Chapter 1
I thought transferring schools would be my escape.
From Riverbend to Fairhaven, it was a 650-mile drive.
It was a new school with new classes, and not a single person knew who I was.
I really thought I could finally start over.
Then came day five.
Lunch had just ended when a photo popped up in the class group chat.
It was me.
My mouth was hanging wide open, with cafeteria soup dripping down my chin.
The caption was three words long. [Pig feeding time.]
I didn't recognize the sender. But I recognized the photo. I knew exactly who took it.
Adrian Monroe.
Six hundred and fifty miles, and he still tracked me down.
*****
Let me explain why I transferred in the first place.
It started three months ago during the spring semester of my sophomore year at Riverbend High.
Adrian handed me a letter between classes. It was a pink envelope with "For Olivia" written across the front.
The entire hallway was watching us.
I opened it and read it once.
Then I looked at him and gave a simple answer. "No thanks."
That was it.
I didn't mock him. I didn't show the letter to anyone, and I definitely didn't gossip about it.
His face flushed a little, and he just muttered that it was fine.
I honestly thought that was the end of it.
The next morning, I found a printed photo sitting on my desk.
It was a shot of me running on the track, caught mid-fall with my face smashed into the dirt.
I had no idea who took it, and the camera angle was incredibly low.
Someone had scrawled a message across it: [An ugly freak like you has the nerve to reject people?]
I ripped the photo up and brushed it off.
On the third day, another photo appeared.
By the fourth day, they started hitting the school group chat.
There were three photos the first week and eight the second.
They were all horrible candids of me eating, dozing off in study hall, or squatting down to tie my shoe.
The captions only got nastier.
[This pig actually rejected the most popular guy in school?]
[She isn't even worthy to look at Adrian.]
Adrian never posted them himself. But absolutely everyone knew he was the one pulling the strings.
I went straight to the guidance counselor.
He told me it was just kids joking around and that I shouldn't be so sensitive.
I told him it wasn't a joke.
He looked at me and let out a heavy sigh. "Olivia, Adrian's father just funded the new STEM center. You need to think carefully before making a fuss."
That was the exact moment I realized the school was never going to protect me.
The photos kept coming. People started pointing and whispering whenever I walked down the halls.
"That's the girl who turned Adrian down."
"Pretty picky for someone who looks like that."
"I heard Adrian swore he'd make her leave this school."
A month later, he kept his promise.
During a passing period, someone dumped a bottle of black ink into my backpack.
My textbooks, my binders, my phone. Everything was completely ruined.
I just stood there watching the thick black liquid drip onto the floor.
The entire classroom went dead silent.
Adrian was sitting in the back row with his feet kicked up on a desk.
He smiled at me.
I would never forget that smile.
It wasn't a mocking smirk. It was a dark look that clearly said, "See? I told you so."
I went home that night and finally told my mom everything.
She stayed up crying until morning.
The very next day, she took off work to pull me out of that school.
From Riverbend to Fairhaven, it was 650 miles.
My mom found a job at a local garment factory.
She brought home barely one thousand dollars a month, and our rent took up two thousand of it.
She just hugged me and told me it was fine. She promised she could provide for us and that we were getting a fresh start.
I never had the heart to tell her about the last message Adrian sent to the school chat on the day we left. [Does she really think running away will save her?]
It was followed by twenty-seven laughing emojis.
I counted them. Every single one.
*****
Fairhaven High was a competitive magnet school.
You had to pass an entrance exam to get in.
My grades were good enough, and I ranked thirty-eighth in my year on the placement test.
Maxwell Adler, my new homeroom teacher, gave me a warm smile and welcomed me to the class.
My new desk partner was a quiet girl named Evelyn Brooks. She wore glasses, barely spoke, and always had a stack of coding manuals on her desk.
Nobody paid any attention to me on my first day.
The second day, someone actually said hi.
By the third day, a couple of girls asked me to play volleyball with them in gym class.
On the fourth day, I almost broke down crying in the cafeteria.
Because everything was so terrifyingly normal.
No one pointed at me.
No one whispered behind my back.
No one tried to pour ink into my bag.
For the first time in months, I felt like going to school wasn't a nightmare.
Then came day five.
Lunch was over, and I was flipping through a textbook.
My phone buzzed with a notification from the class group chat. I clicked it open.
It was a photo of me.
The cafeteria shot with my mouth hanging open and soup dripping down my chin.
It was taken back at Riverbend.
Caption: [Pig feeding time.]
The sender was an anonymous account named "Stranger" using a default gray profile picture.
The chat went completely dead for two seconds.
Then someone asked, [Who's that?]
Another person chimed in, [Isn't that the new girl?]
My hands started to shake.
A second photo popped up.
It was the picture of me face-planting on the track.
Caption: [A day in the life of an ugly freak.]
Then a third photo. Me dozing off and drooling on my desk.
Caption: [Absolutely disgusting.]
Three photos dropped back to back.
Nobody said a word in the chat after that.
Forty-seven people read the messages, but not a single person replied.
I placed my phone face down on the desk and looked around the room.
A guy in the front row was sneaking glances over his shoulder at me.
Two girls in the back were whispering.
Evelyn kept her head down and didn't even look at her phone.
By sixth period, I felt the shift.
Evelyn's desk had been moved a few inches away from mine.
It was a tiny distance. But I saw it.
After class, I went straight to the restroom.
I locked the stall door and crouched down on the floor.