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 15 Confrontation By Amethyst

We managed to get to the storefront that Beth suggested before Ginny’s group caught up with us. “Well, if it isn’t Michelle the muff muncher,” a voice that I assumed belonged to Ginny said from behind us as we looked in the window of the lingerie shop. She sounded snooty and didn’t look much better as we turned to face her. She was bleach blonde, wore too much makeup, and the sneer on her face distorted her somewhat pretty face as she looked over Michelle and Elsaishe as my Fae cousin gripped Michelle’s hand reassuringly. “Aww, is that your girlfriend?” she taunted, causing the jock with his arm held possessively around her and his friends to laugh.

Poor Michelle looked like she wanted to bolt, but Ellie kept a hold of her hand and looked Ginny over and then stared her right in the eyes. “That’s not your business, but if she is then I’d say that her taste has improved. But then, anything would probably be a step up from you.”

“You bitch! You can’t talk to me like that!” Ginny raged as she wound up in an attempt to slap Ellie.

I saw it coming and quickly intercepted the blow, catching her wrist in my hand. “What’s the matter?” I asked, “Can’t take what you’ve been dishing out? From what Michelle has told us, you and your clique have been doing and saying a lot worse to her. Maybe you shouldn’t treat people that way if you don’t want it in return. People like you are the raw sewage of society.” Then I gave her hand a disgusted look and let go of it before deliberately wiping my own off on the hem of my dress.

Ginny looked even angrier than before. She managed to get control of herself enough to sneer at us though. “Whatever that little bitch told you, it’s all a lie.”

One of the jocks with Ginny’s boyfriend was giving me a long look and just his eyes on me made me feel dirty. That feeling only got worse as he grinned at me and said, “You’re hot, so you probably know the deal, being seen with her is social suicide. Why don’t you drop the muff munchers there and come hang out with us? I’ll show you that it just takes a real man to…”

He had barely reached out to grab me before Beth acted, her mind filled with cold anger. Before anyone realized what was happening, my girlfriend had reached in, grabbed his reaching hand, and rolled him over her shoulder to slam him into the hard mall floor. She crouched on his back holding his arm behind him at a painful-looking angle and gave it a good hard twist to let him know that she meant business, causing him to yelp in pain as she spoke in a glacier cold tone that gave me chills. “Listen, asshole, if you or any of your friends try to touch my fiancée or any of my friends again I will break you. Starting with this arm.” She gave another twist to demonstrate her point.

Satisfied that Beth had things in hand I turned my attention back to Ginny and the other two guys who were all looking at my Familiar/assistant/betrothed in stunned disbelief as she didn’t move to get off the jock who was almost twice her size. Sure Beth was fairly tall at five foot eleven and athletic-looking, but he was at least six foot five, broad-shouldered, and looked like he did a lot of weight training. “She means it,” I told them coldly. “But if you’re so sure that Michelle is lying to us, why don’t you tell us the truth about what happened between you.” I directed my magick as I said the last and pointed at Ginny accusingly, channeling the intent that she be unable to lie for the next hour.

Usually, I tried not to use my magick for mundane matters but from the sounds of it Ginny and her friends had driven Michelle to the point of trying to kill herself, and no matter how this had started that wasn’t right and they should be held accountable. At the moment I was more inclined to believe Michelle since Ginny and her friends’ behavior proved that, at the very least, they were all assholes. Michelle also seemed to be genuinely terrified of them.

“I was never interested in her, as a friend or anything else. I hung out with her because she was pretty and popular, so I could get an in with her friends. She was always going to be more popular than me because she was so nice to everyone, so I needed to take her out of the running. I made up some shit about practicing our kissing figuring that I could say she kissed me and she was a lesbian. When I saw that she was enjoying I pretended to enjoy it too, said some shit about being bi and in the closet, and then I managed to record her little confession on my phone. By Monday I managed to out her to most of the school.” Ginny looked so pleased with herself until she realized what she had just said.

“And then you and your friends all went out of your way to make her life a living hell,” I said bitterly as I gave them a disgusted look.

“Fucking queers shouldn’t be allowed to go to school with the rest of us, or use the same bathrooms and change rooms so you can fucking perv on us!” Ginny’s boyfriend shouted.

A familiar voice spoke from behind him, hidden from my sight by the sheer bulk of him and his buddy that was still standing. “Hey, you got a problem with gay people?”

As he swung around to confront the new arrival I saw a flash of pink. “This is none of your business! Get lost, dyke, before I… ooof!”

“Dale!” Ginny looked around in fear as she found herself outnumbered with Beth still holding one of Dale’s buddies on the ground and her boyfriend hunched over in agony from the solid kick that had been delivered between his legs.

The owner of that familiar voice, and the foot that did the kicking, waved from over Dale’s bent-over and wheezing body. She looked quite a bit different than when we’d seen her the day before. Her long blonde hair had been cut short and spiky and was dyed a bright pink and she wore a leather jacket over a simple turquoise crop top and tight black jeans. It was so vastly different from her usual preppy look that I could only stare for a moment before sputtering, “Lisa?!”

That was when four mall cops decided to show up and the one in charge asked, “What’s going on here?” Then he cast a confused look toward Beth, who was still holding her captive in place. “Umm… Miss… I’m going to have to ask you to let him go.” Beth quickly complied and returned to my side to put an arm around me.

“Sir, if you’ll look at the security footage you’ll see that these guys were following me and my friends and trying to mess with Michelle here,” I quickly explained. “We didn’t do anything except in self-defense, well technically Beth was defending me, but she’s my fiancée and sort of my bodyguard.”

