Page 8 of Quiet Rage
As soon as I’m in my room, locked away from the rest of the world, I strip off the clothes I only put on a few hours ago and pull on leggings and a tank top before flopping onto the bed. My heart is so heavy, it hurts, but I can’t bring myself to cry now. I’m alone, and nobody would ever know, but I don’t have it in me.
Not when all I can do is remind myself I have to face those people tomorrow. I can’t drop out—Dad would never get over it. It’s like this is the one good thing he’s still holding onto. Everything hinges on me doing well, being a success. Making him proud.
The pain in my chest gets worse until I can hardly breathe. My heart’s pounding when I place a hand over it, fast enough that I wonder how much faster it could get before it would kill me.
I kind of wonder if I could make that happen. Because otherwise, I’m going to have to endure the same humiliation I endured today. Over and over.
And I just don’t know if I can take it.
Reaching for the headphones on my nightstand, I tuck them into my ears and pull up a playlist of instrumental music I listen to whenever I start to spiral. Whenever I need to relax. I think this definitely qualifies as one of those times, lying here, wishing my heart would explode so the agony of my existence might finally come to an end.
Maybe it would erase the image of a certain smirking face that for some reason makes my body hum with an energy I’ve never felt before.
Chapter 5
Kellen
I still can’t standTiana, but there’s one thing I can’t deny by Monday morning: she knows how to get shit done.
I wonder how she finds time to go to school and, like, eat and sleep when it hits me a couple of days after I asked her for help that she must spend most of her time finding ways to make somebody miserable. I mean, she really puts effort into it. I would think she was getting paid once she sends me the two dozen images she put together to post on Tamson’s social media and send around to other people at school.
“Where did you get these pictures?” I ask her the morning after she proudly sent me her work. We made plans to meet up at school before my first class to go over the next steps in the plan.
“Mostly from her old Facebook and Insta posts,” she explains, shrugging. “Just saved the images and did the editing after that. No big deal.”
No big deal. She copied and pasted Tamson’s face onto the head of a porn star giving a hand job. I would swear it was the realthing. There’s another one where Tamson’s smiling face was pasted onto the image of a girl getting gangbanged.
The text Tiana put over the picture reads:Gotta earn my tuition money, guys.
I can get pretty dark at times. I was raised in darkness, I live in it. But even I never thought of anything as sick as this. “Nice work,” I tell her, and the way she smiles tells me the compliment means more than it probably should. The girl is fucking twisted.
“You want me to start texting them out to people?” she asks when I make it clear I’m going to walk off. She might be helpful, but that doesn’t mean I feel like hanging out with her. She would only get the wrong idea.
“No, I’ll handle it from here,” I tell her, though I have to wonder if she’ll listen. “I’m going to post them online first. You can spread them around when I do.”
“Where are you going to post them?” she asks.
This girl never knows when to leave it alone. “Just keep your eyes open, all right? I’ll handle this.”
And it’s easy to do it, too. Almost too easy. All it takes is watching my subject, learning her routine. After the scene she made on Wednesday, she won’t go to the cafeteria anymore to eat. She eats in the library now if she eats in school at all.
I don’t exactly blend in well, but she doesn’t seem to notice me following her progress as she walks from the parking lot to the large, three-story building on the west side of campus. She’s too busy ignoring the snickers and whistles from other people who either witnessed her fall or heard about it later. She walks quickly, with purpose, but keeps her head down. That’s how I’mable to secretly keep track of her going inside and sitting at one of the computers, where she checks her email while taking quick, hidden bites from a wrapped sandwich in her backpack. I should be on my way to class now, but I can afford to skip one. What I have to do now is more important.
Standing behind one of the bookshelves, I watch her over the top of a row of textbooks. Her blond hair is pulled back in a ponytail, like she was either too busy to do anything more with it or didn’t care.
Not like the other girls around here—most of them look like they just got a fresh blowout. I only know what that is thanks to the addition of the girls into our friend group. That’s the kind of stuff they talk about when we’re all together.
She has this way of scrunching her face a little when she concentrates. Tiny lines pop up between her eyebrows, over the bridge of her nose. The faint glow from the monitor makes her eyes gleam a bright blue while she scrapes her teeth over her bottom lip. I shouldn’t stare, even if she doesn’t know I’m watching. That plump lip—I can’t take my eyes off it. If she put a little effort into the way she dresses and takes care of herself, she would go from pretty to hot.
I have to shake myself out of my trance once she gets up and takes hold of her backpack. Someone at one of the other computers snorts and doesn’t bother hiding it by looking away or anything. No, they’re staring at her, daring her to do or say something. Maybe wishing she would.
Will she react? Will she pretend not to notice? I obviously need to find other ways to entertain myself, because this is way too interesting. I don’t realize until she turns and walks away that I was holding my breath.
Now that she’s gone, pushing her way through one of the glass doors leading outside, I waste no time taking her seat at the terminal she just finished using. Of course, there’s a chance she’s smart and careful and logged out of whatever she was just checking.
Most people aren’t smart and careful, though. They don’t think there’s any need to be.
All it takes is a visit to her browser history to see she logged into her email. And what a surprise: she never logged out. Her entire account is at my fingertips.
