My Sister's a Guardian (RotG Fanfiction)

Chapter 1: The Relationship Game

(Content/trigger warnings for this chapter: self-hatred, bullying, fatphobic comment, mention of anxiety)

--Ranya--

Windshallow High School reminded me of a spiderweb—hairline cracks split across the peeling red-painted bricks, halls intersecting with halls intersecting with more halls, and the fragility. Sometimes purple water dripped from the ceiling. Sometimes one of the doors fell off its hinges. Sometimes one of the walls caved in.

But more than that, Windshallow High School was a spiderweb because of the people. Spiders scuttled through the halls, tittered in the bathrooms, and sank their fangs into unsuspecting passersby.

It was my job to exterminate them.

My heart beat quick as I turned to the first page in my notebook in the reeking bathroom stall, slicing myself on the paper's edge. I grimaced. The world flashed with bright colors just as painful from the Watcher's hallucinations. But I would fight it. Especially because today's ostracization was a little more... personal.

The hall was still packed with students, and the caved-in wall a few feet ahead didn't help. I needed to quickly get lunch, present my findings, and get back to the bathroom to try to get Dakota to help me again.

I shoved my way into the crowd and the pressed, sweaty bodies of my classmates.

"Do you think she's on drugs again?" a porcelain-skinned girl whispered to my left. My chest panged its familiar ache.

"You see the way she's clutching the wall for dear life?" a boy with a similar face replied. "Definitely."

Another boy with the stench of a landfill purposely knocked into my side as the world swerved particularly hard, and I crashed onto a hard pothole in the floor. Laughter rang out around me, and some people stopped to watch. My knees throbbed. People whispered speculations on what drugs I had to be using this time.

"It's like those strange storms from the news!" someone said.

"No, Ranya's worse."

What storms? I narrowed my eyes and dug my fingers into the rough grooves of the wall to try to stand. The first time, I fell back on my knees. The second time, too. The third try, I made it back up. Whispers grew around the hall as people watched my progress.

Laughter continued to bounce around me as I got my lunch and balanced it in one arm while I used the other to keep me stable. I nearly fell several times. Usually I fell.

I soon made it into the high-ceilinged gym crammed with half-broken tables. Cracks ran along the walls in jagged patterns—more like fangs than spiderwebs. It reminded me of the feeling I'd begun to have this past week like needles on my back— that something dangerous was coming.

I quickly made my way to the bleachers on one end of the room, dropped my tray on the bottom one, and set up my area with my trifold poster board and its text and photos.

Then I extended my pointer from my bookbag, managed to stand up without stumbling, grasping a nearby rusted railing, and cleared my throat. The rust dug into my hands in my death grip.

All sounds in the room silenced. The only time when people pay attention to me not as a drug addict. My pointer suddenly vanished from my hand with a tinkling sound. I gasped, and titters bounced around the room—some about me, and some about the curses of Windshallow. I collapsed hard back onto the bleachers as I reached for my bookbag again. Laughter erupted across the room. I fished out a black mechanical pencil and left my bookbag open as I stood back up.