The cool night air made the tears gliding down her face feel like beads of ice leaving trails of biting cold down her cheeks, light pink sneakers kicked at small loose rocks in the dirt road as she shoved her hands into the pockets of her thick light pink hoodie... she should have known better honestly, cover-girl looking chicks like that didn't usually befriend mild mannered quiet bookworm orphans like her, part of Liliana felt like she'd practically asked for this...
To be fair though, even her worst thoughts and reservations never would have anticipated that as soon as she arrived with her 'friends'... she'd find six other freshmen there in the barn with what appeared to be a variety of jocks and all the cheerleaders... something was definitely off... especially since there didn't look to be any snacks, drinks or any method of musical entertainment... plus the smirks of the popular folks versus the worried scared looks of the freshmen...
"What's going on?" Liliana had asked Gwen, the girl that invited her in the first place "This doesn't look like a party to me..."
"Funny thing is, I never said it was a party intended for YOUR enjoyment..." Gwen had replied with a dark sort of amusement "Now, you just behave and you'll make it back to the University in one piece, you worthless waste of a scholarship"
Panic bloomed in Liliana's chest when she looked into the barn at the muscular jocks inside with sadistic looks on their faces and it hot her... all these freshmen were scholarship recipients... this was the rich students hazing students they felt didn't belong at Rockdale!
The location in the middle of no where suddenly made an ass ton of sense!
She looked back at Gwen then and her friend Tracy... she didn't waste another single moment before she threw her full weight at them as hard she could, knocking them on their skanky asses before scrambling to her feet and speeding off into the darkness... she felt awful leaving the others, but what could she do all by herself?
They didn't chase her too far before deciding she wasn't worth the energy...
Which brought her to where she was now... her hand squeezing her phone in her pocket... she wanted to call the police for the other scholarship students, but... those rich kids and their rich mommies and daddies could make life really hard for her, she knew the connections rich families had in the small opulent university town... her part time job, her scholarship... she could lose everything and so could everybody else in that barn... everything they'd all worked so hard for... they'd wind up hating her instead, blaming her for not just keeping her trap shut and letting them just forget what happened tonight...
Liliana raised her arms to wrap around herself as she shivered against the cold October wind, even her hoodie wasn't enough anymore, she sniffled as she wiped her right wrist across her nose, still runny from all her crying.
She pulled her phone out to check for service, hoping at least she could call a taxi or an uber to get home to her dorm and out of the frigid cold, never did a mug of hot chocolate sound so great, that along with crawling into her blankets and hiding for the whole rest of the weekend, she just wanted to pretend the world didn't exist, even if just for a little while.
"No bars... fuck my life..." Liliana whimpered, shoving the useless phone back into her pocket "Why me? Why can't I ever catch a break? Even just one, is that so much to ask for?"