Bully Proof

Chapter Six

The first couple of days of my prison sentence weren't that bad - I slept through most of them and Spencer and Lexi visited me every day while I wasn't sleeping. We watched Aladdin on repeat and ate lots of junk food. They had school, though, which meant I had no visitations for the next five days, which made those five days feel tedious and tiresome. All I longed for was to get up and walk around. I purposely drank lots of water so that I could go to the bathroom more often. Mom caught onto my act, and she limited my water supply after that. I had never thought that would happen.

Such ended the first week of torture. The second one was much worse.

I was extremely antsy the whole time. I couldn't stop moving - my leg, my hand, my foot. I needed to be free of my confinements and do something.

It was only two days before my release date when Spencer and Lexi visited me again, this time, with a laptop. I thought we were going to watch Netflix the whole day, but it seemed that they had other plans.

"We don't want you to be surprised when you go back to school," Lexi said as she kneeled down next to my bed, placing the laptop on my stomach, still closed.

"So we have the posts ready to show you on the laptop, if you want a heads up and want to see them. We can tell you what you want to know, instead, so you don't have to see it firsthand, or we don't have to show you or say anything if you don't want to know," Spencer added.

I opened the laptop and saw that it was already on Claire's Instagram account. Of course it would be on Instagram. Snaps disappeared long before anyone could have read all of this, Twitter didn't allow enough characters in one Tweet to say everything you want to say (and believe me, I said a lot), and no one used Facebook anymore, so it made sense.

I didn't bother looking at the pictures because I already knew what they entailed. It was the comments I was concerned with. As I scrolled through them, I saw a lot of usernames I did and did not recognize, but all of them basically said the same thing: I was asking for it. I thought that "it" meant a lot of things, like going through Claire's torture, but I had a feeling that they were mostly talking about me almost dying.

she probs faked getting sick. #dramaqueen

She's such an attention whore. She deserves what's coming for her.

wow claire. sorry u have 2 put up w her.

Those were only a couple of the comments that I read, but they made me spill silent tears all the same. How people could say such things, given the circumstances, or even at all, was beyond me. I guess it all made sense, though; after all, this is Claire we're talking about. She always seemed to baffle me with how cruel she could get. She just set a new record, which at least double her previous one. She had handed me my all time low on a plate.

Lexi put her hand on my shoulder and closed the laptop with her other hand. I sat up in my bed and waved Spencer over to come join us. He went to the other side of my bed, and I wrapped my right arm around Lexi's shoulders and my left around Spencer's, creating the closest thing to a group hug that we could manage.

"Claire has been talking about how much she hates you. She's being so dramatic about it. She's even asked all of your teachers to switch seats so that you guys don't have to sit next to each other," Lexi told me.

While that obviously had its perks, like putting distance between Claire and me, it also had a downfall: it made Claire seem like the victim.

"Will you guys stay with me when I go back to school?" I squeaked, closing my eyes so that I couldn't see them. I didn't want to see them shake their heads, and after that, have my eyes betray me by producing tears again. I trusted my ears more than I did my eyes to give the impression that them not staying wouldn't be a big deal.

"Why wouldn't we?" Lexi asked. "We're here now. Claire isn't."

"Yeah, and Amanda talked to me the other day. She said that she got into this fight with Claire about how she's been treating you, so they aren't really friends anymore. Amanda told me that she wants to sit next to you in your classes, if you'll let her, because we know you aren't comfortable when you're alone. Lexi and I don't have schedules that interact with yours, and you and Amanda used to be close, so we thought it might work out," Spencer informed.

"Yeah," I nodded, "yeah." I sat there nodding for a few seconds before it all really sank in. A smile formed on my face, "Thank you for caring about me."

"That's what friends do," Spencer chuckled.

Lexi and Spencer then stood up, and they told me that they'd be here when my two weeks were up. That day happened to be on a Saturday, and they said that we would have a very busy weekend of walking around and having fun, all things that I hadn't been able to do since I got sick.

"Thanks, guys. See you Saturday," I called out to them.

"See you Saturday," they said in sync as they left.

I sighed, possibly feeling happy in all of this mess. I finally had something to look forward to, and that's really all you need to keep yourself going.