Shannon O'Reilly was bullied and everything his older sister wasn't. When his sister Sarah gives him a chance to change things through a single wish things don't go as planned.     I Wish: Book 4 Chapter 14 Broken By Amethyst

Thursday was another normal day at school. Since we had informed Sarah, Talisha, and Annie about the favor that we would be doing for Mother Josephine earlier in the week, Annie had canceled our self-defense lesson for the night and Ellie had gotten the evening off from work. As Jennifer and I were at our lockers putting our homework for the evening in our backpacks and grabbing our coats and boots I asked my best friend, “So, what are you doing tonight while the three of us go to meet Michelle?”

“Mason and I are going to meet at the public library to get our homework done and then we’re going to go for dinner and see if Nathan Phillips Square Rink is open yet so we can do some skating,” she said with a grin.

“That sounds fun, I haven’t been skating since I was ten. Have fun Jen, I’ll see you tomorrow,” I replied as I finished putting on my coat and shouldered my backpack.

Beth and Ellie met me halfway to the doors and we quickly made our way to the exit and then across the parking lot to my car. I had wanted to try getting some driving practice in again but we had had some freezing rain the night before and more snow while we were in school. I didn’t dare try driving on snow-covered ice yet. Most of the major streets were already plowed and salted but a lot of the backroads would still be treacherous.

So, once Beth and I had taken our promise rings from our purses and put them on our fingers where they belonged, Beth ended up driving us across town to the address that Mrs. Dubois had given me, a nice little red brick house with dark green trim. Once all three of us were out of the car and gathered at the front door I tentatively rang the doorbell. It was a moment later that a raven-haired woman in her forties who bore a resemblance to Mother Josephine opened the door. She quickly took in our school uniforms under our unzipped coats and a smile touched her lips. “You must be the girls that my sister sent.”

“Yes, Ma’am. I’m Shannon and this is my girlfriend Bethany and my cousin Elsaishe,” I answered trying to be as respectful as possible. Being respectful doesn’t hurt anyone and she was my elder and someone with whom I was trying to make a good first impression. Some people seem to think that respect should be earned, but I’ve always thought that the opposite is true. Respect should be given to everyone and disrespect is earned.

“It’s nice to meet all of you, please come inside,” Mrs. Dubois offered. Then as we were all taking off our boots and coats she smiled and added, “Michelle is upstairs in her room, I’ll go and bring her down, why don’t you all make yourselves comfortable in the living room?”

She led us to the room in question where I got comfortable on the couch with Ellie and Beth to either side of me as she went upstairs. After a moment we could hear voices emanating from the second floor and neither voice sounded very happy. After several minutes of awkward waiting, Mrs. Dubois returned with an unhappy-looking girl with long black hair and brown eyes. Her style was very emo with a black hoodie with the hood up and black jeans and her hair was kind of scruffy, falling around her face as if she were trying to hide it.

“Hi, you must be Michelle. I’m Shannon and this is my girlfriend, Beth, and my cousin, Ellie,” I said trying to stay positive and giving her my best smile.

“Look, you don’t need to be here,” Michelle said with a frown. “You can go, and tomorrow you can tell my aunt that you tried to make nice and I wasn’t having it. You don’t need to be stuck here with me and she’s not going to punish you since you tried, she’s not as mean and tough as she acts. So don’t worry about whatever it is that she had on you to make you come here.”

Beth was looking at her intently and I could hear her sniff to my right as Ellie did the same to my left. Beth’s mind was filled with concern as she stood up, shook her head, and tried to give Michelle a smile of her own. “She didn’t have anything on us. She and your parents are worried about you and she thought that you could use some friends who can understand what you’re going through. We volunteered to try to help you because we’re all into girls too, and all of us have known what it’s like to be bullied and treated as outcasts. We’re all stronger if we stick together.”

“Omigod!” Michelle fake-enthused, “Well, why didn’t you say so before?! Now that the baby dyke squad is here everything is just fucking perfect!”

“Michelle!” Her mother snapped, looking completely aghast.

Beth gave her a long searching look before shrugging. “Sure Shannon and Ellie are still kind of new to this whole thing, Ellie just figured it out earlier this week. From what your aunt told us though, I’ve been out for as long as you have and honestly, none of that has any bearing on whether we can be supportive of you and maybe even become friends.”

