7 Robin Meets an Old Enemy

July 16th

Armand opened the door and made it down the stairs to Camille, where I had to make it clear that there would be no smoking in my car, thank you very much.

I'd thought his strikingly scruffy appearance the other day had been a result of the long flight, but apparently this was just ... him. Even though he was clearly clean and well-rested, his hair was damp and hanging in shiny un-styled clumps, his clothes were still faded and scuffed, and it appeared that shaving had not been on the agenda this morning.

Once he'd put his cigarette out, I let him in Camille and rolled the windows all the way down. We'd left the parking lot and started toward the Norse-U campus when I turned to grin at him. "Excited?"

He glanced at me sideways, seemed to contemplate the question for a few seconds, then shrugged.

I revised my approach: "Nervous?"

This time it was a glare.

But instead of a shrug, I got a soft and grumbly "Yes," only about five minutes after the question had been asked.

"Well, you shouldn't be." I patted his knee. "You're gonna do great!"

After that, he stopped responding to me, until I'd parked in front of the arts building and walked him toward the lobby. He stopped by the main entrance.

"That'll do, Titch," he rumbled.

I blinked up at him. "You don't want me to come in with you?" God only knew if he could find his way to the right room.

"I'll be all right. You go do ... whatever it is you do." He clenched a hand in his hair and looked up at the building, squinting in the sunlight. I was very aware of the fact that he was almost a foot taller than me, about a decade older, and obviously much more worldly and experienced than I was, but he looked so lost and alone I wanted to hug him. "Are you sure? I can—"

"I'll see you in class." He fidgeted for a moment. "Later this evening?"

I nodded. "And I'm supposed to drive you home."

"See you then, Titch." He smiled at me, actually smiled, and headed inside.

What the hell did Titch even mean?

I took a deep breath and looked out over campus, trying to figure out what to do with the hours I hadn't expected to have free. Eventually, I decided to cut toward the theater building, see if there was anyone there and if they wanted to hang out. I needed to start doing more to maintain relationships now that I was officially a prima donna, lest I lose all my friends to the green-eyed monster.

After spending my entire freshman year in the chorus, I'd finally won out over sixteen other hopeful and starry-eyed auditionees. I'd proved myself the starry-eyed-est! I was going to play Peter Pan in The Shadow of Never—a Peter Pan retelling penned by Visiting Scholar Someone Or Other in Norsemen's very own English Department. It was a dark, raw, whimsical reimagining of Neverland where Captain Hook was a disillusioned, thirties-something barista with a failed startup; Wendy Darling was a beautiful young Zumba instructor; and Peter Pan was actually Hook's younger self who'd traveled through time to try to convince himself to never grow up. Or something. I'd read the script a bunch of times now, and I still wasn't entirely sure what was going on.

But that didn't matter. What mattered was that I'd earned the right to be a diva, so now was the time, more than ever, to remind the Little People that I still remembered what it was like to be among them.

I cut through the quad, then around the corner of the music school to the front plaza of the theater—

And froze.

Terri Bishop was lounging across the steps.

Terri Bishop, who I hadn't seen in over a year.

Terri Bishop, who was supposed to be three thousand miles away, going to an elite East Coast school and hobnobbing with other like-minded psychopaths.

But no, here he was. And so were Mason Harris, Glenn Olson, and two other young bucks I didn't know and who would henceforth be referred to as Frat Boys Beta and Gamma. They all appeared to be engaged in filming something—Terri was talking into the phone held by Mason. But he stopped when he caught sight of me, and his eyes widened.

The entire contents of my torso slithered into my kneecaps. I was frozen to the spot.

I should run; I should just turn around and ru—

"FLINCH!!" Terri roared and sprang to his feet, moving toward me like the inevitability of death. I'd never understood how someone so big and so muscular could also be so fast; before I managed to move, he had an arm wrapped around my shoulders and a good grip on my collar. He twisted and pulled back, tightening the fabric against my throat in a subtle but extremely effective way.

"Guys, do you realize who this is?" said the voice from my nightmares. Terri was grinning, and Mason was still holding the phone up.

"Who?" asked one of the unnamed frat boys. "Clifford the Little Red Bitch?"

Terri's laugh was loud enough to draw the attention of the other groups hanging around the theater plaza—it had good shade and seating, so people camped out here between classes.

"No, man, this is Flinch, my boy!" Terri shook me, untwisting my collar slightly so I could gulp in air.

The smell of Terri's aftershave washed over me, and for a second it felt like I was going to throw up so hard my head would explode, but then the dissociation wrapped me back up in its sweet, gentle embrace.

I seemed to float out of my body, watching what happened next from behind a protective film. I could feel the pain and the fear but the same way you can still feel a headache after painkillers. Everything that was happening was happening to a version of myself who was empty.

I was somewhere else. Somewhere safe.

From that place of safety, I heard Terri explaining to the others who I was, that I was hilarious, that you could get me to do anything.

"Yeah," Mason, who had gone to high school with us, added, "Terri's made Flinch do stuff you wouldn't believe!"

This was not entirely true. It was all believable, and straight out of the handy-dandy high-school bully handbook. Like the time he'd made me chug mustard, or lick a bathroom floor, or shaved my eyebrows. To be fair, Mason had needed to hold me down for that one.

Terri and I had been in school together since our freshman year, and he'd made a career out of making my life hell.

But that was supposed to have ended when we graduated. We'd gone our separate ways: me to the local theater department to be a bright, young star, and him to the cutthroat world of pre-law with the other sociopaths. I hadn't had to think about him for more than a year.

What was he doing here?

"Check it out."

I hadn't even realized that Glenn had taken my messenger bag, and now he was riffling through it, pulling out—

My script.

Terri hissed deep in his throat, "Damn, still at it, huh?"

There was a moment of reprieve in which Terri handed me over to Frat Boy Gamma and stepped forward to take my script from Glenn. It had already been removed from its plastic page guard, and he leafed through it in evident disbelief. Frat Boy Gamma's chokehold technique left something to be desired compared to Terri's, so I managed to suck in enough air to keep from passing out. People around us were still watching, but no one was intervening—presumably it looked like horseplay between friends. Terri had become a freaking artist when it came to making a beat-down look like clowning.

"Once a diva, always a diva, eh Flinch?"

Flinchwas the ingenious nickname Terri had invented for me the first week of high school, and diva meant something very different when he said it as opposed to when I called myself that out of pride.

Because I had a lead part.

Terri tore the cover page off my script book and crushed it into a ball. He smiled at me. "Open your mouth, Flinch."

It never helped to fight back—my best bet was to stay quiet and small and hope he got bored of me soon. Shove the pain and humiliation as deep into the corners of my mind as they would go and focus on, despite everything, continuing to exist. I could hear the onlookers laughing, some of them even goading me on like I was in on it—letting Terri see how many pages I could fit into my mouth before I choked.

This part of my life was supposed to be over. Terri Bishop wasn't supposed to be here.

This didn't happen to leading man ingénue heroes. This happened to the kind of person I didn't want to be anymore—a sad, bullied theater kid and disposable extra.

I kept my eyes closed, letting the laughter wash over me like waves. I was safe at the bottom of a deep, dark ocean.