Chapter 58: Aftermath
Nina just stared at me, her face a mess of disbelief and disgust. "A moment? They’re beating the crap out of her, Kofi! There is no ’moment’!"
She ripped her arm out of my grip. The look she gave me was worse than Tyler’s punch. It was a look of pure, cutting disappointment.
"I can’t believe you," she whispered, her voice shaking. "I thought you were different."
And then she was gone. She didn’t run into the fight. She just turned and ran the other way, down the hall, away from the crowd, away from the girl on the floor. Away from me.
I stood there, my hand still half-raised in the air where her arm used to be. The whispers of the crowd buzzed around me, but they felt a million miles away. All I could hear was her voice replaying in my head. ’I thought you were different.’
’Yeah, me too,’ I thought, a bitter, hollow feeling settling in my gut.
I finally dropped my hand and looked back at the scene. The crowd had pushed in a little closer now, a tight circle of ghouls with their phones out. I could see the girl on the floor clearly. Her lip was split, a trickle of blood running down her chin. One of the girls had her by the hair, yanking her head back while she screamed something I couldn’t make out.
Another girl stood a few feet away, a bored look on her face as she held her phone up high, getting a perfect angle of the whole thing. Her thumb was steady. She wasn’t just filming; she was documenting. Creating evidence.
My first instinct, the one I’d been fighting down, was to just charge in there, consequences be damned. To just start swinging.
But the colder, quieter part of my brain, the part that had gotten me through my entire life, took over. It saw the whole scene not as a fight, but as a setup. The crowd. The phones. The way the main bully was yelling, performing for the cameras.
This wasn’t just a beating. It was a show. And they wanted an audience. They wanted a reaction. Rushing in would just make me part of their stupid, ugly play. It wouldn’t save the girl on the floor, it would just give them another target and more footage.