morP 3.2

Even after the broken glass bottle sliced open her scalp, the deluge of drinks on Taylor's head didn't stop there. Madison and Sophia leaned over the top of the stall, each of them with plastic bottles at the ready to replace the empties they had already discarded. Bent over with her arms shielding her head, Taylor suffered through the liquid assault a second time.

It ran down Taylor's neck and back, her heather grey hooded sweatshirt wetly molded to her shoulders soaked through, and fizzed painfully as it ran through the lacerations under her hair. Taylor pushed against the door again amid sweet and sticky puddles of juice on the floor, but her bruised and bandaged side eliminated any possibility of body-checking the door open with Emma braced against it.

More empty plastic bottles with labels for grape and cranberry juice fell to the ground around me. A bottle of orange soda bounced off my shoulder to splash into the puddle before rolling under the partition and into the next stall. The smell of the fruity drinks and sodas was sickly sweet.

The door swung open, and there stood Madison, Sophia and Emma. Julia leaned in from the side and took a picture with her camera with a flash. The four of them laughed like it was the funniest thing in the world, but the sounds of their amusement barely registered. Julia was shocked by a response in kind as Taylor took a picture of her own.

"Omigawwd!" Julia protested as she blinked away the spots which clouded her vision, "Why'd you do that?"

"I was about to ask you the same thing," Sophia said as she snatched the phone out of Julia's hand, "Delete that. No evidence that points back to us, dumbass."

All that a second attempt to take a picture accomplished was a close-up of a palm through the view finder as Sophia said, "Oh no you don't."

This was followed by a shove which knocked Taylor to collapse back in the stall onto her backpack with a crunch amid the puddles of juice.

As Sophia turned and walked away, she briefly fumbled with the disposable camera. She hissed, and unexpectedly exclaimed, "Ow!" then shook her hand briefly then violently pulled out the film. The tangled ribbon cascaded to the floor behind her and became worthlessly over exposed in the ambient light. Sophia pulled up on the window sash to no effect, then tossed the curled film and empty box clattered into a garbage can.

One big flaw in the camera defense Taylor realized – she had to take manually take the pictures. Hindsight being 20/20 she acknowledged getting a voice recorder would have been a good idea after all. Too late now, though.

Taylor said "You…"

BANG!

Taylor flinched as the door in the next door stall slammed closed right next to her ear.

"You're fucking THIS close to having your fucking head kicked in, snitchy bitch," Sophia growled.

Taylor struggled to control her breathing due to her aching side and decided that now was not the time to try and stand up again.

"You're just lucky these windows are practically painted shut or I'd have chucked that shitty camera out and then thrown you out right after." Sophia ranted.

Taylor didn't trust herself to say anything that wouldn't set Sophia off further, so she kept silent.

"You say anything about this, one fucking word," Sophia snarled as she loomed over the prone Taylor, "and I will throw you out that window…"

Sophia whirled and stalked away, "…and I won't even try to open it this time."

As she left the restroom with a smirk Emma gave a little wave of one hand and said "Buh-bye, Tay-tay."

A slightly stunned Madison recovered her wits enough to pull Julia, who had just stood there staring in shock at what she had just witnessed, out to the hall to follow Sophia and Emma.

The bathroom door slammed shut behind them.

Carefully, Taylor climbed unsteadily to her feet and leaned against the stall for balance. Enough of the swarm under her control had finally made it up the walls and vents inside the three story building or onto the roof from outside that Taylor could push her emotions away from herself and distribute her negative feelings across tens of thousands of bugs.

The one feeling she didn't want to push away was the cold, almost sour sensation in her stomach. Not nausea, but a condensed, determined calculated rage as she approached the sink and rubbed at the smeared, streaky lenses under the running tap.

As she began to clean herself up, Taylor used the bugs in the vents to listen in on the conversation in the hallway outside.

"Oh my god, that was great," said Emma, "The perfect end to your week of detention, don't you think?"

Sophia gruffly snorted a reply.

"What the hell did she ever do to deserve that?" Julia muttered.

"Oh, y'know… Existing. Inhaling. Exhaling. Being too ugly to live, that sort of thing," Madison explained.

Sophia said, "The Track Team has started giving me shit, now it's all gonna flow downhill onto her."

