I am a teenage brown hued, Haitian girl. My full name is Towanda Nadia Marie Tousainte. I have one friend that I am currently walking next to. Every time I walk next to her I feel the stares of the boys from our school like they can see through our clothes. I only feel this way when I walk with her. When i am alone no one notices me and walking with her makes me miss the feeling of blending in. They throw compliments at her and whistle with every step we take. Our hips sway subtly to the sporadic whistles as we walk off of the school's premises down the street. Boys riding bikes with other boys sitting or standing on them scatter between the crowd of boys ahead. "What are they doing?" My friend asks and I shrug. She wraps her arm around mine. It is comforting and i briefly forget all the boys that we are approaching. She lets me go and gently massages the shoulders of a lean muscular guy with a dark chocolate skin tone. He turns around and murmurs something in her ear, and he pushes her away from him afterwards. His face is serious and his lips are pressed into a line. He scratches the short, dark brown coils on his head and looks away from her then to the crowd once again. She walks back to me. Her eyebrows are furrowed. She could be annoyed or maybe the setting Sun's light is getting to her eyes. "What is wrong?" I ask. She shrugs. "He said girls should not be here." She says.

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"It means nothing because we are going to follow them."

I nod. A boy somewhere ahead yells on a megaphone. "Okay, everyone who wants to work for the best gangster here has to run to the meeting spot down the street. We told you the instructions on how to get to the place earlier. Remember you cannot get scared and run at the last minute. You will be killed if you are caught running back." The boy says. "I think we should not go. Maybe that guy was right about girls not getting involved in this." I say. "One of us can probably end up romantically tied to the gangster guy." She says.

"I don't want to end up tied to a gangster guy. I am a virgin."

"All the better, you should want to go after him even more. Girl, look around us! We are living poorly This is our chance to get out of this situation."

"i am comfortable with how I live."

"Do it for me, please. It will be fun."

Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep! I walk back slowly and she grabs my arm like a boa constrictor. She yanks me deep into the moving crowd. The stampede moves me against my will with her ahead. They run and giggle as we speed to meet our fate. I jump on some guy's back and he continues running without trying to push me off. A curve makes him lose his balance and we roll out of the crowds crushing path onto the dirt next to the street. The guy that warned my friend before is the guy I am looking at now. He looks at my uniform shirt and my face. I push him off of me and straighten my shirt and skirt. He looks around us at the night and the lights approaching us from down the street. He laughs. "You are not scared of me, right?" He asks. "I am not scared of you." I say.

"Then why did you push me away?"

"I am not a lustful, promiscuous girl."

"You think that you are conjuring up prurient desires from me. How about you show me that you are not scared of me?"

I stumble back and shake my head before running back on the broken street. His feet slap the ground behind me and I am anxious. I push myself to run faster away from him. The sound of his footsteps get drowned out as we catch up with the loud crowd. I weave myself into the lower half of the crowd and sneak a glance backward. I see him stuck behind three guys behind me. I laugh and continue to weave myself in the rushing crowd. We reach the destination that is unknown to me in no time. The boys stop running and walk into the rundown gas station. As I approach the still crowd ahead. I watch my friend slam the gas station window with her palms. A thug comes out of the gas station with a machete and hacks one of her arms off. Her blood splatters across the faces of some of the boys nearby. She screams and tries to runaway but he grabs her plats and hacks away at her body until she is a bloody mess of flesh on the pavement. I stifle a scream and turn around. My vision blurs with the salty tears spilling over my eyelids down my cheeks and past my lips. The boy that warned my friend before hugs me and I nestle my face into his chest. He rubs my back as I silently sob into his sweaty, dirt sprinkled shirt. I stopped crying and he kept rubbing my back. I looked up at him and got on the tip of my toes. "Thank you." I whispered near his face and kissed his cheek. He stopped rubbing my back and I weaved myself through to the end of the side of the crowd. i jumped into some bushes and crawled away from the scene. I needed to find a police station but instead I found a medical clinic. Sick people are sitting in the lobby. I run past them to the counter. "May I use your phone, please?" I ask. The female medical assistant look at me quizzically. "Why?" She asks.

"I have to call my mother so that she can come and pick me up."

"Okay."

She hands me the phone and I press the numbers that will help me reach the police. I tell them calmly where to go because I have some important information for them and hang up. "I am sorry. My mother did not answer. Can I try her number again?" The lady nods and I call my mother and tell her to come to this location. "I will wait for her over there." I say to the lady and the male medical assistant near her. He gave me a worried look. I looked away from him and turned to walk to the seat near the door. As I walk to the seat, I see the boy that I kissed pointing at me through the glass wall with a gun pointed to his head. The thugs behind him raise their guns at the clinic glass. One of them shoots him in the head and I jump as my eyes widen. i turn back and try to run. They spray the place with bullets and a few pin me to the ground and knock the life out of me.