“I don’t need any more friends to stab me in the back, thanks. And I don’t need your support either if it’s anything like the support I’ve gotten from the other LGBT kids at school,” Michelle snapped.

I looked from Beth to Michelle, and then to Ellie, uncertain of what to do. My eyes fell upon my Fae cousin just in time to see that same determined look on her glamoured face as had been there when she announced mine and Beth’s “engagement” to the world. She stood up and smiled and said, “Well, we’re good listeners so why don’t you tell us all about that, and while you’re telling us about that maybe you can…”

I didn’t hear the last of what Ellie had said as she moved very close to Michelle and whispered it in her ear. Whatever it was though, it got the hostile girl’s attention. Her face went white and she looked from Ellie to her Mother and then back to Ellie, Beth, and me. “Fine. We’re not talking about it here though. Mom, we’re heading to the mall.” She turned on her heel and made for the front door where she quickly put on her boots and jacket and grabbed her purse. We had to hurry with getting our own things on to catch up with her and I promised Mrs. Dubois that we would take care of her daughter and do our best to help her as we scrambled out the door.

Michelle waited until we were all in the privacy of my car before turning to glare at Ellie. “How the fuck did you know that I’ve been cutting?”

“Basic powers of observation,” my Fae cousin said with a dismissive shrug as I turned in my seat to watch the pair and Beth put the car in gear. “There are bloodstains on the sleeves of your hoodie, good choice wearing black, they’re barely noticeable, probably not at all to those with less acute vision.” She and Beth did have really sharp vision and they probably smelled the blood as well with those sensitive Fae noses of theirs. That certainly explained them sniffing like they were.

“I noticed too,” Beth agreed as she pulled into the street. “I’m not going to tell you that you should stop or anything like that because if you didn’t realize that you wouldn’t have looked so scared when Ellie whispered about it. We’re not going to hurt you, we want to help you, so why don't you think about that and tell us what happened to make you doubt people so much while we drive to the mall.”

“I just said that we were going to the mall to get you out of the house so Mom doesn’t overhear this, that’s the last fucking place I want to go,” Michelle grumbled.

I rolled my eyes and sighed in exasperation. “Well if you didn’t want her to suspect anything then you should have thought of another excuse. Have you ever heard of four teenage girls going to the mall and not buying anything? You’re going to have to go home with at least something or she’s going to wonder why you were so quick to get us out of the house.”

Michelle seemed to realize the trap that she had put herself in and sighed. “Dammit, it’s been so long since I’ve been to the mall that I didn’t think of that.”

Michelle still appeared to have her doubts about us but as we drove to the nearest mall she told us her story. She probably did it just because the words filled the awkward silence and because she thought that after this mall trip she would never have to see us again. She didn’t seem to trust people in general, but then I probably wouldn’t either if I’d gone through what she had at the hands of so-called friends.

It had started in her bedroom on a Saturday afternoon while she and her best friend Ginny were hanging out. They were talking about some of the boys at their school and what it would be like to have a boyfriend. Michelle had never really been interested in any of the boys and she figured out why when Ginny had suggested that they should practice kissing so that they would be able to do it properly once they got boyfriends. Michelle realized then that she was into girls and Ginny had looked like she was enjoying herself too so she admitted it to her friend.

Ginny told Michelle that she thought she might be bisexual but that she wasn’t ready to come out of the closet, so any relationship they had would have to be kept secret. Michelle agreed, but she hadn’t wanted to hide anything from her parents so she told them that she thought she was gay. They had been surprisingly cool about it and she was actually happy about things until school the following Monday.

Ginny and Michelle had both been a part of the popular crowd at their school but while Michelle was in school that Monday she discovered that all of her former friends had turned against her. Ginny had told all of them that Michelle was a lesbian and had tried to force herself on her. That was when the bullying began; the girls who were formerly her friends spread rumors about her, she received threatening and inappropriate text and voice messages on her phone, pictures of male genitalia were stuffed in her locker and slurs painted on the outside, and if any of them saw her outside of school they’d follow her and do their best to humiliate her in public.

