The Sacrificial Daughter (5 page)

Laughter, cruel and mocking, followed after Jesse as she left the cafeteria. Her shirt was ruined; it ran with red sauce and oil. She fled to the nearest bathroom where she attempted to clean it in the sink. This seemed only to spread the stain and when she was done, it was so wet that
everything
beneath showed through. She looked like a dying hooker from a horror movie.

"Damn it!" Jesse screamed and then the tears came, they were hot on her face. Ashamed of them—they made her feel so weak—she went to a stall and hid there...and cried some more.

Girls came and went. The bell for fifth period rang, then six minutes later the late bell rang as well and still Jesse cried. She was furious at everyone in the school. They hated her and she hated them right back. It was a passionate hate on her part and they could all rot in hell for all she cared. After a while, being half-naked, she grew cold. Sneaking out of the stall she took her shirt to the hand dryer and ran it repeatedly until the shirt had dried well enough to put back on.

Jesse then went to mirror and looked at the person who was hated to such an awful degree. She couldn't understand it. How people could be this way was simply beyond her. Heavy tears began again to fall from her cheeks and just then the bell for the sixth period rang. Like a coward she ran back to the bathroom stall and locked the door. There she sat… alone.

Girls came and went. They giggled and laughed and talked up a storm. The subject of boys came up and everyone agreed that Allen was by far the dreamiest. This brought about the topic of the coming Christmas ball and a parade of hopes floated along the white tiles of the bathroom. The talk turned to dresses and shoes and who would look most like a princess. Then the words Jesse had feared the most popped out of someone's mouth. The words were—Jesse Clarke.

Whatever nasty things they were going to say Jesse refused to hear. She clamped her hands to her ears and began rocking back and forth. A muffled bell rang. It was the late bell for sixth period. Slow and tentatively, Jesse pulled her hands back. The bathroom was mercifully quiet again and there she sat… alone.

Eventually her legs grew numb from sitting in one place for so long and she got up and went to the mirror again. The girl there was pathetic looking. Her makeup had run down her face, her eyes were red and puffy and her stupid marinara stained shirt looked idiotic. The shirt, the skirt, the shoes, the blonde hair had all been a bad idea. The girl who had dressed so thoughtfully that morning was a putz. She was a weakling and a coward; a person afraid of eating alone.

Who could like someone like that?

Jesse dunked her hands under hot running water and began washing away the makeup. Beneath it she saw the hard girl that had walked the halls of Copper Ridge High. That girl had been hated, but unafraid. That girl had once stabbed a boy with a wickedly sharp pencil. At Copper Ridge all of her pencils were wickedly sharp.

When her face was scrubbed clean, she rolled the sleeves of her shirt far up and then untucked the bottom of her shirt. She undid half the buttons and then tied the loose ends of her shirt just below her breasts. It made her look a touch slutty, but not for a second did she care since at least the stain was halfway hid. Next she pulled off her shoes and then groaned in relief.

Not a minute later the bell for seventh period rang.

For her, AP History, room 235 was her next class. It was all the way down the length of the school. In actuality this wasn't very far, but as she opened the bathroom door it seemed like the hall was a mile long and was filled with thousands of laughing, jeering teenagers.

Was it her imagination, or were they all staring at her? Were they all pointing? Did the name Jesse Clarke roll down the hall in a whispered undertone beneath the hated laughter?

Jesse gave her head a brief shake and then gritted her teeth in determination.
Remember, you are tough and you are strong
, with this mantra going through her mind, she strode down the center of the hall as if she owned the place.

As the most hated person in every school that she had ever attended, Jesse had learned a few things about walking down crowded halls. The first thing she had discovered was that there were going to be jerks who would want to smash into her as she passed by. This was an inevitability.

The trick to combating it was a simple little maneuver. She would act like she
wanted
the shoulder-to-shoulder confrontation and as her assailant would brace in preparation to send her sprawling, Jesse would make ready in the opposite manner. At the last second she would dip her shoulder back and step deftly to the side.

This worked almost every time, though it depended upon a state of awareness that was uncommon in teenagers. The hated one hadn't initially been blessed with this hyper-awareness, but over time, and with many a bruised shoulder, her mind and body had adapted. Her eyes would flick about with startling speed, going from person to person, judging
their
mental state by how they walked, who they were with, and where they were positioned amongst their friends. Were they slouched, bored with school and just wanting to get to class? Were they with a girl in a nice dress and wished to look gentlemanly? Or were they alone?

Rarely did people alone ever bother Jesse. Sure they might sneer or drop the word "Bitch" as she passed, but a physical confrontation was an uncommon thing with a lone person. It was when they traveled in packs that she had to take the most care. Then the least little dweeb might want to try something to impress his or her friends.

On that stroll through the halls of Ashton High, she was likely just too new yet to actually have to worry about any of this. This was the part in her little Greek tragedy in which she would be sized up. This was the stage where her physical and mental presence would be judged and it was important to come across as someone not to be messed with.

Therefore she held her head high and looked the other teenagers in the eye as she passed… at first. Then something caught her attention that was so out of the norm in her school experiences that she was shocked into staring.

In front of her a ghost moved down the hall.

There was a second tactic to moving in crowded corridors, one that worked better even than the first. It was simple. All Jesse had to do to move from class to class safely was to get behind a group of football players…linemen she believed they were called. The very largest and strongest kids played on the line and when they sauntered down the halls, they were like battleships plowing down a narrow river. People scurried out of their way and Jesse found that if she stayed in their wake, she could drift along behind virtually unnoticed by all.

Amazingly, this ghost, though slightly built had that same ability.

