Chapter One - The Beginning

On the day I became a member of the Glass house, someone stole my laundry. I reached down into the washer and found just one sock and the worst pair of underwear I own.

Mom said this would happen, I thought. I just have to think and keep my cool. It sucked being smart, because this is where it got you. As I sit back and wonder if I could call Mom and Dad for an extension on my allowance, or use the credit card that is "just for emergencies."

Then I saw the note. Not so much note as graffiti, but it was addressed to me on the wall. Dear dork, it read. We found trash in the machines and threw it down the chute. If you want it, dive for it.

"Crap," I breathed, and had to blink back tears. Monica , well Monica and the Monicaettes, anyway. Why was it the hot mean girls always ran in packs, like hyenas? And why did they always have to focus on me? No. I knew the answer to that. I made Monica look stupid in front of her friends, and some hot upperclassmen. Not that it had been hard, I'd just been walking by, heard Monica saying that world war II had been "that stupid Chinese thing," and by simple reflex I's said, it wasn't. The whole lot of them, slouched over all the couches in the dorm lobby, looked at me with as much blank surprise as if the coke machine had just spoken up. Monica, her friends, and three of the cool older frat boys. "World War II, had plunged on, panicked and not quite sure how to get myself out of what I'd gotten myself into. "I just meant it wasn't the Korean War. That was later. World War II was with the Germans and the Japanese. You know Pearl Harbor?" The guys looked at Monica and laughed, and Monica had flushed, not much, but enough yo ruin the cool perfection of her make-up. "Remind me not to buy and history papers off you," the cutest guy said to Monica. "What kind of dummy doesn't know that? Though I had been sure none of them had. Really. "Chinese right," I had seen the fury in Monica's eyes, quickly covered over with smiles and laughter and flirting. For most of my (brief, two year) high school experience, being ignored was worse by far.I'd gotten there a year earlier than everybody else, and left a year ahead of them. Nobody liked that. Nobody but teachers anyway. The problem was that I really loved school, books, and reading. Ok not calculus, but pretty much everything else. Physics. What normal girl loved physics? Abnormal ones. Ones who were not ever going to be hot. It wasn't fair. I'd dived in and worked my butt off through high school. Graduated with a perfect 4.0, scored enough on the tests to qualify for admission to the great schools, the legendary schools, the ones where being a brainiac mutant girl freak wasn't necessarily a downside. (except that, of course, at those schools, there were probably hot tall leggy brainiac mutant girl freaks.) Didn't matter. Mom and Dad had taken one look at the stack of enthusiastic thumbs-up replies from universities like MIT, Caltech, and Yale, and clamped down hard. No way was their sixteen-year old daughter (nearly seventeen, I kept insisting, although it wasn't really true) going to run off three thousand miles to go to school. At least not at first. I had tried, unsuccessfully, to get across the concept that if anything would kill me budding academic career worse than being a transfer student at one of those places, it was being a transfer student from Texas Prairie University. Otherwise know as TPEWWWWWW.

Well nothing to do but try to get my stuff back. I gulped a couple a couple more times, wiped my tears, and hauled the arm twisting weight of my backpack up and over my shoulder. I stared for a few seconds at the wet pair of panties and one sock clutched in my right hand, then hastily unzipped the front pocket of the backpack and stuffed them in. Man, that would kill whatever cool I had left, if I walked around carrying those."Well," said a low, satisfied voice from the open door opposite the stairs,"look who it is. The dumpster diver."

I stopped, one hand on the trusted iron railing. Something was telling me to run, but something always told me : fight or flight, I have read the text books, and I was tired of fighting. I turned around slowly, as Monica Morrell stepped out of the dorm room (not hers,) so she's busted Erica's lock again. Monica's running buddies Jennifer and Gina filed out to surround me. Soldiers in flip-flops and low-rise jeans and french manicures.

Monica struck a pose. It was something she was good at, I had to admit. Nearly six feet tall, Monica had flowing, shiny blonde hair, big blue eyes, accented with just the right amount of liner and mascara. Perfect skin. One of those model-shaped faces, all cheekbones and pouty lips. And if she had a model's body, it was Victoria's Secret model, all curves, not angles. She was rich, she was pretty, and as far as I could tell, it didn't make her a bit happy. What made those big blue eyes glow right now was the idea of tormenting me just a little more.

