I faced them with milk dripping from my hair and my history book ruined on the desk.
"That's enough," I said.
Tessa tried to laugh, but it came out thin.
"We're just trying to help you."
I looked around the classroom one more time. Everyone was watching now. There would be no pretending this was a misunderstanding. No claiming I had imagined it. No telling me to work harder while the evidence dried on my clothes.
Tessa had wanted a quiet victim.
She had finally given me a reason to stop being one.
I clenched my jaw and stepped away from the desk.
"You poured milk on me because I closed a book," I said, loud enough that the whole room could hear it. "Everyone here watched you do that. I want everyone here to remember it, because I'm done pretending it didn't happen."
Tessa's eyes flicked toward the door, toward the hallway where footsteps were approaching. "You're being dramatic."
"I'm being honest," I said. "Those aren't the same thing, even if you've spent this whole year hoping I couldn't tell the difference."
Ms. Patterson, my English teacher, stepped through the doorway at that exact moment, a stack of graded essays in her arms, and stopped cold at the sight of me standing there soaked, milk pooling on the floor tile, my history book ruined on the desk in front of me.
"What happened here?"
The room, which had been holding its collective breath, seemed to exhale all at once into overlapping voices. Someone said it was an accident. Someone else said Maya had knocked it over herself. Tessa opened her mouth to offer her own version, but I spoke first, my voice steadier than I expected it to be.
"Tessa poured a carton of milk on my head while Brianna held my chair so I couldn't get up. It wasn't an accident. It's not the first thing they've done this year, either."
Ms. Patterson's gaze moved from me to Tessa to Brianna, and something in her expression shifted from confusion to a kind of weary recognition, as if she had suspected something like this for longer than she'd let herself admit.
"Tessa. Brianna. Both of you, come with me to the office. Now."
"This is ridiculous," Tessa said, but she was already gathering her bag, the bravado draining out of her voice now that an adult had actually witnessed the aftermath instead of just hearing about it secondhand. "It was a joke."
"It didn't look like a joke to me," Ms. Patterson said. "Maya, are you all right?"
I looked down at my ruined shirt, the milk still dripping from the ends of my hair onto my shoulders. "I don't know yet."
"Go to the nurse's office and get cleaned up. I'll send someone to check on you once I've sorted this out." She turned to the rest of the class, most of whom were still frozen in various states of shock or discomfort. "Everyone else, take out your reading assignment. This is not a spectacle."
I gathered my backpack, leaving the ruined history book on the desk because there didn't seem to be any point in salvaging it, and walked out of Room 214 with milk still dripping down the back of my neck, past Tessa and Brianna, who were being escorted in the opposite direction by Ms. Patterson, past the rows of desks where nobody quite met my eyes, though a few — Priya from third period, a boy named Jordan who sat by the window — offered small nods that felt, in that moment, like more support than they probably realized they were giving.