A/N: YAY! The second book is up. From now on I'll have single-POV books. This one is Sarah. Don't worry if you haven't read the first book. Though I reccomend it, it isn't necessary to understand this one.
Full summary: Sarah, Jennifer, Danielle and Cassidy have to fight a war they know nothing about. As Sarah prepares for battle, she still has to deal with the aftermath of Jennifer's little "show." She's angry, depressed and confused, until she meets someone who changes her whole view on things.
Chapter 1
"I'm so sorry," he said to the absent look on my face.
Sorry. Everybody was sorry. It was all I had been hearing all week.
Were they sorry? Probably not. No, they were just tired of staring at the empty look on my face. Tired of seeing my eyes cast downward. Tired of watching tears crawl their way down my face.
I hadn't shown up at school for the first few days after Jennifer's suicide. It would have been too emotional. After all, half the school had watched her fall to her death. Undoubtedly, everyone would have been talking about it.
The guy who had told me he was sorry was named Dave. His eyes held a glimmer of something real. His tone was mourning and his hand was on mine in an attempt to be comforting. I recoiled from his touch.
Now everyone had receded into a sort of silent mourning, or in some cases, fake mourning. Not everyone in our school was that compassionate, but most of them didn't want to be viewed as cold-hearted either.
Mind you, there were a few.
"Can we get on with the lesson?" A voice asked. His name was Andrew. He wasn't very smart, but he was still obsessed with school and in general, not a very nice person. "I mean, I don't want to have a bunch of work to do at the end of the semester."
We had been doing review all week, not that I had actually done any of it. Not that I was able to.
"No, Andrew," the teacher said in her best sympathetic voice. "I don't believe that many people would be able to concentrate on the work right now." She shot a glance at me, and I had to pretend not to notice.
Frankly, I was also tired of tears, tired of downcast eyes. I was tired of talking to the police and the councilors and my parents who had gotten a phone call on their way home from a business trip. I was tired of people calling and offering words of comfort and I was tired of thinking about it. I was exhausted all the time from crying, from lack of sleep, from trying to ignore the jerks who didn't seem to give a damn.
"I just don't get why we have to make everyone fall behind just because of some stupid emo girl."
He gave me a sideways look. Of course, my eyes were down, so he obviously didn't know that I would see it. He was testing me, pushing my buttons because he blamed me for this whole thing. After all, I was mostly the only one Jennifer ever spoke to.
She was dead and he still had the nerve to say something so rude. If he was looking for a fight, he got it.
I stood up, not speaking. Not trusting myself to speak. I kept my head down, and I know that it gave the effect that I was rising from the dead. A dancer knows how to use body language to act. It's the only way we know how to act.
I took the two long steps it took to get to his desk. It would have been normal steps for most people, but I was fairly short. He was sitting there, staring at me, unafraid. The kind of arrogance that comes from being a pretty tall guy. He looked at me and uttered a very short, sarcastic, "sorry."
And I struck. Suddenly his seat was tipped over and I was on top of him, scratching, hitting, punching. I even bit his hand when he tried to push me off. There wasn't a whole lot I could do that would damage this guy, but I sure as hell tried. For the first few moments it was chaos. I couldn't figure out how to pin him, how to beat him. At last I started to understand where he was and where I was. I was still over him with one knee in his stomach and one on the floor. He was holding my left forearm and my right wrist above his chest. It was a power struggle that I would surely lose: him trying to push me away and me trying to get my hands in contact with his face. I twisted to free my right wrist from his grasp and delivered a blow across his nose with the heel of my hand. It was bleeding. Not broken, I hadn't quite hit him hard enough for that, but definitely bleeding. I laughed triumphantly, though it came out as more of a grunt. Suddenly I felt his leg shift and his foot hit me squarely in the stomach, making me roll onto the floor and hit a desk with my head. I was vaguely aware of the teacher yelling and Andrew getting up off the floor. I didn't care. I just stayed laying where I was, eyes staring forward blankly and gasping for breath. I was lost in my own rage. I didn't care anymore.
After a moment someone helped me up. I wasn't willing to stand on my own, but they forced me to my feet and I was left with a decision of standing by myself or falling and probably hitting my head again.
I felt weak. I noticed that tears were streaming down my face, probably because I was still trying to catch my breath. My legs were shaky, but they held me up as the teacher (Who I now realized had been the one to pick me up) dragged me out of the classroom, yelling at the remaining students not to move. I expected her to take me to the office, but instead she took me to the bathroom.
"Clean up and go home," she said. Her eyes were compassionate, despite her hard tone.
Then she left. I stood there, alone in the bathroom. I looked into one of the mirrors. It wasn't such a pretty sight.
It wasn't that I was badly beaten. I only had a bruise on my cheek. I did, however, have blood splattered across my face as if I had committed murder with some brutally painful weapon rather than simply made someone's nose bleed. I wasn't sure exactly how that had happened, but I washed it off anyway.
I was wearing sweats and my hair was tied in a ponytail that I had made without even bothering to brush it. I had no makeup on, which I really resented because my skin wasn't as even as I'd like it to be. The bruise under my eye was slowly turning darker and my eyes were still red, but for the most part I didn't look like as big of a mess as I had a few minutes before.
I left the school without telling the office. No doubt they would have insisted on calling my parents, and I wasn't excited about explaining myself to my parents quite yet.
((What happened?)) a voice asked.
"Hi Jennifer," I said.