"So, you want to come over tonight and hang out, watch bad movies?" Emma asked as the group followed her away from the bathrooms.

"I can't," Sophia replied, "I've got that… dance I have to go to tonight. And the rest of my weekend is all booked up."

"Wait, wait, you're going to the dance?" Emma said incredulously.

"Believe it or not, yes," Sophia said defeatedly.

Emma turned away from Sophia, "How about you, Julia? Got plans for tonight?"

"M..me? I, uh… no, no I was going to go to that dance at Immaculata too," Julia said.

"What about you Mads? Got a secret boyfriend at Immaculata we don't know about?"

Madison quipped, "Well, if you knew about him, then he wouldn't be a secret then, would he?"

Emma giggled and said, "Sounds like a plan, then. Go get us a table in the cafeteria before they're all gone, We'll catch up with you in a bit."

After Julia and Madison went down the stairs, Emma asked, "You've never gone to a dance before, why is it so important tonight?"

Sophia let loose a dissatisfied grunt and said, "I have to go to that lame dance for my… evening job. No getting out of it, or it's my ass in a sling."

"Wait. They're forcing you to go to a fucking dance? Let the gangs run around free, this Ward needs a corsage, stat! Seriously?"

"I know. They're gonna pick me up and drop me back at home afterwards, then I got a meet-and-greet with seven year olds first thing in the morning tomorrow."

"Yuck, can't you just drop-kick the little ankle-biters?"

"I wish, but not after last time…" Sophia's voice trailed off as Taylor returned focus back to her immediate surroundings.

She noticed her fingers had wrinkled like prunes under the running water, but at least her lenses were merely wet and no longer streaked by juice. A look in the mirror confirmed she looked like she'd been near an exploding hippie with all the various splatters of fruit juice stained her clothes and made her look like a spastic first attempt at tie-dyeing. At least the brown turtleneck only looked wet, but splotches of red, purple and orange speckled her faded jeans like a Jackson Pollock painting.

At least her scalp had stopped bleeding, so she cleaned up the tacky blood on her forehead with wetted paper towels as best she could.

Squadrons of mosquitoes flew though the gap in the window Sophia had managed to open slightly more and attempted to suck the staining liquids out of her clothes to little success.

Taylor gathered her backpack and ignored the sound of her former art project crunching together and looked at her reflection in the mirror, not surprised by the defeated, disheveled countenance looking back at her.

"Is this all there is?" she thought to herself, "Try and be a cape, but get beat up for it. Plan retribution at school only for everything to slide back into place as if the events of last week never happened…"

She hefted her backpack and moved to exit the bathroom, her bugs returned to the crawlspace under the school as she tried to decide what to do next.

Retreat, and let discretion be the better part of valor, catch the first bus home in defeat? Or should she brave the humiliating stares and laughter as she went to the office and see how they would follow through on this latest round of bullying?

No, even if confronted by Principal Blackwell those bitches would probably claim Taylor had dumped the juice all over herself in some pitiful cry for attention. She could just picture Madison playing up the condescending innocent bystander angle, "…and then she just dumped it all over herself like a crazy person. I think the poor thing needs help." It's not like the school would take fingerprints off the bottles or…

Taylor turned and looked at the garbage can near the window.

The camera.

Sophia had unrolled the film, and tossed it in the trash.

Taylor walked up to the dented can, a ribbon of exposed film draped halfway out and looked inside at the disposable camera box on top of the trash.

She reached inside her backpack and removed the plastic sandwich baggie which formerly held her pain pills and turned it inside-out.

Taylor gathered up the ruined film carefully with the baggie, intentionally never touching it with her bare hand then reached into the can and retrieved the disposable camera with the same level of care.

The still factory sealed, unbroken, disposable camera lay inside the baggie, right next to the exposed film which used to be inside of it.

With Sophia's fingerprints all over it, and possibly inside the now empty sealed camera as well.

Not a smoking gun, per se, but one more piece of evidence.

Taylor sealed the baggie, dropped it on top of her ruined art project, lifted her backpack and exited the bathroom.

She remembered an album her father sometimes listened to, not so much since the accident where her mother died

"All in all," Taylor rhythmically muttered, "it's just… another brick in the wall."

A masculine teen voice joined in, "We don' need no educa… what the hell happened to you?!?"