Enter the world of Rosie.

As you step through the front doors of your new completion school for the first time, you feel a strong, familiar sense of foreboding cling to your back. You've been assured by voices who just don't understand your perspective, that this is just a common experience for young women your age. Obviously a complete lie. After all, if that were the case, why is the average girl you pass confident and relaxed, instead of nervous or skittish?

Even if it were true, you find it perishingly unlikely that anyone would be able or willing to understand. After all, you've only recently had to move halfway across the country, uprooting your home comforts. On top of that, you've been delayed in starting at West Springwater Academy by two weeks, and missed out on whatever bonding exercises they employ here. And that means everyone's picked their dorms, and your future classmates have already formed their cliques.

Ah, yes. The cliques. Groups of people who decide among themselves whose lives they want to make miserable. Not with physical blows, but with words that leave wounds that can never truly heal. By gaining their victims’ trust and then turning against them. By isolating them, manipulating others into shunning them. They've all been brought together in the fortnight of your absence, and now you're left alone, at their mercy.

You feel stares boring into you, heads turning to gaze upon you, an unfamiliar element in a new world. Conversations and gossip turn to silence as you are pored over. In this moment, you feel like prey surrounded by a pack of hunters. They've clearly come up with their first insult, or their first scheme to make it clear that you're not welcome. And while a hunted animal’s fight-or-flight response may have been activated in this situation, you just feel yourself freeze. Your mind isn't anywhere but fears of the future, not even thinking of where you're going...

THUD

CRASH