down to its purest parts.
She could do this. She had to do it.
She stepped forward into Gina's body, and got her left foot behind and between Gina's. That put her lower leg at an angle, below Gina's knee.
As Gina stabbed at her with the knife, Claire grabbed her wrist, forced it up and in, and overbalanced her. Gina started to step backward, then yelped as Claire's braced leg took the strength out of her knee.
She went down on her back. Claire twisted the knife out of Gina's hand and dropped down with one knee on her chest, holding her down. She froze, looking down at her, breathing hard. She felt hot and shivery now, and the impulse to take that knife and do something terrible with it boiled up inside. It tasted like rage and fear and all the terrible things she'd ever felt, and for a second, just a second, she thought about what it would be like to make Gina feel that, to make Ginahurt.
Gina's eyes went wide, watching her. She knew. She could see it, too, and for the first time ever, Claire saw that Gina was actually afraid.
"This is what I saw," Miranda said, a quiet little voice at Claire's elbow. "But you're not going to do it. You're a good person."
Claire didn't feel like a good person, not at the moment. She felt sick and a little bit faint, and she didn't resist when Miranda took the knife out of her hand.
"But I'm not that good," Miranda said, and stabbed the knife down at Gina's chest.
Claire screamed and knocked Miranda out of the way, a firm body check that sent Mir stumbling, then rolling. The knife fell to the grass. Gina scrambled for it, but Claire got there first, picked it up, and held it at her side. Gina slowly climbed to her feet, breathing fast, chin down. The fear was gone now, replaced with an insane amount of rage.
"Monica," Claire said. "Call off the pit bull. Now, before this gets worse."
A few torturous seconds of silence passed before Monica said, "Gina. Yo, bitch, chill. We'll finish this some other time."
"Give me back my knife," Gina said.
"Um...no." Claire folded it up and slipped it into her jeans pocket. "The last thing you need is a weapon."
"I'll buy you another one. Come on, Gina. We're going." Jennifer took Gina's arm and tugged on it, glancing at Claire with a mixture of fear and respect. "Like Monica said. We'll get this later."
Gina pointed at Claire. "You. I'll getyou later."
Claire shrugged. "Go for it."
Jennifer pulled her friend away. Monica had already turned her back and was walking away. She paused right before she turned the corner to glance back and nod slightly to Claire.
Odd. It almost looked like respect, too.
Silence. Claire listened to the breeze, the distant laughter of students coming from beyond the trees, and all of a sudden she couldn't stay on her feet. She sat down--sprawled--and rested her forehead in her hands.
Miranda crawled over to sit next to her. "Thank you," she said.
"For what?"
"Stopping me. But you don't know. You don't know what it's like."
"Getting bullied? Kind of do."
Miranda was looking at her with sadness and a strange kind of pity. "No, you don't," she said. "It's been happening since I was in kindergarten. Not them all the time, but other kids, you know. Every day. It never stops, and it never goes away, thanks to the Internet--it just keeps happening every minute, every day. And I just want it to stop. I think about how to do it, you know. How to kill them. All kinds of elaborate things, like trapping them in pits and burying them alive, or covering them with concrete."
It was the most sensible thing Claire had ever heard her say--and the most painful, too. She put her arm around Miranda. Close up, she expected Mir to smell bad, but she didn't; she smelled like lemon shampoo and soap. With a little clothing upgrade and better makeup and hair, she'd be pretty.
Oh, God,she thought, amused.Eve's rubbed off on me. Because the old Claire, the one she'd been before the Glass House, would have never even thought about Miranda's appearance.
"Explain to me why you came to find me," she said. "Was it just that you saw the knife fight?"
"Yes," Miranda said. And then, immediately, "No. There's something else."
"What?"
Miranda looked up at her with those odd, unsettling, luminous eyes. "It's about Shane. I think he's in trouble. There's something wrong in his head.