Haunted Rayne

6 | The Rebel's Recess

Rayne Foster never really enjoyed physical education unless it involved dodgeball or softball. Ever since the tender age of three, Rayne struggled to play well with others. Her greatest joys were found in pushing boundaries, pranking people, and stumbling into fistfights. The word "teamwork" only brought frustration.

Today, however, Rayne bounced down the stairs to the gymnasium faster than a five-year-old on Christmas morning. The isolation of her new post-murder world was becoming unbearable, and part of her, just a tiny part, wondered if that loneliness contributed to her recent mental decline. She had only been at this school for a day, and the hallucinations were getting worse.

On her way to the locker room, she caught sight of another dark shape in her peripheral. Her heart skipped. When she spun around, the mass whirled around with her, looping under her arm before swooping upward. From the black vapors, a torso began to take form, long dark fingers reaching towards her. Its empty face stopped just inches from hers. She began to tremble.

Students in the vast hallway watched as fear gripped her by the ankles, halting her footsteps midstride. They watched her eyes widen with terror, a pebble of sweat dripping down the left side of her face. But they couldn't see it.

Why couldn't they see it?

Rayne opened her mouth, but the mass started to whisper.

The sound was dreadful and distant, like the soft drone of a broken washing machine in a closed laundry room. Rayne covered her ears and stomped through it, muttering, "Not real, not real, not real, not real."

She reached the locker room and tried to strike the whispers from her mind, but they were still there, a persistent fly buzzing in her ear. She even found herself swatting the air a few times, recoiling as if she'd felt the displacement of air tickle her skin.

"Not real, not real, not real, not real."

Just like the rest of campus, the locker room gleamed like a mausoleum for girls who'd never known dirt. Rayne could see her reflection in the black-and-white tiled floor—distorted, watery, split by grout lines. Around her, girls peeled off designer lingerie with practiced indifference, the air thick with hairspray and perfume named after cities they had only vacationed in. They all looked like they'd been dipped in pearl and daylight—porcelain limbs, lacquered hair, the curated symmetry of catalogue daughters. But Rayne's skin held the memory of sun somewhere beneath the pallor, like bronze buried under frost. Her collarbones cast shadows sharp enough to cut. She didn't gleam. Didn't glow. She was a long-lost heirloom, wrapped in the wrong color silk.

She changed quickly when she thought no one was looking, her black bra and boy shorts clinging to a body that had forgotten softness. Her bruises had turned the color of old violets, and her ribs were too visible now—knuckles for a cage. She hated how quiet the locker room fell as she moved.

"Look, girls. I think we just found patient zero," someone said.

Rayne yanked up her black gym shorts and spun around. It was Bianca Hawthorne. The girl was shadowed by two of her friends—the strawberry blonde from English class, and a girl with almond eyes, feathered bangs, and caramel highlights in her black hair. 

Wearing her T-shirt tied above her navel, and her gym shorts rolled down, Bianca laughed. "Better run, girls. Before she bites you."

"Shut up, Bianca," said Rayne.

"Excuse me?" Bianca stepped closer, placed a hand to Rayne's shoulder, and pushed. "Wanna run that one by me again, you ugly zombie bitch?"

"Did I stutter?" Rayne shoved passed her and between her two friends. Before she could blink, one of them had grabbed her by the hair and yanked backward as hard as a lawn mower starter rope. It was the strawberry blonde. Rayne heard the girl scream and looked up just in time to see a good chunk of her curls clumped in the girl's hand—dark, dense, and coiled like it had fought the whole way out.