Becoming Anne Again

Chapter Fifty-Four

A/N This was a very difficult chapter for me to write, and I hope that it holds up to all of your standards. I am issuing a trigger warning for this, as the topic of abuse is extensive in this chapter. If this is a problem for you, you can skip down to the end of the chapter and I will give you a summary of events. Thank you for sticking with me! I love you all, and remember to keep taking care of yourselves!

Mere hours a go the school had been bustling with activity from the musical. Now it lay eerily bare, so silent it caused Anne's hair to stand up on the back of her head. It wasn't right.

The halls stretched forward forever, and the eggshell walls seemed to contort themselves into wallpapered dungeons with lacy curtains and those rustic signs that Mrs. O'Keafe had made sure were religiously cleaned. If she squinted, the tiles were covered in glass, and she was barefoot again, and maybe it was her nightmare, maybe it was her past, maybe she was being hunted, maybe she was an orphaned girl who had nowhere else to go—

Maybe someone needed her.

She was scared. She was terrified that maybe reality was edging in on her dream, but yet there wasn't a fiber in her being that was telling her not to go on. It was innate, and as she stripped off her shoes, her stockinged feet noiseless on the floor, and the thoughts and visions that had filled her mind faded. She was not any of the things the visions had depicted her as. She was Anne Shirley, and she was going to defeat another monster.

It was the mantra in her head as she crept forward, acutely aware of what could happen if she revealed herself too soon. She knew Diana would be tearing the school upside down, but in all the times that Anne had been in the school, she had already catalogued the perfect place to carry out a crime. Diana was nowhere it.

She didn't need to see this.

Mr. Phillip's office was in the front of the building, in an open office space that was problematic for many reasons. The theater, his domain, was too filled with activity and it was too risky that someone was going to come in. There were similar issues with various other rooms, from being too light to being too dark, a natural eyesore that the eye just had to be drawn too.

But then there was a classroom, as innocuous as they come. The class technically belonged to Mr. Webster, an old teacher who was just waiting for retirement, who was constantly forgetting to uncover the small window after lockdown drills. This was why it wasn't out of place at all that there was a poster covering it, the room itself dark.

As Anne approached the room, she went from quiet to silent. But the closer she came to the room, the more right she realized she was and the harder it was for her not to scream.

She remembered it all. The whimpers, the chafing, the clenched grunts, the whispers. She and Prissy became one, a sisterhood that should never have existed.

It was the beginning of the end.

Saying "if the walls could talk" was such a tired phrase, but it was a pertinent phrase to be asked. Because, looking down at the scene, there was only one thing that was absolutely apparent. The walls would be screaming. There was Anne, the worn heroine, her fingers struggling to work through her hair to get a bobby pin free, and Prissy, pinned beneath Andrew Phillips, with wide eyes and trembling lips and a body that never meant to betray her.

At first, it had been innocent smiles. Or Prissy had thought they had been innocent, but as smiles turned to touches, she became more unsure. There was no one she could tell, though, not with her mother being infatuated with the man and the secret affair that they had had that she wasn't quite sure had completely fizzled. Maybe, she thought it was okay after the video and her mother had shrugged her shoulders and laughed, saying she supposed it was "better than the talk she had had!" Maybe it was why her lips began to crave kisses as the touches became longer, deeper, maybe it was why when he told her they were in love, she believed him.