He wasn't a ghost of course, he was the boy who had stood in front of her at the back of the lunch-line, and he was quite solid. However, for all intents and purposes he was the ghost of Ashton High. The other kids seemed to look right through him. They noticed his presence among them but pretended they didn't. He drifted soundlessly down the hall and although he was only average in size, Jesse was amazed to see the crowd part for him like he was the biggest leviathan on the football team.

It was so strange to Jesse that she followed along after him and she passed her own classroom without even a glance into the room. The ghost went to the next and last room in the hall where two girls stood in the doorway. He walked right between them without even the courtesy to say excuse me and only one seemed to even twitch at his passing.

She was a big haired girl with pasty skin that seemed to crawl as he went by and when he was safely in the room, she gave the slightest barely perceptible shudder, just as if a ghost out of a book or movie had gotten too close. Jesse walked between the same two girls.

"Excuse me," she said by reflex only, her mind was too absorbed in the ghost for actual thought out politeness. She watched him go to the back of the class to a desk that was purposely set apart from the rest. As he passed, the ten or so students in the classroom all found convenient things other than the ghost to look at. Heads were turned slightly away, eyes were averted, and awkward conversations picked up in volume. The ghost sat down and taking a book from his bag, began to read, ignoring those who ignored him.

Jesse turned to the girl on her right. "Can you tell me who that boy is?"

The girl, a blonde who had apparently applied her make-up with the hopes of being mistaken for a transvestite said, "Yeah, his name is John McScrewyourself."

Jesse blinked in surprise, having momentarily forgotten that she was hated, but she rallied quickly. "Oh, so you two are related then?"

The larger girl with the 80's teased hair, whose skin had crawled with the passing of the ghost, looked stunned at first at what had just been said. She then realized who it was that stood in front of her. "You're that bitch, whose dad fired my mom, aren't you?"

Jesse could have made an attempt to side with the two girls and denounce her father as the straight up bastard that he was, only she knew it wouldn't work. Instead she stepped up in the girl's face.

"And you're the bitch who will be missing her front teeth if she thinks she's ever going to call me that again." Jesse stared hard into the girl's eyes, knowing what was coming next. The big haired girl thought she knew as well, but in truth she hadn't really thought past her next word.

"Bitch," she said slow and obvious.

The word seemed to set a spark in Jesse's eye. It was a lusty spark that denoted danger and she hoped the big haired girl read it properly. The key to not fighting is to actually want to fight, or at least to seem like you wanted to. For Jesse, she was in a semi-bluff position. As a street fighter she was very good for a girl. In fact against other girls she was thirteen wins against only one defeat and two draws. On the other hand, the big hair of her opponent sat atop a very big girl. And she wasn't fat either, more like a volleyball player. She had Jesse by at least thirty pounds in weight and four inches in height.

The girl saw the spark in Jesse's eyes, paused for a moment and then her own eyes sparked as well. She was game for a fight, or so she thought.

In a semi-bluff position it paid to keep betting, it put the pressure on one's opponent and Jesse was sure that her opponent thought the fight would be a modified hair pulling event in the hallway that would go on to the cheers of the other students until a teacher broke it up. But Jesse had other plans. A fight such as the one the girl was envisioning would only cause many more fights down the road. Instead, Jesse wanted to take it out back and go at it girl against girl.

The fight she envisioned would have her pummeling the girl into a half-conscious state and then coming back into the school alone. And when she did, it would be with a smile of pleasure on her face at having ripped the big hair off the girl's head. That sort of fight would discourage other fights. It wouldn't stop them all together, but at least there would be far fewer.

"Let's go," Jesse said simply and began to walk away. She turned to see the girl looking slightly perplexed. "Come on. We'll do this out back, behind the cafeteria. Just you and me…it'll be fun." There was no hesitation in her words and her voice was like cold steel.

The girl hesitated, the spark in her eyes dimmed. Jesse had put a lot on the table and her demeanor suggested very strongly that she could back it up with her fists.

"I'm not going out there…I have class."

"So you're all talk?" Jesse made sure the distain was clear in her voice for all to hear. "You call people rude names and then you hide behind excuses. Fine, you don't have time now, how bout down at the berm after school?"

There had been a growing crowd around the two girls and with it came an increased murmuring, but at the mention of the berm, the hall grew silent. Big haired girl's eyes looked about with a touch of wildness to them. The idea of the berm frightened her and that very obvious fact brought back the memory of the Shadow-man in Jesse's mind.

Maybe fighting down at the berm wasn't such a good idea. Still there was no backing down from this sort of dare once it was out there, not in a situation such as this.

"Well?" Jesse asked as the pause lengthened.

"What's going on," a man's voice spoke up sharply. "What's going on?" A dapper man in a three-piece suit pushed through the crowd. He stood staring for a moment at Jesse and the girl, he then asked in a somewhat fussy manner, "Have you two been fighting?"

"No Mr. Irving. We were only arguing," the girl said, speaking for Jesse as well.

"That's good, Amanda. I don't want to have to suspend anyone so close to the holidays, but I will if I have to," Mr. Irving threatened. "Now get to class, all of you before the late bell rings."

With a last glare at the girl, Amanda, Jesse turned to leave, but Mr. Irving called her back. "Miss Clarke? You were absent from my sixth period economics class. Have you anything to say for yourself?"

"I...I was sick." It was the truth in a way, but sounded extremely lame nonetheless.

It sounded lame to Mr. Irving as well and he cocked an eye at the excuse. "Then you will need to go to the nurse's office for a note excusing you."

After the near fight, Jesse was deflating rapidly. "Sure. Could you tell me where..."