Nightshade
My best friend, Natalie Grey, was the most famous pushover class president in the entire management department.
When classmates didn't pay their class dues, she covered them out of her own pocket.
When people sent her on errands and dumped grunt work on her, she kept her head down and did every bit of it. When someone got written up and pinned the blame on her, she quietly took the fall.
I, on the other hand, breathed a sigh of relief and told her to keep it up.
Because deep down, Natalie was a little hellion. Emotionally detached and born with a screw loose, she was the kind of person who would actually take a knife to someone in real life.
When we were kids, a boy from our town picked on me. Natalie pinned him to the ground and beat him so badly it took three or four grown-ups to drag her off.
He ended up in the hospital for three days. Natalie climbed a drainpipe up to his fifth-floor room and yanked out his oxygen tube. He was so scared that his family moved away the very next day.
I was terrified she would one day do something she couldn't take back, so I poured everything I had into training her to be sweet and docile.
Then Selena Morrison, the department's it-girl, moved into my dorm room.
She made me pick up her meals and fetch her packages, but she never paid me a single cent. Every time we split a bill, she made a point of rounding her share down.
With no money left for food, I lost thirty-three pounds. When I finally tried to stop picking up her meals, Selena went straight online and posted that I was jealous of her and out to get her. Suddenly, every guy in the school had it out for me.
My bike, parked outside the dorm, got smashed to pieces. My food deliveries kept disappearing the moment they arrived.
One day, as I stood helplessly over yet another takeout order splattered across the ground, Selena looked at me with a smile. "Come on, be a good girl. Being my servant is an honor..."
There was a loud bang. Before Selena could even finish her sentence, she went flying half a mile.
I snapped my head up. Natalie was walking toward me, her face dark...