Victoria liked pain. The stinging, beating, cutting rash of all her favorite drugs tied up into the tourniquet around her arm. The suffocating virus of the nighttime air as she sat on her windowsill, so eager (yet timid) to just jump. Everything was quiet in the pain. It was a cocoon with the trappings of a real night out with her father's credit card, strapped into the back seat of that older guy who lived just off campus. But the real stuff, the true pain, that was hard to come by.

Nathan could bring the pain. Pills popped in his car left empty bottles of booze under her bed as the days wore down into the long winding semester. With the night brought the spare keys and late night swims in the drunken spirit of the shark and otter infested waters. The ocean was great, but the salt got under her skin and between her toes and it itched her in all the wrong spots.

What hurt her best was the pizza. Not because she loved the greasy pepperoni and juicy pineapple, but because she was spoiled already. Nathan's money was just the last drop of acid on a bad trip which landed her in front of the mirror on lazy Sunday's, pinching at the belly fat she wished she had so she could make herself throw up without hating herself too much.

Sharing never came easy, because being on top never lent itself to being a friend. Nathan's almost animalistic nature brought out a kindness only found in mothers who look after adopted children. She fed him the thinly cut slices of peperoni off her pizza as he laid back in the parking lot, starring into the partially cloudy sky. The stars shown like pin pricks of light in the blackness. If Victoria had her camera she'd have surely captured the sight.

If it weren't for the sudden jolt of light from the gymnasium pool, they might have laid there for the rest of the night, like they had on most drunken nights. But the dew on the grass brushing against their bare feet eased the buzz from the cheap beer. The panic didn't even last passed the courtyard, as their laughter held the silence hostage.

On a normal night, the sight of principal Wells on his porch, spouting drunken nonsense would have sent Victoria rushing back into the school to take the long way around, coming up to her dorm by Samuel's little shack of random supplies and odd ball fashion magazines. On that route, she'd carve something clever into the large Native American statue watching over the courtyard, but this time Nathan just waved at Mr. Wells and flashed his quirky smile. It was like the weirdest get-out-of-jail-free card she had ever had the pleasure of chilling with.

"That man drinks like a teenager," she said.

"If he did maybe he'd be less of a cunt." The last word was louder. He wanted the principal to hear. And Victoria loved that. She loved it like she loved Capa, McCurry and Carter. It was the kind of love that most movies never spoke of. Deeper than lust and much more shallow than "the one". It was like friendship but more spiritual. She never thought herself a poet.

They never held hands on their walks, though sometimes she wished they did. She wondered if he wished it too. He probably did. She was gorgeous, sharp like a knife and carved from nothing more than stone cold ice. Anyone would fall in love for her piercing wit and demeaning attitude (or at least that's what she thought). To her, there was nothing more attractive than being the alpha. The top dog. All of those kids that wasted their times on games and manga, like that Warren Geek, should have been bred out of existence. If not even a fellow hipster cool-girl like Maxine could fuck a foreign-to-girls freak like Warren, then no one in their right mind would find it in themselves to let him inseminate them.

Her scowl followed them into the dorm and up the stairs. The hallway was an abandoned version of the day-lit one. It was a movie set put out of production, left on a backlot to collect dust and haunting memories. They stood there, letting the beer and pizza settle in their guts before anyone spoke: "Goodnight," Nathan said.

"Yup," Victoria said. She wished he had invited himself back to her place, the way he usually did. They'd swap saliva for a bit and pass out on the bed after a few pills took hold. Things were different though, after Kate almost jumped. Victoria felt it deep inside herself. Guilt is what some would call it, but Victoria didn't think it was guilt. She didn't think it was her fault. Not entirely.

In her dorm she popped a few sleeping pills and laid on her bed. But she didn't sleep. Wandering the corridors of these feelings, thinking about Max and how she was on the roof too, there to save her. On her phone, the video she started taking played over and over again. Tears welled up in Victoria's eyes and she cried, sobbed, shaking in her bed.

The video went on until her battery blinked red and she tossed her phone against the wall. Daddy's money would buy her a new one, new model, but that's not why she did it. Maxine floated through her mind and her sniffling shook everything inside her. The embarrassment of how pathetic she looked sank in before she even saw herself in the mirror. She pinched herself hard, on her taught belly.

Victoria liked the pain, and she pinched until she stopped crying and was standing straight, tears drying on her cheeks. She composed herself, wiping the snot off on the shirt with all the paint on it. It was passed the point of no return so she had been sopping up random spills here and there with it. Nothing like a thousand dollar hand towel.

Her mind stayed on Maxine, even as she leaned against her doorway, looking across the void of a hallway. Thump, thump, thump, went her heart. There was a pair of used sunglasses in her jacket pocket that she kept fondling. In her back pocket, her other hand was tucked, going deep hoping to find a forgotten piece of gum or a jolly rancher. There was none.

Max's door was quaint and her little square of dry-erase still have her cute (no, not that word, she didn't mean that word) half-smile, half-frowny face on it. Victoria's lips smiled, even though her brain was telling them not to. She thought that it was that smiley that drug her across the carpet in her bare feet, and placed her knuckles on the door. She knocked twice. There was no answer.

She knocked once more and leaned her head against the door. It pushed in a little. In the dark she hadn't noticed, but the door was not closed all the way. Victoria's eyebrows were suspicious and she let her head push the door the rest of the way opened. Max's room was tight, in both space and in the slang term.

Walking inside, Victoria stood looking at Maxine's photo wall, much more extensive than her own. She didn't admire Max for any sort of talent, but she did like a few of her photos, though she would never admit it. There was one, a selfie of Maxine's, looked like it was taken in some bathroom, probably Two Whales. Victoria snagged it off the wall and ran her finger over it.

Her finger played across the fretboard of Maxine's guitar (of course she'd have one) letting the open chord ring out, reverberated in the sleeping chamber. Kate's bunny was sitting on the floor. It was a bunny that Victoria had threatened to kill once. Not out of malice, just as a joke, like most things she said. No one got her sense of humor, not even her friends (if she could call those two goons friends). Bending down to pet the rabbit, it bit her, drawing a trickle of blood. Victoria sucked on the finger, starring at the rabbit as if she were an alien. In that moment she might as well have been.

Another tear came to her eyes, but she shook it off and walked back to Max's bed. She sat carefully, feeling the comforter on her hands. She gripped it in her first as another sobbing fit hit her. Though it was fruitless, she attempted to not cry on Maxine's bed. The photo was still in her other hand and she looked at it, wishing (for just a moment) that Maxine's arms were wrapping around her, pulling her into a hug, the kind of hug that she gave Kate Marsh up on the roof earlier. The kind of hug that saved people.

Laying down on Maxine's bed she felt the pull of the sleeping pills settling in. Her eyes drifted from the photo to the dresser, where they stared at the wood stain. She didn't want to sleep there, but she did. And she dreamed of being on that roof instead of Kate Marsh, getting ready to jump. Max didn't come up there for her though. She stayed on the ground, pointing her phone, recording every moment as she pushed from the ledge, falling like a brick.

Kate Marsh wasn't the only person at Blackwell that needed saving…