"Shouldn't you be in first period at the Junior High by now?" Monica laughed. "Or at least getting your first period?" "Maybe she's looking for the clothes she left lying around," Gina piled on and laughed. Jennifer laughed with her. I swore their eyes, their pretty jewled-colored eyes, just glowed with the joy of making me feel like crap. "Litterbug! Clothes?" Monica folded her arms and pretended to think. " You mean like those rags we threw away?" "The ones she left cluttering up the washer?" "Yeah those. I wouldn't wear those to sweat in." "I wouldn't wear them to to scrub out the boys toilet," Jennifer blurted. Monica annoyed, turned and shoved me. "Yeah, you know all about the boy's toilet don't you?" "Didn't you do Steve Gillespie in ninth grade in there? She made sucking sounds, and they all laughed again, though Jennifer looked uncomfortable. I suddenly felt my cheeks falre red, even though it wasn't for a change a dis against me. "Jeez, Jen, Steve Gillespie? Keep your mouth shut if you can't think of something that won't embarrass yourself."

Jennifer, of course turned her anger target on a safer target. Which of course happens to be me. She lunged forward and shoved me back a step, towards the stairs. "Go get your stupid clothes already! I'm sick of looking at you, with your pasty skin." "Yeah Junior High, ever heard of sunshine?" Gina rolled her eyes. "Watch it," Monica snapped, which was odd, because all three of them had the best tans money could buy. I scrambled to steady myself, as the heavy backpack pulled me off-balance, and I grabbed onto the banister.

Jen lunged at me again and slammed the heel of her hand painfully hard into my collarbone. "Don't," I yelped, and batted Jen's hand away, hard. There was a second of breathless silence. "Did you just hit my friend, you stupid twit? Where do you think you get off, doing things like that around here?" Monica said very quietly.

Monica stepped forward and slapped me across the face, hard enough to draw blood, hard enough to make flares and comets streak across my vision, hard enough to make everything turn red and boiling hot.

I let go of the banister and slapped Monica right back, full across her pouty mouth, and for just a tight, white-hot second i actually felt good about it, but then Monica hissed like a scorched cat, and I had time to think, oh crap, I really shouldn't have done that.

I never saw the punch coming. Didn't even really feel the impact, except as a blank sensation and confusion, but then the weight of my backpack on my shoulder was pulling me to one side and I staggered. 

I almost caught myself, and then Gina, grinning spitefully, reached over and shoved me backward, down the stairs, and there was nothing but air behind me. I hit the edge of every stair, all the way down to the bottom. My backpack broke open and spilt books as I tumbled, and at the top of the stairs Monica and the Monicketts laughed and hooted and High-fived, but I saw it only in disconnected little jerks of motion, freeze-frames.

It seemed like seconds, but when I woke up again there was somebody kneeling next to me, and it wasn't Monica or her nail-polish mafia. It was Erica, who had the room at the top of the stairs, four doors down from my room. Erica looked pale, strained, and scared. I tried to smile, because that was what you did when somebody was scared.

I didn't hurt until I moved, and then my head started to throb. There was a red-hot ache near the top, and when I reached up to touch it I felt a hard raised knot. No bloob though. It hurt worse when I probed the spot, but noy in a oh-my-God-skull-fracture kind of way, or at least that was what I hoped.

"Are you ok?" Erica asked, waving her hands kind of helplessly in mid-air as I wiggled my way up to a sitting position against the wall. I risked a quick look past her upstairs, then down. The coast looked clear. Nobody else had come out to see what was up either, most of them were afraid of getting in trouble, and the rest just flat didn't care. "Yeah. I guess I tripped," I said and managed a shaky laugh.

"You need to go to the quack shack?" Which was college code for the University Clinic. "Or, God an ambulance, or whatever?" "No. No, I'm ok,"I replied. Wishful thinking, but although basicly everything in my body hurt like hell, nothing felt like it had been broken into pieces. I got to my feet, winced at a sore ankle, and picked up my backpack. Notebooks tumbled out. Erica grabbed a couple and jammed them back in, then ran lightly up a few steps to gather the scattered textbooks. "Better get to the quack shack, seriously. You look like crap," she says. I pasted a smile and kept it there until Erica got to the top of the stairs, and started complaining about the broken lock on her dorm room.

I tasted blood. My lip was split, and it was bleeding. I wiped at the mess with the back of my hand, then the hem of my shirt before realizing that it really was literally the only thing I had to wear.

I need to go down to the basement and get my clothes out of the trash. the idea of going down there, going anywhere alone in this dorm suddenly terrified me. Monica was waiting, and the other girls wouldn't do anything. Even Erica, who was probably the nicest one in the whole place, was scared to come right out on my side. Hell, Erica got hassled too, but she was probably just glad that I was there to get the worst of it. I am alone, and if I hadn't been before, I'm scared now. Really, really scared. What I'd seen in the Monica mafia's eyes today wasn't just the usual lazy menace of cool girls versus the geeks, this was worse. I'd gotten casual punches before, trips, and mean laughter, but this was more like lions coming in for the kill. they're going to kill me. I started shakily down the flights of stairs. Every step a wincing pain through my body, and remembered that I slapped Monica hard enough to leave a mark. Yeah, they're going to kill me. If Monica ended up with a bruise on that perfect face, there wasn't any question about it.