Glass Houses Page 0,3

she staggered.

She almost caught herself, and then Gina, grinning spitefully, reached over and shoved her backward, down the stairs, and there was nothing but air behind her.

She hit the edge of every stair, all the way to the bottom. Her backpack broke open and spilled books as she tumbled, and at the top of the stairs Monica and the Monickettes laughed and hooted and high-fived, but she saw it only in disconnected little jerks of motion, freeze-frames.

It seemed to take forever before she skidded to a stop at the bottom, and then her head hit the wall with a nasty, meaty sound, and everything went black.

She later remembered only one more thing, in the darkness: Monica's voice, a low and vicious whisper.

"Tonight. You'll get what's coming to you, you freak. I'm going to make sure."

It seemed like seconds, but when she woke up again there was somebody kneeling next to her, and it wasn't Monica or her nail-polish mafia; it was Erica, who had the room at the top of the stairs, four doors down from Claire's. Erica looked pale and strained and scared, and Claire tried to smile, because that was what you did when somebody was scared. She didn't hurt until she moved, and then her head started to throb. There was a red-hot ache near the top, and when she reached up to touch it she felt a hard raised knot. No blood, though. It hurt worse when she probed the spot, but not in an oh-my-God-skull-fracture kind of way, or at least that was what she hoped.

"Are you okay?" Erica asked, waving her hands kind of helplessly in midair as Claire wiggled her way up to a sitting position against the wall. Claire risked a quick look past her up the stairs, then down. The coast looked Monica-clear. Nobody else had come out to see what was up, either - most of them were afraid of getting in trouble, and the rest just flat didn't care.

"Yeah," she said, and managed a shaky laugh. "Guess I tripped."

"You need to go to the quack shack?" Which was college code for the university clinic. "Or, God, an ambulance or whatever?"

"No. No, I'm okay." Wishful thinking, but although basically everything in her body hurt like hell, nothing felt like it had broken into pieces. Claire got to her feet, winced at a sore ankle, and picked up her backpack. Notebooks tumbled out. Erica grabbed a couple and jammed them back in, then ran lightly up a few steps to gather the scattered textbooks. "Damn, Claire, do you really need all this crap? How many classes do you have in a day?"

"Six."

"You're nuts." Erica, good deed done, reverted to the neutrality that all the noncool girls in the dorm had shown her so far. "Better get to the quack shack, seriously. You look like crap."

Claire pasted on a smile and kept it there until Erica got to the top of the stairs and started complaining about the broken lock on her dorm room.

Tonight, Monica had leaned over and whispered. You'll get what's coming to you, you freak. She hadn't called anybody, or tried to find out if Claire had a broken neck. She didn't care if Claire died.

No, that was wrong. The problem was, she did care.

Claire tasted blood. Her lip was split, and it was bleeding. She wiped at the mess with the back of her hand, then the hem of her T-shirt before realizing that it was literally the only thing she had to wear. I need to go down to the basement and get my clothes out of the trash. The idea of going down there - going anywhere alone in this dorm - suddenly terrified her. Monica was waiting. And the other girls wouldn't do anything. Even Erica, who was probably the nicest one in the whole place, was scared to come right out on her side. Hell, Erica got hassled, too, but she was probably just as glad that Claire was there to get the worst of it. This wasn't just as bad as high school, where she'd been treated with contempt and casual cruelty - this was worse, a lot worse. And she didn't even have any friends here. Erica was about the best she'd been able to come up with, and Erica was more concerned about her broken door than Claire's broken head.

She was alone. And if she hadn't been before, she was scared now. Really, really scared. What she'd seen in the Monica