Page 73 of Revenge At Raleigh High
The pain is excruciating.
I can barely breathe around it. My right arm, pulled awkwardly over my head, is dislocated…and Jacob is dragging me by it down the hall. He’s whistling a tuneless, cheery song as he pulls me roughly behind him.
Pain.
Pain.
Pain.
Pain.
Pain.
It’s spread to every cell of my body. There’s no running from it. No escaping. It’s too fucking much…
I try to wrench my arm free from Jacob’s grasp, and it’s the worst possible thing I can do. A hot, white flash momentarily blinds me, and a fractured scream builds at the back of my throat. I can’t keep it in. The cry bounces off the walls, rattling around inside the row of hollow lockers to my right. Jacob pauses briefly, casts a bored look at me over his shoulder, and laughs. His grip tightens around my wrist as he continues on his way. The whistling starts up again, and I realize, sickened, that I know the song after all. It’s ‘We Didn’t Start The Fire,’ my favorite Billie Joel song.
Jacob sounds insane as he stumbles through the chorus of the song, trying and failing to hit the correct notes. The rhythm of the song is unmistakable, though.
It’s then that I realize what I’m wearing: a red Raleigh tank, and matching red and white pleated skirt. My pajamas are gone, and I’m decked out in the Siren’s uniform. He did it. He stripped me while I was out cold and changed my clothes. The gasp I let out is a mixture of horror mingled with bitter, frustrated rage.
“Don’t worry. I didn’t take advantage,” Jake says casually. “Your titsarenice, but I’m not into the whole touching-girls-when-they’re-unconscious thing. No point touching you at all if you’re not awake to hate me for it.”
Looking down and seeing the vivid bruises all over my legs, the deep slash on my right thigh, and the blood that’s already seeping into the fabric of the Siren’s tank I’m now wearing, I realize just how bad this is. I look like I’ve been beaten half to death. Panic gets the better of me. “Let me fucking go, Jake. Just…just let me go. We can both walk away and pretend like this never happened.”
The whistling cuts off. “I think we’ve come a little too far for that, don’t you?” He seems to think for a second. The soles of his boots squeak against the linoleum with every step he takes. “No, there’s only one possible outcome here tonight, Silver. You need to die. That’s just the way it’s gotta be. No hard feelings.”
“No hard fe—ARGHHH!” I nearly pass out as a wave of pain fires like a bullet down my arm, burning in my shoulder joint. Jake gives my arm another swift, sharp tug, and a wave of nausea rolls over me.
“Probably best if you just shut the hell up. Bargaining’s pointless. I’m not a particularly merciful person. I feel like I shouldn’t have to tellyouthat,” he chides.
He’s right, I should have known better. Idoknow better, but I had to try. I twist, bracing as hard as I can against the pain, trying to use my bare feet to gain some sort of a grip on the floor. Jacob’s fingers are closed tighter than a steel vise around my wrist. My efforts get me absolutely nowhere, as he continues to pull me by my arm. We pass a glass cabinet, full of Raleigh’s awards, commendations and trophies, and I’m able to pin point where we are just as Jacob rounds a corner, jerking me roughly around the bend and we pitch up in front of the set of double doors that lead into the gym.
Instinctively, I know that I’m dead if he manages to get me through those double doors.
With everything I’ve got, I strain against Jake’s hold, desperation forcing me to pull, pull, pull. Towering above me, Jake pauses in front of the gym doors, casting a condescending smile down at me. “Pathetic. You’re so fuckingweak.I thought with all the big talk recently you’d put up more of a fight than this. Shame there’s no one here to see you like this. They began to fall for your bullshit, didn’t they? They began to believe that you were better than me. Fuckingbetterthan me. Hah. They’d change their minds if they were here right now. They’d see just how fucking useless and scared you are. Come on. Guy Lovell’s having a party. I need to get there by midnight, before people are too fucked up to remember seeing me.”
God, he even has an alibi squared away. I bite back a howl of pain as he shoulders open the gym doors, dragging me along behind him. My panic ramps up to an eleven when I look up ahead and see what awaits us in the middle of the gymnasium; in a beam of silvery moonlight, lancing through the gym’s high windows, I see a chair. And above the chair, hanging ominously from a broad, strong support beam…is a noose.
30
ALEX
My body is on fire. The cold needles at my lungs. I’m a machine, feet pounding against the snow, fists pumping as I sprint along the side of the road. With every step, I’m convinced I can’t go any further, and yet I manage to lift my feet again and push forward.
I won’t stop running until I find her. I have no choice. I’ll ignore the exhaustion and the pain, increasing exponentially every time I draw in a frozen, icy breath, until I have Silver safe in my arms. My body can quit on me after that if it needs to. Until then…
Lights skitter and dance across my vision. In my pocket, my phone begins to ring. I hardly hear the sound over the crashing, slamming rhythm of my thundering heart. I burn, I ache, I hurt, and I seethe. And I run.
My phone doesn’t stop fucking ringing.
I ignore it until I realize that it might be Silver. I pull the phone out of my pocket as quickly as I can, then, making sure not to drop it in the snow. Hope flares inside my chest for a second as I strain to focus on the name lit up on the screen…but then I make out Cam’s name and that hope crashes and burns.
Keep running.
Just keep running.
Don’t fucking stop.
