Fear Her (Complete)

Episode 2

Quinn walked Virgo to homeroom, holding her hand the entire way. She walked her right to the teacher, a man in a patched cardigan named Mr. Steuben, who met their hurried arrival with a distracted air. The classroom was loud and crowded, the air clouded with an eye-watering smog of Axe, Bath & Body Works eau de toilette, and Sharpie markers. It was almost a step-up from juvie. Except nobody’s frisking these assholes for shanks. Some of them (and she was thinking of the skinhead-looking dude next to the window in particular) looked ripe for probable cause.

“Hey, class. We’ve got a new student joining us today.” He checked the note she’d handed him on entering the room. “Valerie Sage. This is Valerie, guys. Look after her, she’ll need your help catching up.”

Quinn took this as her cue to bounce. Virgo had never wanted to see the back of a girl less. She knew one, count it, one person at this suburban hellhole and that person had just walked out the door.

“Find a seat, any seat. I’ve already taken roll, but I’ll go ahead and mark you present. Just try to be on time next time.”

“Yeah, okay.”

Virgo plopped down in one of the last empty chairs that didn’t feel like she was asking for a conversation. She wasn’t looking for friends and she hadn’t worked out all the details of her new identity yet. If people started asking her who she was and who her people were, she wasn’t going to have much of an answer for them. Or worse, she’d have sixteen answers for them and as good as she was, she wasn’t good enough to keep that straight in her head. Writing lies down was out; lesson the first of the foster system, one she’d learned late: never get attached to anything you’re scared to lose. That included clothes, people, iPhones, tablets, and diaries. Virgo didn’t write things down because her mind was her only constant; she’d have this mush in her head when she didn’t have the clothes on her back. She knew what she could handle and she never pushed past that. She’d done that. People got hurt when she asked too much of herself. 1

She was putting her stubborn nature to work not thinking about what had happened when the blessedly unoccupied chair in front of her was besieged by a person. Virgo put her ‘people pleasing’ face on to hide the sneer she defaulted to out of habit. Everybody’s got questions. Fuck their questions. And this girl definitely looked the type to have questions.

She was Disney-approved, litebrite and white-passing, dark hair, dark Bambi eyes, and she was way too young to be in homeroom with a killer.

“Are you lost?”

“Are you?”

“Nope. I’ve been here for two years. You’re the newbie, newbie. Where ya been?”

“I just got here.”

“Yeah, I was watching. Doesn’t really answer my question.”

“I just transferred in.”

“Are you being dense on purpose?”

“You’re like twelve. What are you doing here?”

“Fifteen. I’m fifteen. What are you, twenty or something?”

“Don’t come for my age, Betty Sue.”

“Is that a reference from the 80’s or whenever? I wasn’t alive back then. Maybe I can find reruns on my mom’s 8-tracks.”

Virgo rolled her eyes. “8-tracks are for music.”

“8-tracks are out of date, like you.”

“You have a big mouth and you’re getting on my nerves. You planning to go away, like, ever?”

“Not if you want me to. You’re new, that makes you interesting and I’m bored. Everybody’s boring.” She propped her chin on her hand and her arm on Virgo’s desk. I will snatch her Bambi eyes bald if she leans any closer. “Where ya from?”

“Here and there.”

“Everybody comes here from somewhere else. It’s the big ole weirdo Lost & Found. You a weirdo?”

Virgo rummaged around in her bag for a stick of gum. “The weirdest.”

“Then, we’ll get along fine.”

“Ha. Because I was real worried about that, small fry.”

The girl, and it struck Virgo instantly that she hadn’t offered her name, smiled vacuously in her direction and turned around in her chair in time for the teacher to make class announcements.

This was the strangest conversation Virgo had had in a year and she had sat through three rounds of psychiatric evaluation before she was allowed to attend public school again, much less stay with a host family. 1

Virgo ground her gum to a tough, bland lump. She didn’t want to think about going back to the Sages tonight. She didn’t want to think about spending her next two years at Nevada Lights either, but she was going to make the most of it. She had wanted this, a real education, the whole teen dream experience she’d been denied living at Stargazer. That was what she’d told the parole board when they asked how she intended to repay her debt to society. ‘I’m going to be a mentor,’ she’d said. ‘I’m going to use my past to build a better future for kids like me before they turn into kids like me.’ Kid tested, parole board approved. And it was only half bullshit. 1

Virgo’s chewing kicked up a notch the more the teacher noted all the big school events to come. The Fall Festival. The Hallow’s Eve Semi-Formal. The Samhain Bonfire hosted by the Witches of Light. The All Souls Day Mass Carpool. She chewed fervently, focusing all her attention on pulverizing the tasteless tack smacking inside her jaw. Gum was a step up from grinding her teeth into nubs. She’d wasted plenty of commissary money paying for replacement caps on her teeth when she turned them into mulch in her sleep. Her therapist called her a worrier.

‘Well, yeah,’ she’d snarked, ‘there’s a few things to worry about out there.’ There were a few things to be worrying about here, too. She’d never really found her freedom after Stargazer burned; she’d just moved from one compound to another, from under the thumb of one zealot to staring down the barrel of a despot. Once a person had lived like that they were forever aware of how it might happen again and would do anything to avoid it, even when it meant choosing another kind of prison instead.