Girlfriend On Mars

5. "She went to jail!"

Five.

"She went to jail!" 

Marley's friends couldn't seem to let it go. She realised at lunch that the girls couldn't stop bringing up Jen Archer's name in conversation, with as much resentment as Mya had shown a few days earlier. It made Marley uncomfortable, she didn't want to get too involved, but she didn't want to sit out in case her friends thought she was protecting the outcast girl.

She did her best to steer clear of Jen over the days until their first practise together. She made herself sparse and ended up later to lessons and after school commitments. Part of her was quite curious as to why the beautiful, dark-haired girl was so disliked; she assumed the everyone just knew the reason except her.

Marley's friend, Leanne Kingsley, seemed to be leading the conversation with Mya not far behind in agreement. They had brought up the Archer girl again.

"Do you know why she was held back?" Leanne started knowingly. "'Cause I do."

"Why did she?" Marley asked, folding her rubbish packets into neat squares so she could throw them away when she passed a bin.

"Because she went to jail." Leanne stated, watching Marley's shocked reaction closely with her beady, brown eyes. "Six to nine months allegedly."

Marley brought her hand to her mouth in silent surprise. "And what for?"

"Drugs I think." Mya said, joining the conversation suddenly again.

"I heard she assaulted someone, sent them to the hospital." Leanne said, fuelling Marley's curiosity further. "It was apparently really terrible."

"I'm not surprised! Did you see Lisa after the fight?" Mya shook her head. She turned her head to see if the girls in the group had seen anything but no one apart from Leanne spoke.

"Blood was pouring from her nose- it was like turning on the faucet. It was everywhere, and for a few minutes she couldn't even talk she was so winded." Leanne exclaimed, seeming morbidly excited at the topic. She'd probably hung back with the groupies when it had happened. "Then as soon as she could talk, she was yelling that her ribs felt broken."

Marley felt her face drain of colour, a sickly paleness painting her cheeks. Frankly, she felt a bit sick. It dawned on her that this was the girl who had been bothering her and who had been so eager to talk with her. The girl she felt so afraid of, rightfully so. Marley thought she was a thug and even though Lisa wasn't the nicest, what had happened seemed so unfair and so terrible. She definitely couldn't talk with Jen after the conversation she had with her friends, they'd seriously give her some trouble if she did. Her friends all mutually hated Jen Archer and were determined to not have her join the soccer club.

But Marley felt caught in a trap. How could she tell Jen that she couldn't be in the club? How did the girls expect her to say that?

"That's so disgusting. This is exactly why she can't be on the soccer team." The girls all looked pointedly at Marley, who hung her head. "We really can't have her there, Marley. She'll bring trouble to us."

"I got it. I'm sorry." Marley muttered, clutching her rubbish packets tightly in her pale hands. She disliked all the responsibility being forced upon her but then again, team member recruitment was an automatic responsibility of the captain. It was something she'd chosen to bear when becoming the leader. In that moment though, she wanted to discard her title as captain and give it up to someone else. The pressure of dumping a newly joined Jen from the team was becoming overwhelming already for the blonde.