3 weeks ago...

“Little pervert.” Bethany jeers venomously at me. I keep my head down and look at the ground.

Can’t fight. Can’t stand up for myself. No fighting back or the college will kick me out. Not allowed to hit girls, even if they hit first.

It's been only a few months since we graduated high school. I had ambitions to go for a degree in computer science. I had high hopes of putting all the stuff from high school behind me and moving on with the next phase in my life.

But lucky me, Beth decided she wanted the same degree.

And the torment from high school followed me here.

She spits on me and walks away. I wipe it off sheepishly and continue to sit in my spot, staring at the ground. I put my earbuds in and play some music to distract myself. Music always seems to help, and it's the only thing I can really count on these days. I'm not great with people, and don't have many friends.

I look up and happen to catch sight of a girl with fiery red hair. I look down immediately. If Bethany saw that, she’d be back in a heartbeat with more insults and a few of her friends. I only made the mistake of looking at Bethany’s older sister once. “She’s out of your league you fucking pedophile.” She had said, then her friends had kicked me until a rib broke. Though that’s not really difficult, considering my skinny physique and fragile, weak body.

I'm sure in her eyes, she's doing a good thing. Punishing a criminal, delivering justice and all that. But for the life of me, I can't figure out why she thinks I've done all these horrible things, when all I've ever done is kept to myself.

Hailey was well known for being absolutely gorgeous, the face of an angel and the body of a succubus to go with it. She dyed her hair red a few years ago and never went back. She was the most sought after girl in high school. It seemed like every guy had made a shot with her, and she rejected every single one of them.

She also was at the same university, though for a different degree. Just my luck, huh?

She was a Metalhead, as I had discovered when I heard some guys talking about how she listened to ‘Devil’s music’. She was also reserved and distant. Not shy, more distancing herself from others because she preferred life that way. All of this, I had learned from hearing others talk about her. She was exactly my kind of girl and I would have gone for her, had it not been for her witch of a little sister. Hailey was one year my senior, Bethany was my age. Bethany took some kind of sadistic joy in reminding me how much of a pathetic loser I am, and how I wouldn’t ever be able to get with her sister. To my knowledge, no guy ever has, despite the probably hundreds that have tried.

Almost cliche. The loser with a crush on the most unattainable girl around, even to the popular guys. A part of me harboured a hope that she was looking for somebody like me, an outlier, a weird dude in the face of our increasingly uniform society. But I’ll never pursue that hope.

That fantasy.

Lest I be beaten half to .

I sigh and look down at the ground, blasting music into my ears to distract me.