But that didn’t matter. Whatmatteredwas that I’d earned the right to be a diva, so now was the time, more than ever, to remind the Little People that I still remembered what it was like to be among them.
I cut through the quad, then around the corner of the music school to the front plaza of the theater—
And froze.
Terri Bishop was lounging across the steps.
Terri Bishop, who I hadn’t seen in over a year.
Terri Bishop, who was supposed to be three thousand miles away, going to an elite East Coast school and hobnobbing with other like-minded psychopaths.
But no, here he was. And so were Mason Harris, Glenn Olson, and two other young bucks I didn’t know and who would henceforth be referred to as Frat Boys Beta and Gamma. They all appeared to be engaged in filming something—Terri was talking into the phone held by Mason. But he stopped when he caught sight of me, and his eyes widened.
The entire contents of my torso slithered into my kneecaps. I was frozen to the spot.
I should run; I should just turn around and ru—
“FLINCH!!” Terri roared and sprang to his feet, moving toward me like the inevitability of death. I’d never understood how someone so big and so muscular could also be sofast; before I managed to move, he had an arm wrapped around my shoulders and a good grip on my collar. He twisted and pulled back, tightening the fabric against my throat in a subtle but extremely effective way.
“Guys, do you realize who this is?” said the voice from my nightmares. Terri was grinning, and Mason was still holding the phone up.
“Who?” asked one of the unnamed frat boys. “Clifford the Little Red Bitch?”
Terri’s laugh was loud enough to draw the attention of the other groups hanging around the theater plaza—it had good shade and seating, so people camped out here between classes.
“No, man, this isFlinch, myboy!” Terri shook me, untwisting my collar slightly so I could gulp in air.
The smell of Terri’s aftershave washed over me, and for a second it felt like I was going to throw up so hard my head would explode, but then the dissociation wrapped me back up in its sweet, gentle embrace.
I seemed to float out of my body, watching what happened next from behind a protective film. I could feel the pain and the fear but the same way you can still feel a headache after painkillers. Everything that was happening was happening to a version of myself who was empty.
I was somewhere else. Somewhere safe.
From that place of safety, I heard Terri explaining to the others who I was, that I was hilarious, that you could get me to doanything.
“Yeah,” Mason, who had gone to high school with us, added, “Terri’s made Flinch do stuff you wouldn’tbelieve!”
This was not entirely true. It was all believable, and straight out of the handy-dandy high-school bully handbook. Like the time he’d made me chug mustard, or lick a bathroom floor, or shaved my eyebrows. To be fair, Mason had needed to hold me down for that one.
Terri and I had been in school together since our freshman year, and he’d made a career out of making my life hell.
But that was supposed to have ended when we graduated. We’d gone our separate ways: me to the local theater department to be a bright, young star, and him to the cutthroat world of pre-law with the other sociopaths. I hadn’t had to think about him for more than a year.
What was he doinghere?
“Check it out.”
I hadn’t even realized that Glenn had taken my messenger bag, and now he was riffling through it, pulling out—
My script.
Terri hissed deep in his throat, “Damn, still at it, huh?”
There was a moment of reprieve in which Terri handed me over to Frat Boy Gamma and stepped forward to take my script from Glenn. It had already been removed from its plastic page guard, and he leafed through it in evident disbelief. Frat Boy Gamma’s chokehold technique left something to be desired compared to Terri’s, so I managed to suck in enough air to keep from passing out. People around us were still watching, but no one was intervening—presumably it looked like horseplay between friends. Terri had become a freakingartistwhen it came to making a beat-down look like clowning.
“Once a diva, always a diva, eh Flinch?”
Flinchwas the ingenious nickname Terri had invented for me the first week of high school, anddivameant something very different when he said it as opposed to when I called myself that out of pride.
