Roach Girl’s Revenge
I still don’t know what made me go. The 10-year high school reunion invite sat in my inbox for weeks, a digital ghost I kept opening and closing. Why go back there? Fort Collins High. The place where I perfected the art of invisibility, where being ignored was a good day. Where she reigned. Trina.
But something pulled at me. Maybe proving I survived? Maybe closure? Maybe just morbid curiosity. So I clicked RSVP. Yes. One night only. What could possibly go wrong?
Turns out, everything. And then, spectacularly, nothing I could have ever predicted.
The Girl Behind the Auditorium
Fort Collins, Colorado wasn’t exactly glamorous for me. Mom and I lived crammed in the back room of my aunt’s already small house off Shields Street. Mom worked nights cleaning office buildings, weekends pulling shifts as a gas station cashier. Money wasn’t just tight; it was a constant, suffocating anxiety. Dad? He vanished when I was eight. No calls, no cards, no child support. Just… gone.
High school was a masterclass in social stratification. I was at the bottom. Shy, perpetually broke, rotating the same three worn hoodies. I ate lunch alone behind the auditorium, reading library books to escape. Teachers barely noticed me—quiet, no trouble. But the other students? They noticed. Or rather, Trina noticed.
Trina Dubois. If you went to FCHS in the early 2010s, you knew her. Blonde, rail-thin, with a wealthy stepdad who funded her seemingly endless supply of Abercrombie and attitude. She wasn’t the loudest mean girl, but she was the most venomous. She could dismantle you with a single smirk. And for reasons I’ll never understand, I became her favorite project.
“Roach Girl.” That was my name. Because, she announced loudly in the cafeteria sophomore year, I probably lived in filth. She said my house likely smelled like “cat piss”—we didn’t even have a cat. She’d “accidentally” trip me in the hallway, sending my books flying. She’d dump water on my chair before class. Her masterpiece? Stealing my official school photo from the display case, scribbling “LICE” across my forehead in Sharpie, and passing it around. It made the rounds for weeks. I stopped getting school pictures after that.
And the worst part? The silence. No one ever stepped in. A few pitying glances, maybe, but mostly just averted eyes. Everyone knew it was wrong, but no one wanted to become her next target. Senior year, she was crowned Prom Queen. I didn’t go. I was washing dishes at a pizza place off Mulberry Street, the smell of grease and burnt cheese clinging to my clothes. That felt like the appropriate end to my high school experience.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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