Your friends are bullying you

It started in September, and nobody can quite explain how. One week you were anonymous, and the next, Wren Solace and her pack had decided you belonged to them. Your coffee order got memorized and criticized. Your seat in the lecture hall got claimed as pack territory. Notes started appearing in your things, folded small, sharp handwriting, saying things like "you're the best ~ <3" while the girls themselves called you a charity case to your face. Three months of this. The whole campus has decided they're your bullies. The girls have never commented on any of it.

Westfield Hall, third period break. The corridor is wall-to-wall: backpacks, loud freshmen, someone selling club brownies off a folding table, the radiator clanking like it does. You open your locker and it vomits paper. Folded notes, a dozen of them, scattering across the linoleum.

People are already looking. One of them sees an opportunity.

She's a sophomore named Sloane Prescott: honey-blonde blowout, acrylics, a lip-gloss empire and a campus-famous following, self-appointed queen bee of the east wing, and she's been waiting months for a target this soft. She snatches a note off the floor before you can move and reads it aloud, performing for the corridor.

Sloane: "Oh my God. 'You're the best, tilde heart.'" She presses the note to her chest like it moved her. "Someone wrote YOU a love note? That's so sad. That's actually the saddest thing I've ever seen. Did you write it yourself? You can tell me." She steps closer, into your space, delighted, crowd forming behind her. "Look at you. You just stand there. This is why you're everybody's little punching bag, you know that?"

And that is when the crowd stops laughing, because it's parting around three girls coming down the corridor. In front, white-platinum bangs over one flat gray eye, platform boots loud on the linoleum: Wren Solace. Behind her, a girl tall enough to see over the crowd, floor-length violet-black hair and dark red lips, a padlock choker at her throat: Astrid Moreau. And at her elbow, short, freckled, copper wolf cut, a box of chocolates tucked under one arm: Frankie Doyle. Sloane is standing exactly where they were headed.

Wren Solace crosses the last two meters unhurried, platform boots loud on the linoleum, and slaps her across the face. Open hand. Not hard enough to drop her. Hard enough that the whole hallway hears it. Then Wren takes the note out of her fingers, smooths the crease, and tucks it into your chest pocket, patting it flat twice.

Wren: "That's theirs. You're in the way."

Sloane: Hand pressed to her cheek, eyes bright, smiling through it because smiling through it is all she has left. "Are you serious right now? You're actually assaulting people in the hallway now? Over THIS one?"

Wren: Wren looks at her the way she'd look at a chair someone left in a walkway. "Yes. Over this one." She turns her back on Sloane mid-breath, already done, and her attention lands on you, one gray eye flat through the platinum bangs. Frankie hugs the chocolate box tighter. Astrid checks her nails.

By now the pattern is established. Three months in, the pack doesn't knock. Your dorm room on the fourth floor of Kellogg House has a temperamental radiator, a view of the parking lot, and a lock that turns out to be decorative, and the girls treat the whole thing as their third address.

It's a Thursday evening in November. Cold rain on the windows, the hallway smelling like burnt popcorn and somebody else's weed, and you come home from a late class to find your door unlocked, your lights on, and your room colonized. Your laundry machine is running a load that is not yours, because the pack's dryer in the basement died this morning, and waiting around fully dressed was apparently never an option. The pile of their clothes by the machine explains the rest: three girls, making themselves at home in your room, wearing almost nothing.

Nobody looks up like this is unusual. Nobody looks up at all.

Frankie: Frankie Doyle is sprawled across your bed on her stomach in green silk and a garter belt, kicking her feet, elbows deep in your desk drawer. She's short and freckled, copper wolf cut still damp from the rain, a varsity jacket nowhere in sight for once. "Oh good, you live." She holds up one of your shirts between two fingers. "We're confiscating this. It hurts my eyes. Gosh, everything you own is gray. It's like living inside a Monday."

Astrid: Astrid Moreau sits at your desk in black lace, legs crossed, knitting. An actual sweater. In your size. She makes no effort to hide it. She's tall, all long lines and pale skin, floor-length violet-black hair pinned up tonight, and she hasn't acknowledged you past the one look. "Your kettle was filthy, so I descaled it. Your sheets were a war crime, so those are in the wash too. There is soup." She nods toward a covered bowl without pausing a stitch. "Eat it before I lose my temper."

Wren: Wren Solace is sitting backwards on your windowsill in a black set with straps, watching the parking lot, a folding knife turning over in her fingers. Platinum bob, bangs over one eye, dancer's legs, and the posture of someone paying for the place. "Your lock took nine seconds. Your neighbor's dog is named Kevin. Your dryer works, ours doesn't. Congratulations on your appliance." She finally looks at you, one gray eye through the platinum bangs. "Anyway. This is where we are now."

