Aria nodded, walking quickly into the front office. The hair on the back of her neck stood up as she collected the first-aid kit and a bottle of antiseptic spray, a mostly full bottle of Tylenol, an unopened one of Ibuprofen, some kids’ allergy medicine, some anti-anxiety meds, and a host of other things. She returned at the trot to hand the things to Vanessa. “I’m going to go find the papers and then head to the auditorium. I think they’ll need me to help organize kids. If I don’t hear from you before the last groups are deployed I will send a few seniors to come find you two.” She headed back into the office. Again she shivered at the vague sense of… fear… that she found in the room.

She took a stack of papers off the secretary’s desk, as luck would have it, the attendance sheets for the entire school for first period. She folded them up and tucked them into her backpack, and walked further into the office. The place was giving her the creeps… she needed to get out as soon as possible. She stepped into the principal’s office and heard a crunch under her shoe as she stepped on a piece of glass. And then her light found the body, cut up and bleeding from the glass and a dent in her head where the skull had collapsed.

She gasped and stumbled back, to slam into the door. The door was closed behind her. But she hadn’t shut it behind herself…. Frantically she yanked on the knob, but it had locked, or so it seemed. Just for a second she heard a demonic cackle, and her flashlight switched off, and she was left alone in the room with the corpse and the pitch-darkness outside.

Frantically Aria tried to turn the flashlight back on, to no avail. With trembling hands she fished her phone out of her cardigan pocket, flipping it open for a tiny bit of light. Instantly she wished she hadn’t.

In the window. A…. thing. That was all it could be described as. From the blue light of her phone she couldn’t tell what color it was, but it was twisted, with too many broken limbs and warped appendages and a tortured, human face staring at her with sightless eyes. Too scared to scream, Aria inched back against the wall. Her foot twisted on something fleshy; for an instant she looked down, realizing she had stepped on the hand of the dead girl. She gagged, and then when she looked up at the window the creature wasn’t there.

Because it was in the room with her. She heard its’ demonic, guttural laugh as it crept closer, inching on twisted arms and legs that grated and clicked like broken bones were bouncing around inside. And then a hand grabbed her ankle, the hand of the dead girl, and in the corner of her vision she saw the creature pounce.

She cowered, fearing for her death, but then there was nothing... There was no creature, the door was open. But the body was real enough. Practically sobbing from terror, Aria scooted across the floor to kneel next to the body. She rolled the figure over, noting the floppy limbs. She had to have just died, then. And then all thoughts went out the window as she realized who it was. Hana, Maki’s interpreter… Oh god. OH GOD. She’d met Hana before… she didn’t seem like the kind to get in a fight. But neither did Maki, and both girls were cut up pretty badly.
Clapping both hands over her mouth, scrambling to her feet, skidding on the hard floor, she sprang to the window and opened it and threw up outside. But as she caught her breath, huge gulping breaths of stuffy, sour air, a lightning bolt of pain lanced through her head and her body, and suddenly voices sprang into her head, laughing, cackling, then shouting at her, hate-filled and bitter.
[i]You don’t deserve to live! They only pretend to care about you because they feel bad for you. You’re too smart for your own good. They fear you and hate you. You’re not one of them, you’re just an extra. Forever an afterthought.
“You’re like a kitten. Defenseless, stupid, too fragile. And whenever anyone gets attached to you they get hurt trying to protect you!” Jack’s voice all but roared in her head.
“Don’t you get it, Aria? I don’t like you. I never have.” Connor spoke, and she could just see him, his hair standing on end like it always did when he was angry.
“I wish you would just die so that you wouldn’t be always following us around like a little lost puppy, making all of us look bad!” Adam added, the mirror-image of his twin.[/i]
“Just go away.” Aria said it out loud. Barely managing to control herself, she forced herself back in through the window and slammed it shut. Then she lay on the floor, feeling the voices in her head fading, and also the pain.

“My god, what was that?” she whispered to herself as she finally regained enough control of her muscles to stand. Her flashlight was dead, having hit the ground hard. She only had her cell-phone.

She fled the room, only taking a second look at Hana’s body. “I’ll send someone to come bury you, Hana. You won’t be forgotten.” She said. She took the second doorway out of the office, a door that put her around a corner from the spectacle of Vanessa and Maki. She had to run further then, but she didn’t want to have to pass the girls.

She tasted blood at the back of her throat and reached her hand up to find that she had a nosebleed. Aria used her sleeve to wipe most of it off as she jogged, her sandals slapping on the floor, trying to put as much distance between herself and the office as was possible. The voices of her friends randomly spoke in her head, telling her how worthless she was, how she deserved to die.
An instant before she ran into the auditorium, she realized that she couldn’t tell Jack where anyone could hear or it would cause a pandemonium. So she yanked a red pen and a tattered Latin essay out of her backpack and started writing by the light of her phone.
“There is a dead girl in the office. Hana, I’m not sure of her last name. Maki Fujita’s foreign-exchange sibling. Maki is cut up by broken glass (from a cabinet in the office?) and very scared and crying over some evil thing she did. Vanessa is tending her right outside the principal’s office Hana’s in the office. Her skull was caved in and she was also cut up by broken glass. When I was there in the office I saw a… thing. A nightmare creature. It made me hallucinate or something. I stuck my head out the window because I had to throw up from… finding a body… and the air out there is kind of sour and heavy. I took a few breaths and then it felt like someone electrocuted me and there were voices clamoring in my head and I just couldn’t think…” In the light of the phone the blood on her hands from herself and from Maki was the same color as the ink she had just written with.

She forced the thought out of her head, scrubbed at her nose (Starting the bleeding again, unfortunately) and headed into the auditorium. First she sought out Robyn, having gotten in there just in time to hear her mention fires on the gym floor. “Robyn, not a good idea!” she hissed, rising onto tiptoe to speak in the girl’s ear, while also trying to keep her face out of the light of the phones. “No fires in the gym, on the wood floor. And don’t have them look for supplies in the office. You’ve got to trust me on that, don’t you dare let them look in the principal’s office. Please.” Tears welled up in her eyes and she brushed them away angrily. “I have to go report to Jack, but just… Don’t let them go into the office, whatever you do.”

Then she hurried over towards Jack’s voice, pushing through the crowd of much taller people. “Jack, I got the papers!” she forced nonchalance into her voice, though her bloody face and arms and tear-streaked face would probably scare everyone anyway. “And something else.” She passed him the paper and her phone, hoping he could read the scribbles of her shaking hands.
[i]”You deserve to die, Aria. You’re weak and you’re stupid and you don’t deserve to live, not in this school, not where it’s survival of the fittest.”[/i] The Jack in her head said. 
Tears spilled onto her cheeks. “How—How can I help…? I know…” she swallowed hard. “I know you think I’m not capable of doing anything, that you think I’m like a kitten, stupid and weak and a liability. But I’d like to help however I can, for the sake of all these kids...” She clamped her mouth shut but couldn’t stop the sob from escaping her. She wiped at her nose (Still unsure why it was bleeding so much) and looked up slowly at Jack, waiting for him to laugh or dismiss her like the Jack in her mind would.