Bitten (Once Bitten, Twice Shy #1)(6)
“What-” Katherine began to ask, but was abruptly cut off as her arm was grasped by her worked up friend. She was hastily tugged into the nearest girls’ restroom.
“You’re not going to believe this,” the girl repeated more quietly after checking the stalls of the room and making sure they were all empty, “but the rumor mill is going absolutely berserk with stories about you!”
“What? Why?” was Katherine’s instant confused response. She stubbornly ignored the butterflies that had suddenly sprouted wings in her stomach, firmly telling herself that she didn’t care what others were saying about her.
“Somehow the fact that you were attacked by that rabid wolf on Miller Road is going around the school,” Abby explained intently. “Half the students who’ve heard the story apparently think you’re dead and the other half thinks you’ve been mauled so badly that you’ve lost a limb or that your face has been deformed or something.”
Katherine fought the urge to roll her eyes at the dramatics of the student population. “Let me guess,” she replied, “Mallory started these rumors.”
Abby winced slightly at that. Despite Katherine’s contempt for the snobby blonde girl and her gang of friends, Abby got along with them all rather well. “It’s possible,” the redhead admitted, looking a little sheepish.
Katherine sighed. She determinedly repeated to herself that she didn’t care about stupid rumors – especially about any concerning her.
“It’s fine,” she breathed out, forcing the tension to leave her body. “They’ll all have seen that I’m alive and well by the end of the day. Let them talk until then if they want to.”
“If you’re sure,” Abby replied, still looking concerned, but letting the subject drop. She glanced down at her cell phone. “Shoot, it’s already past eight. We only have three minutes to get to Pre-Calculus.” She made a face, her opinion of the math class obvious.
The bell rang immediately after the girl’s announcement, almost as if in support of her assessment. “I’ll meet you there,” Katherine quickly assured her friend as they left the restroom. “I still have to drop by my locker and grab my books.”
Abby nodded and bounded off to class, leaving Katherine on her own by her locker.
She was all alone in the hallway, the other students having set off for their own classes. After what the animated redhead had told her about the latest gossip, Katherine was relieved. She wasn’t looking forward to the stares and prying questions that she knew would be directed at her all day long since apparently, an animal attack was big news in Middletown.
She was actually surprised Abby had gotten the chance to warn her about all the gossip before she'd been stopped and questioned by other students on her way into the school.
Dreading the rest of the morning, but already on the verge of being late to class, Katherine forced herself to speedily enter the combination of the padlock protecting her locker. Snatching the lock off the metal handle, she opened the slotted door. With a startled gasp, however, she banged it shut again.
What the...?
She felt as if her heart had leapt into her throat and was now lodged there, pounding hard. After taking a moment to calm its erratic beating, she carefully reopened the locker door, convinced she had been mistaken. Cautiously peeking into the metal box, however, she quickly realized she had not been.
For there, sitting innocently on the top shelf of her school locker, was the sneaker she was sure had been lost forever on Miller Road.
Katherine wasn’t sure what to think.
Was this some sort of prank? Perhaps, but she was almost certain that, besides herself and her parents, only Abby had been aware that she had lost a shoe last Friday night.
And she had literally just unlocked her locker two minutes ago. It had been locked all weekend and no one, not even Abby, knew the combination. Maybe her friend had told others that she had lost a shoe, but that still left the question of how whoever had planted the shoe had gotten into her locker in the first place.
She was getting nowhere with these thoughts.
And worse, that familiar feeling of awful foreboding was rising in her gut.
Taking a deep breath, Katherine forced herself to calm down. There’s no point in panicking, she told herself firmly. It’s probably just a dumb prank. Deciding that it was best to forget about it for now, she quickly gathered her books.
She closed her locker firmly and double-checked to make sure the lock was fastened correctly. Then, pushing thoughts of the shoe steadfastly to the back of her mind, Katherine made her way to Pre-Calculus.
Despite what she had been trying to prevent all morning, she was five minutes late for class.
Katherine noticed the looks in Pre-Calculus, but didn’t let them get to her. It helped that she shared the class with the rambunctious Abby, who was not-so-secretly doing her best to distract her – both from the stares and the class itself. The redhead absolutely detested math in all its forms.
Her next class, English, passed in much the same manner. In fact, it wasn’t until Katherine’s third period class, the one directly before her lunch break, that she was even questioned about the animal attack.
The class in question was American History. Katherine could swear that the class had been covering the same information since she had first had it in fifth grade. Every year, the teacher would spend way too much time on the Revolutionary War and the class would end with the students barely having touched upon the Industrial Revolution. Forget anything that had happened after that. Katherine seriously doubted any student in the school knew much of America’s history past the early 1900’s.