t noticed him move, but there he is, sly mouth twisted into a rictus grin beneath his mask. His fingers curl around my wrist, tight enough to bruise. Shit. He’s magnificently—almost disturbingly—handsome in his cruelty. The universe isn’t fair, is it? He shouldn’t be so pretty.

  “Bonjour, Karma,” he purrs, yanking me close as Calix, Barron, Sonja and their awful horde of followers—dressed in glittering faerie masks, grotesque goblin faces, and the grinning visages of hag-like witches—approach, circling me. Cutting me off from April and Luke.

  “I’m not afraid to go to the administration!” Luke calls out, but I’m surrounded now, forced to look up into Raz’s red eyes, the vicious, spiteful gleam in them sending chills down my spine. For the past three years, I’ve worried about Devils’ Day, wondered wha
t trouble the Knight Crew might bring my way. I thought last year’s ruse of Calix confessing his love and then fucking me was the worst they could do. But the way Raz is looking at me right now? Maybe I was wrong.

  Maybe things can get a whole lot worse.

  “An eye for an eye,” Raz says, dragging me forward. I start fighting him the moment he begins to move, but Barron appears on my other side, restraining me. Even outside their little circle of influence, the other students watch hungrily, their filthy rich maws wet with slaver as they seek out violence and discord with glittering black eyes.

  I know—I know—that Devils’ Day isn’t supernatural, that it doesn’t mean anything, but sometimes, it feels like there’s some truth it. The demons and devils … they really have come out to play.

  Raz clamps a hand over my mouth to keep me from screaming as he and Barron drag me down the halls toward the front entrance of the school. We don’t pass by any staff members on our way, and as much as I’d like to believe that Luke or April will get help for me, they’re probably trapped in the courtyard by the remainder of Calix’s worshipful mob.

  We stumble down the front steps of the school and toward the gravel parking lot that’s designated for students. All around us, the woods stand a silent witness to whatever torment the Knight Crew has in store.

  As soon as I see my car—affectionally dubbed the Little Bee by my family and friends—I can see what Raz means by an eye for an eye. The tires are missing, the windshield is smashed to pieces, and the rear hood is lifted up, exposing what’s left of the engine.

  The boys release me, throwing me to my knees in the gravel. I cringe as rocks and bits of debris get stuck in my skin, sending a wave of agony through me. Raz adds to the torment by kicking dust up in my face and laughing as I choke on it.

  “You fucking assholes,” I grind out, trying and failing to push up to my feet. Barron puts a hand on my shoulder and shoves me to my knees with little effort on his part. The crowd swarms around us, blocking me with a wall of human flesh, their masks eerie in the afternoon light. My body quivers with adrenaline as I look up and find Calix in his black mask, staring down at me, Sonja smirking on his right side. “Don’t think I’m afraid to report you,” I quip, because I’ve done it in the past, and I’ll do it again. That’s what started all of this, I think. Freshman year, I reported the three of them for harassing a fellow student. No, no, not just harassing but assaulting. They beat the shit out of some poor boy and left him with broken limbs.