Her school was as bad as my former school, if not worse. The popular kids, rich kids, and athletes could get away with anything and the principal had said that there wasn’t enough evidence to prove anything when she tried to get something done about it. There was plenty of evidence though, just the messages on her phone should have been enough, and everyone had seen the way that they treated her in the halls. So her bullies got even worse and none of the other students would come forward to help or even be seen with her. Even the other openly LBGT kids wouldn’t go near her, for fear of bringing the same thing down upon themselves.

Michelle had hoped that her tormentors would lose their interest in their little game over the summer if she stayed out of sight and out of mind, but it just kept going if they saw her alone in public and when she returned to school in September they picked up where they had left off. She couldn’t bear to tell her family what was going on and she threw her phone deep in her closet where she’d never have to look at it again and stopped leaving the house unless she absolutely had to.

We were all pretty furious by then. It was like a raging inferno in Beth’s mind and Ellie looked pissed in the back seat as she reached out to take the other girl’s hands in her own as Michelle finished her story. “So, yeah, I couldn’t take it anymore and after school started I… tried to kill myself. I guess I didn’t cut deep enough or at the right angle or something because I didn’t die, and that’s when I started cutting. It hurts, but there’s kind of a rush to it too while I’m doing it. The pain makes all the other pain in my life go away for a few minutes, and it’s something that’s mine, something that I’m in control of and those assholes at school can’t take away from me.”

“Okay, we’re calling Sgt. Williams and Detective Hanson about this later. They’ll do something about it or put us in contact with someone who can,” I said, trying to hold back my anger. “Michelle, do you still have any of those messages on your phone?”

Michelle regarded me with a look of uncertainty on her face. Finally, after a moment, she shrugged but kept looking at all three of us warily. “Yeah, though my phone is in the back of my closet somewhere and it hasn’t been charged in months. Why do you fucking care, and why are you being so nice? What’s in it for you?”

“Because we can, and nobody should be treated the way you have been. Real friends stick by you and help you when you’re in trouble or going through something, they don’t turn on you. What’s in it for us is you being happy, that should be enough for any real friend,” I stated firmly.

Beth ended up driving us to Yorkdale Mall, it was about halfway between my place and Michelle’s and we hoped that we would have less chance of being seen by anyone from Michelle’s school there. It was a risk though because Yorkdale was quite a bit bigger than any of the malls near Michelle’s place and could draw in anyone serious about some after-school shopping. As we trolled the mall we told Michelle a bit about ourselves and picked up a few things and it looked like she might be starting to relax a bit around us.

One of the things we picked up was a change of clothes. It was too warm in the mall to keep wearing our coats and Ellie, Beth, and I were getting a lot of attention in our school uniforms, so we each bought a new outfit to change into. Soon we were garnering slightly less attention in our new clothes. Ellie had chosen a mid-thigh length denim skirt and a baby pink t-shirt, Beth had gone for a pair of tight low-rise jeans and a crimson crop top that showed off her awesome abs, and I had decided on an emerald and black sleeveless skater dress with a built-in bodice and mid-thigh hem that went really nicely with the black leather ankle boots I was wearing.

We had our uniforms in the shopping bags and had convinced Michelle to at least buy some new jeans to maintain her cover before we started to get hungry and headed toward the food court. We were halfway toward our destination when Beth sighed and muttered, “Don’t look now girls, but we’re being followed.”

“I thought that Lisa was over that,” I grumbled.

“It’s not Lisa,” Ellie quickly put in. “A girl and three guys and they’re not even trying to be subtle. Hell, they’re pointing at us and making rude comments and they’ve mentioned Michelle by name.”

I leaned over to tenderly kiss Beth. “Okay, sweetheart, it’s time to text Sgt. Williams and let her know that we might have a problem here.”

“On it, babe,” she replied as she extracted her phone and began rapidly thumb-typing. “Done. They’re closing in on us so let’s find a place with plenty of surveillance cameras in case things get ugly.”

“They’ve already gotten ugly,” Michelle said snidely as she risked a glance in a store window and we continued walking to a storefront that Beth whispered had good camera coverage. “The girl is Ginny and the guys are her boyfriend Dale and some of his teammates from the football team.”