"What?"
"For the attention," she said. "You're always begging for it."
Brianna leaned around my shoulder.
"We're helping you loosen up."
They called it help because the truth sounded worse.
They were humiliating me because they knew nobody had stopped them.
I wiped milk from my eyes and looked at the students watching from their desks. Some looked frightened. Some looked embarrassed. One girl lowered her phone under the table.
No one spoke.
Tessa smiled again.
That smile told me she believed the room belonged to her.
For months, I had mistaken silence for safety. I had thought keeping my head down would protect my future, protect my mother from another problem, and protect me from becoming the angry girl everyone blamed.
But sitting there soaked in milk, I finally understood what my silence had protected.
It had protected them.
Tessa reached for the edge of my ruined book.
"Aw," she said. "Are you going to cry?"
I looked at her hand.
Then I looked at the chair Brianna was still gripping behind me.
My fear was still there. My hands were still shaking. But underneath the fear was something harder, something I had pushed down every morning when I walked through those doors.
I slowly stood.
The chair scraped across the floor.
Tessa's smile disappeared.
Brianna took one step back.