“Yeah, and I saw these guys were being assholes and really loud about their bigoted opinions and took offense and asked him if he had a problem with gay people. He threatened me, so I defended myself. Half the mall could hear him ranting about gay people,” Lisa added.

Ginny and the jocks were trying to make like they were the victims, but to their horror when Ginny was asked she said, “We saw them in the mall and decided to follow them and fuck with them. Since they were with Michelle and those two were holding hands we figured that they were all lesbos and we could have a bit of fun.” I’m not sure who was more surprised and horrified, Ginny or the guys she was with.

Twenty minutes later the four of us were making our way to the food court with Lisa while Sgt. Williams and her partner were in the security office interviewing Ginny, Dale, and his friends. She was also going to go over the security footage and gave Michelle her number so she could call her to arrange a time to hand over her old cell phone with whatever messages might be on it for evidence. She had also cautioned Michelle not to touch anything if anything else was left in her locker or on if there was any further vandalism, but to call her immediately so she could come and deal with it.

At first Sgt. Williams had thought Lisa was part of the problem since she was in the security office with us but we explained what happened and that Lisa had already apologized for her actions and taken steps to make amends. Lisa even apologized to Sgt. Williams and her partner for the trouble she caused and admitted to feeling terrible that they had gotten hurt chasing her, even though none of them remembered what happened when the pair of officers were knocked out and Lisa was abducted. It was nice to see that she was taking responsibility for her actions and trying to be a better person. So, in the spirit of friendship, we had asked if she wanted to come to have dinner with us.

We managed to get our meals and find a table big enough for all of us, and now that we didn’t have security breathing down our necks I smiled at Lisa. “That’s a good look for you, you look hot. I thought that you were grounded though.” We had introduced her and Michelle briefly, but we hadn’t really had a lot of time to talk while in the security office.

Lisa smiled back and nodded. “I was, but I told Mom about what happened with you yesterday and I kind of had a horrible day at school today so she took pity on me and let me borrow her car. She still wants to meet you though, all of you. So, since I was free I decided to come to the mall and change my look a bit and get some new clothes.”

“What happened at school?” Beth asked in concern.

“No worse than I was expecting,” Lisa replied with a despondent shrug. “Gossip is flying all over school about me being a lesbian, my former teammates are spreading most of the rumors and they’re pretty bad. The coaches and principal are pissed that I quit and are pressuring me to stay on the teams, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to show my back so my former teammates can put another knife in it. A lot of the people that I was a bitch to are getting their payback too, but I probably deserve that. It was a really shitty day, but I guess that’s part of the reason that Mom wants to meet you. She’s thinking of having me change schools and wants to know about St. Catherine’s.”

Ellie, Beth, and I told Lisa all about St. Catherine’s as we ate and Michelle watched the conversation thoughtfully. Finally, Michelle asked uncertainly, “Why did you all stand up for me? You could have just bailed on me and those jerks would have probably left you alone.”

“Because friends stand beside one another when there’s trouble, they don’t run off or stab you in the back, Michelle. That’s why we want you to talk to Sgt. Williams. She can help put an end to all of this bullying you’ve been going through and nail the people responsible. You don’t deserve to be treated that way, nobody does,” I told her carefully before turning my gaze to Lisa to let her know that that applied to her as well.

“Yeah, that’s kind of why I stepped in,” Lisa admitted. I didn’t see any of you well but I saw that bitch and those big assholes being all bigoted and heard him bitching about ‘queers’. I figured that they were making someone miserable so I thought that I should see if you needed any help. It kind of reminded me of how I was acting with Shannon before I came to my senses and I’m never going to let anyone treat someone else that way again if I can help it.”

“I… well… thanks,” Michelle replied with a blush. “I’m not used to having people come to my defense. How the hell did you take Tony down though, Beth? That was fucking amazing.”

“Aikido, you know, using his momentum and size against him,” Beth smoothly lied. “I’m Shannon’s personal assistant as well as her main squeeze and sometimes I need to play bodyguard so Shannon’s sister’s girlfriend has been teaching us a few things.”

“Yeah, Annie is awesome with martial arts and she used to be a cop,” Ellie added.

“I wonder why Ginny told the truth though. She’s a lying backstabbing bitch and I never thought that I would ever see her admit to something like that,” Michelle said with an awed shake of her head.

“Well we did have her and those jerks with her on camera so maybe when I mentioned the security footage she got scared and figured it would be in her best interests to cooperate,” I suggested, hoping to get her off the topic. I didn’t like lying, but neither Michelle nor Lisa knew about the existence of magick and I couldn’t risk revealing it to either of them unless we absolutely had to.

“Yeah, I guess that could be it, she’s always looking out for number one, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that she turned on them when it looked like they might all be in trouble,” Michelle spat bitterly.

Lisa reached across the table to squeeze Michelle’s hand reassuringly. “People like that are always looking out for themselves. Real friends look out for one another. I thought that I maybe had some real friends, but today showed me that I really didn’t. Shannon, Beth, and Ellie were willing to give me a chance and show me what real friends are like even though I don’t really deserve it. They’re good people, and I think they’ll be good friends too if we let them. I’d like to be your friend too if you’ll have me, if nothing else at least we’ll both have someone to talk to about how much school sucks.”

“I… yeah, that could be nice,” Michelle admitted.

We hung out at the mall for another hour before finally saying our goodbyes to Lisa and taking Michelle home. We had managed to convince both of them to go to the support group meeting on Sunday though and promised to be there as well to support them both. Michelle seemed less guarded with us when we dropped her off at home, but we all knew that it was going to be a while before she could fully trust anyone again. Still, it was a good day and I was feeling pretty good about the way that things were going with both Lisa and Michelle when Beth dropped me and Ellie off at home.