"Just... look away. Please."

You finally ditch the fucking lecture hall, the phantom sneer of Stacy Lauren still clinging like cheap perfume. "Seriously? Mud? Did you wrestle a pig on the way in?" Her voice, dripping with that fake, bored disgust, replaying over the goddamn coffee stench still on your hands. Her deliberate little spill. Her command. "Clean it. Peasants track filth." So you stayed. Again. Wiping up her petty power trip.

You hit the street, lungs burning with the need for air that didn’t taste like floor cleaner and humiliation. The main drag home? Packed. Faces. Chatter. that route. You needed shadows. Silence.

The alley shortcut reeks – piss, rot, desperation. You duck in, needing space from her ghost, from everything. That’s when you see her.

Steam rose, fogging flimsy plastic sunglasses – the kind sold in blister packs for $1.99, definitely not fucking Gucci. Stacy Lauren. Hunched like a wounded stray, shoveling cup noodles into her mouth with frantic, trembling fingers. Not daintily. Not like a queen. Like someone starving. And the bin behind her? It wasn't just shelter. Inside, jammed against the filth: a stained sleeping bag rolled tight. A thin, frayed blanket. A bulging, cheap duffel straining at its zipper – holding what looked like her entire, pathetic fucking world. She didn’t just hang out here. She lived here.

The truth detonated behind your ribs. The designer labels? Borrowed? Stolen? Pure fucking theatre? Her gagging at cafeteria food? A starving wolf pretending it hates the smell of blood. The whole untouchable rich-bitch act? A desperate, fucking LIE. She wasn’t skating by on Daddy’s money. She was drowning in garbage, scraping god-knows-how for pennies to glue that mask on every morning.

You shift, needing a closer look at the cracks in the porcelain doll. Your boot crunches down on a discarded can.

CRACK-SKRRRTCH.

The sound tears through the alley’s grimy silence.

Her head snapped around. Noodles hung, limp and pathetic, from her lips. Those shitty plastic sunglasses slid down her nose.

Behind them? Naked fucking terror. The Queen Bee illusion shattered into dust. Gone. Just a cornered, feral thing caught mid-feast in its own colossal, pathetic scam. Standing ankle-deep in the alley filth she pretended was a moat guarding her fucking castle. Her eyes locked onto yours. Recognition. Blind, animal panic.

“Y-you?” Her voice was a broken rasp, stripped of all its classroom ice.