Saint Ambrose Academy: Unlikelies

13

ENZO

I spiraled last night, down the existential crisis rabbit hole. If karma is a thing, I am drowning in bad karma. The more I dove into the fake accounts the worse the content got. I don't have to question where the bruises came from, the way people abuse this girl and carelessly post about it online, it's no wonder she's a walking bruise. The videos only got worse too, they were hard to watch, and man those videos oh those videos made me spiral. I obsessed over how many times I just sat back and let someone be tortured, clueless as to how bad it was.

It's beyond what I imagined, and I don't know if it's the alcohol I consumed to numb the darkness rising in me or the cruelty but I begin to feel sick to my stomach. Despite my better judgment, I look again, I have to face the pain I caused. I'm doing just that when I scroll across a video from last year.

They tied her half-naked to a tree and wrote insults all over her body, some people told her she was fat, others ugly, others called her a slut or a bitch, some used racial slurs, and some people wrote big advertisements meant to tempt people into harming her. I feel guilty when I remember this day, I remember people talking about this, I told them it was messed up but I didn't listen to who they did it to, I didn't stop them, and I probably laughed at her expense because I was too high too ignorant to take it seriously.

I keep scrolling and it feels like it just doesn't end, years and years' worth of videos and photos. There's even an account dedicated to pretending she's dead, where students just write nasty things about her and how glad they are that she was gone. I scroll some more, there's girls cornering her in restrooms, some videos even show male students joining in and tripping or shoving her, teachers punishing her for startling in class when provoked by other students, vandalizing her property, ruining her clothes, cutting her hair, laughing at her misery. I don't understand why people are so cruel to her. Lia's the only person I'd ever seen interact with her, Nova's polite to people, in fact, she is always polite, but I have never seen another person make her happy, only Lia and the one thing I can't help but notice in all of this, is how it shows a clear picture of her losing her spark. With each video, it's like you can see her get more and more closed off, and the cold demeanor she's become iconic for having is the result of the light being snuffed out with every incident.

The accounts don't start till high school but some of the more popular accounts have evidence that even in middle school she was subjected to bullying, it was just less severe. I had just made it through the posts from her freshman year, and there's another video...

This time she's at a house party at the city University campus, a party I was in attendance for. I didn't think the Ice Princess did parties so this never registered before, I was extremely wasted and high that night, and most of it is a blur, but now that I think on it, I do remember Matteo brought Nova as his date. It was tradition for Saint Ambrose kids to attend this party, like an end-of-the-school-year blowout party, one of the wilder parties thrown, and Matteo forewarned all his friends (and friends by association such as myself) that he was taking the Ice Princess. Everyone laughed at him thinking it was some joke, and he didn't laugh along, he said it was a bet but that everyone was to treat her as his proper date, honestly I'd believe it if he really had been interested in her back then.

She drank enough that she loosened up, and I remember thinking that maybe she wasn't cold as ice, that her heart did indeed beat. We moved the party to a bedroom within the house, and after that, I blacked out. A feat that was never a big deal before, because I didn't think anything happened that was anything worth remembering, but this video shows differently. They took advantage of the drunken state she was in, making her make a fool of herself as their cameras rolled. Providing the already wasted girl with more alcohol and weed, and puppeteering her into cruel pranks, and when she got too sloppy for them (probably because of alcohol poisoning) they ditched her at the party, leaving her incapacitated and alone in a shed outside the frat house. The video was hours long, and I was in it, passed out for most of it, but the brief moments I came to I would just give a thumbs up and laugh completely unaware of my surroundings. Now I know why she hates me. Honestly? I hate me too.