Page 33 of Breaking Ophelia
As soon as I’m out of sight, I stop and lean against the wall, chest heaving.
I stare at my hands. They’re shaking. Not with fear. With rage. With something darker, something that feels too much like want.
I slide down to the floor, knees tucked to my chest.
I won’t kneel. I sure as fuck won’t crawl.
But I might bend.
God, I hate him.
I hate how good it feels to fight.
And I know—know—I’ll go to his room tonight, just to prove I can stand it.
Just to prove I can outlast the wolf.
Chapter 8: Caius
By1:55theGovernmentand Politics classroom is already full of bodies, half of them buzzed on Adderall or cold brew, the other half strung out on coke. I choose the far-right seat in the second row, directly behind Ophelia. There are twenty-four desks in the room; seventeen have asses in them by the two-minute mark, but only hers makes me itch.
The room reeks of fake lemon, whiteboard marker, and a slow bleed of pheromones from the legacy girls who wear perfume like blood. The windows are sealed. Every sound—cough, click, pen tap—grinds my gears.
Ophelia comes in three minutes early, in a white uniform. Her hair is down and it makes her look softer. More manageable. Shesits, adjusts her skirt over her thigh, then does the same with her jacket, as if daring someone to find a crease. Her bag is canvas, thrifted, covered in ink and stickers; it does not belong. She pulls out a notebook, opens it, and immediately lines her pens in order: black, blue, red, green. OCD, or just a need for control.
I lean back, spread my knees, and let myself look. The angle is perfect; I can see the fine cords in her neck as she writes, the triangle of bare skin above her neck, the way her breathing hitch-steps every time someone new enters behind her.
She’s alert. She’s afraid. She’s pretending not to be both.
The teacher—some bitter asshole, Mr. Cabot, who won’t last the semester—stumbles in at exactly 2:00, but nobody notices. All eyes are either on me, or on her, or on the silent message that passes between us every time I tap my pen or shuffle my chair.
She doesn’t look back. But she knows.
Cabot starts his spiel: “Power structures, the cycle of domination and collapse, what separates the sovereign from the serf.” He drones on, his voice scraping over the silence like a razor.
I don’t hear a word, because Ophelia is tracing circles in the margin of her notebook, and each pass of the pen makes her sleeve ride up a little farther. I can see the pale spot on her forearm where a scar sits, erased now except for the memory of damage.
She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear, once, twice. She doesn’t want it to fall in her face. Her hand shakes, barely, when she writes a date in the header. She’s a machine, running on spite and habit.
I imagine, for a second, what it would take to break that habit. To force her to stop writing, stop controlling, stop pretending she’s not thinking about the night before. I imagine her bent over this very desk, fingers white knuckling the edge, mouth full of my name.
I shift in my seat, letting my knee bump the back of her chair. She tenses, then pretends not to notice.
Perfect.
Cabot tries to get a discussion started: “What does power mean to you?” He says it like he wants someone to be clever, but all he gets are the same answers—control, influence, respect. A few students throw glances back at me. They know who owns this room, and it isn’t the man with the chalk.
Ophelia doesn’t answer. She just keeps writing.
She thinks she has no power.
Except she does.
She holds all the power she could ever imagine… over me.
I wait until the lull, then kick her chair again, this time harder. She snaps upright, spine rigid. Her hand clamps the pen so tight the plastic flexes. Still, she doesn’t turn.
She’s learning.
