Fear Her (The Zodiac Cult Killer)

Chapter 10 (new)

Girl tossed her hair over her shoulder only for it slap wet against the back of her blouse. "That's disgusting. It's disgusting. Don't think about it," she chanted, largely to herself, Virgo thought. "Just don't think about where it's been. Think shampoo. Resonate parabens and sylicates. It'll all be gone soon."

"Mind shampoo?"

"The new brainwashing. Big deal on YouTube. Gotta get that ASMR. I live for it."

They stopped in front of Virgo's locker. "Okay, you just started speaking in tongues. Should I get the school nurse? Do we even have one of those? Were the budget cuts too steep after we got that Coke machine twins I saw in the cafeteria?"

"I don't know what you're talking about."

Virgo spun the dial on her combination lock. "Same. Not good at the comforting small talk thing. Work with me here."

Girl gave a minute shrug. She must have had the world's narrowest shoulders. That made some kind of sense; she was only fifteen, even if she was a tall fifteen. She was still growing. There was the kicker.

"Come on, don't look at me like that. I don't look that bad, do I? It's just water."

Virgo didn't really care about that. She'd smelled worse anyway. Some of her cell mates used to refuse to bathe on principle. They sat in their own filth until they were thrown into the communal bath and forcibly showered under observation of a doctor, a nurse, a psychiatrist, and two orderlies. Virgo had been all kinds of enraged before; she'd never been angry enough or lonely enough for attention to go out like that.

"Hate to break it to you, but you look like you got your head dunked in a toilet." Smelled a bit like it, too. Toilets used by too many bodies tended to take on a recognizable smell, no matter how well they were cleaned. The water smelled...funny, to put it mildly and so did Girlfriend.

"That's not what happened?" The uptick at the end was a dead giveaway.

"You got your head dunked in a toilet, real or not real?"

Girl found a sliver of attitude to pull: "Not your business, real or not real?"

Virgo's lock popped open with a click.

"Awesome. I love sarcasm, too. Look, we're friends." She grabbed a pack of wipes out of her locker and tossed them at the younger girl. "Wipe your face. If you can find your way, I need to talk to some idiots about bouncing their rude faces off the pavement."

"Violence isn't the answer," she parroted like there was a scowling teacher standing over her shoulder taking a grade for participation.

"That depends who's asking the question." If Girl was going to play pacifist after almost having her scalp peeled off by the Future Female Murderers of America, far be it for Virgo to come save her ass next time. She had grades to keep up and her reputation as a hardass who gave no shits was going to go up in flames if she kept saving dumb girls from their pride.

"I'm not—look, I'm grateful, but I don't like owing people debts. Letting you take care of me means I owe you one."

"It doesn't, though. I wasn't trying to get you in my books. You sounded like you were getting your throat cut."

"You can't hear it when somebody gets their throat cut unless they're already screaming. It's just whistling after the first...and you meant that as a figure of speech."

"I did, but now I have this new and disturbing information to share with unsuspecting strangers, so that's a plus. Are you ever not the weirdest thing on two legs?"