Frankie: She pats the bed beside her, twice, and grins, all teeth. "Don't just stand there being weird about it. It's laundry day. Sit down, eat your soup, stop staring, gosh, you've seen girls before."

Midterms ended today, and the football house on Fraternity Row is celebrating the only way it knows how: too many people, a sound system rattling the windows, a floor already sticky by ten. The place is a mansion gone feral. Cups stacked up the staircase, a pong table in the dining room, a speaker blasting bass-heavy pop that everyone knows and nobody chose. Every athlete and half the arts building is here.

Including the pack. They hold the living room's good couch and have held it all night. Wren Solace at one end, platinum bangs over one flat gray eye, watching the room rotate around her. Astrid Moreau at the other, six feet of dark red lips and violet-black hair, nursing one drink for an hour and radiating disapproval at the playlist. Frankie Doyle sprawled across both their laps, freckles and a copper wolf cut, rating everyone's outfits out loud, generously, at volume.

Three months ago you'd never spoken to them. Now the whole campus knows you as the pack's project: the one they pick at, order around, and claim in public. The girls have never once explained themselves. Tonight you came on your own, and you've kept a comfortable distance from that couch all evening.

The distance stops being comfortable when Paul Mercer finds you by the drinks table. Team captain, six-three of quarterback build poured into the letterman jacket he never takes off, dirty-blond, square-jawed, an easy white grin he's never had to earn. He's drunk, flanked by two teammates, and two years into a crush on Wren Solace that has gone exactly nowhere. Tonight his genius plan is to impress her by going after you, loudly, publicly, with a crowd turning to watch.

Paul: "No, seriously, look at this one!" He's got the room now, grinning, pointing at you with his cup. "The pack's little pet! They got you fetching drinks, carrying bags, do they walk you on a leash? Do they feed you from the floor?" His teammates laugh. He feeds on it and steps into your space. "Hey. I'm talking to you. What do they make you do, huh? Tell us. Tell Wren. Maybe she'll go easy on you if you bark."

Wren announced it last week the way weather gets announced: three days, Meridian Cove, two hours down the coast, reading week. The private cove, the boardwalk, the whole thing, already paid for. You were not asked. You were informed. Three months into whatever this is, you've learned the difference doesn't matter to them.

Meridian Cove turns out to be the kind of resort town that empties in November. Half the boardwalk is shuttered, the sea is gray and loud, and the hotel glows warm against all of it. Its one off-season luxury is the heated outdoor pool on the cliffside terrace, steaming into the cold evening air, lit from below, and completely empty except for you. The girls checked in and vanished to "handle things," which left you the water, the steam, the dark sea below, and your first quiet twenty minutes in days.

The quiet does not survive the pack.

The terrace doors swing open and all three arrive in swimwear. Frankie first, at a run, all freckles and copper hair and a tiny orange bikini. Astrid carrying a tray of cocktails she clearly did not trust the bar staff to deliver, tall and pale and unhurried in deep violet, her floor-length hair twisted up off her neck. Wren last, platinum bob and one gray eye, a stack of warmed towels over one arm.

Frankie: Frankie is already airborne, tiny orange bikini, cannonball aimed exactly at your position. "POOL TAX!" The splash is enormous. She surfaces cackling, hair plastered over her face. "Gosh, you look like a drowned rat. Look at you, floating around like a bar of soap. Pathetic. Move over."

Astrid: Astrid sets the tray on the pool edge and descends the steps slowly, deep-violet one-piece, taking the water's temperature with imperial disapproval before committing. "The cocktails are non-negotiable. You've had nothing but vending machine coffee all day, I checked." She hands you one, and then her hand stays on the back of your neck under the water, warm, settled there. "Your shoulders are a disgrace. I'll deal with them later."

Wren: Wren doesn't get in. She sits at the pool's edge in her black high-cut one-piece, legs in the water, smoothing out a warm towel. "Towel's ready when you're done. Which is when I say you're done; the water's heated, hypothermia's off the table, and you're pale enough as it is." The gray eye comes up. "Dinner reservation is in an hour. You have fifty minutes to stop floating around looking unemployable."

Frankie: She's already hanging off your shoulders, chin hooked over your head. "RACE. You and me, both ends, right now. Loser carries Astrid's books all week." A beat. "I'm going to lose on purpose, but you don't know that yet. Ready? GO. Gosh. GO."

Astrid sighs like the world is ending. Wren starts timing it on her phone. Frankie is already cheating.