"Oh piss off!" She walked away from them but he followed her, all of them angry that she'd lied to them, that she hadn't trusted them enough not to try and handle her problem on her own; but he was brazen enough to voice it.
"Piss off?! You almost got us all killed because you don't trust--" She rounded on him.
"Trust you?! That's a laugh! You're guarding me, I'm your fucking prisoner! Where I come from--" Then he was in her face.
"Where you're from?! Oh you mean prison?!"
"YES! FUCKING! PRISON! DEATH-MATCH-FUCK-YOU-UP-EVEN-IF-YOU-SURVIVE PRISON!"
"Yeah right! That's a load if I ever heard it!" Those words left her cold and angry, staring down her would be classmates as he pushed it further. "Don't use that crap as an excuse! You should have told-- WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!"
She'd removed her tie, then her jacket, then her shirt; scars littering the flesh suddenly visible to them; each article of clothing thrown to the cement in her anger. Pulling off her belt, she undid her pants and pushed them down; and that was it. There she stood, nearly naked in the middle of the classroom; and it wasn't her underclothing that the people before her stared at.
It was the scars. Thin lines from slash wounds, dots from punctures, thick, corded and fleshy scars from surgeries. She pointed to one on her abdomen, to the side of her naval.
"I was matched against my mother who committed suicide in front of me because we both knew that if she threw the match they'd kill me and torture her. They took my kidney." She pointed to two nearly identical scars that ran along where her ribs SHOULD have ended.
"Four ribs, taken because I lost because my opponent nearly slit my throat." She pointed to a few more marks. "Intestines. Stomach. Liver." It was when she reached her hysterectomy scar that she paused, her lips pressing into a thin line as she glared at the boy that had been yelling at her.
"All of my internal reproductive organs, taken because I lost a match to my best friend." Her tone dropped and she pulled her pants up, deciding her point had been made.
"You can tell me all you want that it's a load, that things don't work that way; you're naive. I grew up there, I KNOW how it worked, it was my reality for 5 goddamn years. And in there, the wrong person trusted, meant you were DEAD...or worse, wishing that you were." And once she'd dressed, she flopped down in one of the desks, thoroughly done with the conversation.
"You're right, I SHOULD have trusted the lot of you. But I need you to understand why that is hard for me."
