There was a geometry quiz. This particular teacher had a penchant for daily quizzes, which explained the abhorrent reviews underneath his profile page on the school’s forum. One review said the following regarding this teacher’s performance in class: “A balding thumb desperately trying to contain the flopping uncut foreskin that draped over him like an imperial robe made specifically for assholes.” 

The boy sitting next to her was peeking. Son needn't look to confirm that suspicion, in fact, she believed that both the person sitting on the other side of her and the person sitting in front of her peeked at her paper during every quiz, because they knew she could effortlessly ace every quiz if she wanted to. Not because Son was some kind of mathematical genius, but more so the fact that the math classes in this place were almost two years behind what she was learning back in her home country.   

The boy sitting next to her was not peeking. The reflection in the boy’s eyes betrayed the fact that he was staring at Son's exposed neck tainted with pink calamine lotion; she might as well be sitting there completely naked, it made no difference to him one way or the other.  

“I will kill you.” Whispered Son. 

The boy cackled soundlessly, his furtive eyes snaked away after lingering on her just for one moment too many. Molested by his gaze, Son turned away and put herself low to the table as though to cover herself, only to be met with multiple pairs of unmoving eyes staring at her from all different directions. Their gazes were full of accusations, and some even came with the same whiff of sultry intention, stripping her with eyes alone. A month into her school life, she still knew none of these people’s names, and yet they stared, relentlessly. 

“Hey! Hey!” The person sitting in front of her shouted quietly, “Move your arms away! I can’t see the answer!” 

Son decided to bomb the quiz, just to teach these people a lesson. 

After the class, Blue came up to her. 

“Son! Ah you are finally back! I was so worried when I called your phone and nobody answered! Where’ve you been?” 

Son gave Blue a strange look. “Do you not know what happened in the past weeks?” 

“What? That missing person? Who cares?” She realized her mistake and quickly drew a cross over her chest, “I shouldn’t have said that. I hope for the best for the guy. I really do. I hope they find him soon enough, but you know… it’s not like we can do anything about it?” 

“What about the fire?” Son asked. 

“What about it?” Blue returned with the question, her head tilted innocently to the side, “Nobody died in there, I heard. So there should be no concern for us, right? Thank god, or else the school would definitely use that excuse to start another bullshit fundraiser whereby fifty percent of the money raised went into ‘operational cost,’” Blue made the air quotes, “Anyhow, wanna hang after school?”

The cluelessness this girl had displayed was astounding enough to be suspicious. At a time when Son felt as though she was beleaguered by enemies, Blue just waddled into the scene like a blissfully ignorant child. A sense of solace rose in Son; at least for some people, normalcy was still intact and well. 

“Let’s hang after school! Now that the rain is over, I was thinking of that diner down in the city. They serve the most dynamite crab rolls girl, and I mean dynamite! I have had enough of you hating on the food scene around here and I’m gonna show you… oh, god.” Blue pulled out her phone, “Why do they keep sending me this garbo… JESUS! I knew about it already! Stop sending me p**n over text for crying out loud…” 

“What is it?” 

“There is this video circulating on the forum… somebody leaked this an hour ago, actually. It’s everywhere now, I can’t even look up anything without it popping on my timeline… there it goes again! Ugh, it makes me sick….” 

Son took a glance at Blue's phone. The video displayed was one of sensory assault mixed with bestial abandonment, fresh skin glistening in lube and sweat, hips gyrating upon the wrinkled shaft, discombobulated music over moans and cheers. The content would put the biblical city of Sodom to shame. The caption of the video read: Easy girl. 

The one in the video was her. Not that she really was the one in the video; she wasn’t, not that she was aware of. What mattered was that everyone else saw her in the video, which meant that it was her in the video. “Easy girl” was a label frequently attributed to international students like Son, especially of her ethnicity. This was revenge p**n, fictional it may be. It explained all the eyes she had encountered through the day, and that cackling rat during the geometry quiz. 

“Can you turn up the volume a bit?” Son asked. 

“Absolutely not! We are still in school, Son!” Blue replied. 

Son took Blue’s phone and put its speaker against her ears. Amidst the drunken cheering from the onlookers and the coital exclamations from the parties involved, Son could discern a faint voice in the background, and she could make out the words: 

Every day the sun comes up, and she went down

Every night her mind went out, and the flowers drown

The little girl, inside of us all

Come take her stay, bed has made

By tomorrow, you will wear a dress of blood and blades

Nina Schultz. The radio station they put on at that party played her song almost on repeat the whole night through. Son quickly swiped through the video to see if anything was recognizable from it, but none stood out. Maybe if she sunk some time into it, she could figure out the true identity of those in the video, but she would need assistance, the professional kind.  

On the very edge of the schooling district sat an abandoned house covered in vines and moss. The house’s foyer was dingy like a windowless attic, with a heaping pile of rusting metal scraps -- discarded bikes and defunct cookware -- sitting right in the middle, welcoming any visitors with the smell of rust and soaked soil. The mat on the ground had rotted beautifully, the oversized mirror with the thick wooden frame affixed to the wall could not reflect due to the stains, and the coat rack in the corner had developed tumor-like overgrowth; most likely, fungus. 

This cannot be the correct address. Son thought to herself, wandering aimlessly around the block to look for a street sign. There was no other alternative, this decrepit structure was the destination. 

The Paperbox Detective Club. Compared to other clubs in school, this one was minute in size and remained largely obscure from the general student population. Its reputation on the forum was polarizing. Some swore to their proficiency in solving problems of varying magnitudes, from the mundane like finding if one’s romantic partner was cheating on them, to the absolute buck wild like how one post suggested the club members exacted business espionage for a local ice cream parlor to avoid acquisition by the chained ice cream stores. Critics of the club were far harsher in their verdict. One post called the club: “a scam in its fullest totality,” and another post addressed its four members as “grifters who think too highly of their own mental illnesses and various failings in lives.”

Son ventured further into the house, where greenery reigned supreme. A ginormous tree branch, black and covered in splinters, managed to throng into the house through the picture window facing what used to be the back garden. Some thorns on the ground tore open her cheap canvas trousers. The abandoned stovetop in the kitchen had collapsed into itself under the weight of vines and leaflets and the broken-down cabinet had now become the host of wild cabbages and berries. The humid air smelled of wet mud, the last remnant of the earlier rainfall. 

In the dingy study where the only window that could let in some sunlight had been thoroughly curtained by a wall of ivy, papers and documents were stacked high like mountains, making traversal near impossible for the untrained. Son had to tiptoe around in fear of knocking down one of the mountains. The one receiving her was a lovely redhead with a heart-shaped freckled face and a vibrant toothless smile. 

“We have quite the workload over here, as you can see.” Said the girl. “I’m Lehmann, president of the club. Nice to meet you.”

“I wasn’t aware that detective work would be in such high demand…” Son muttered. 

“Oh no, these aren’t detective works.” The girl named Lehmann explained, “Don’t be silly. Nobody actually needs detectives in today’s world of mass surveillance and exhibitionist internet culture. Our main source of income is ghostwriting. These are book reports and final papers we wrote for our clients. We usually hold a backup copy in case the client turns on us… couldn’t be too careful, am I right?”  

She let out an appropriately short string of silvery giggles, her wavy red hair bounced ups and downs, and Son already found herself trusting this stranger more than anybody else she had met today since she woke up, a strange urge to divulge all her secrets to her as though they had been non-consanguineous sisters in arms since childhood. This charm is deadly. 

This might be her only shot to reclaim innocence.