She knows better than to listen to her classmates. Claire has a lot of experience in ignoring the nasty whisper that tend to spring up around her not-quite-normal family. She’s ignored the whispers about her deadbeat dad and about how her mother struggled to support them. About her increasingly shabby clothing. About how awful her mother is for dragging her around the country instead of sending her to school. It’s all variations on the same old theme, and all things that she learned to tune out years ago.
But this is different. This doesn’t start with a whisper of “Amelia” or “Jimmy” or “Claire”.
It starts with giggles and “Castiel.”
She can’t help but look over curiously. There are three girls from her class hunched over an iPad; two of them look absolutely enthralled in whatever is on the screen, while the third is quite obviously disinterested. It only takes a moment for Claire to realize that they’re reading; she recognizes the passages. Not only because she’s read the book, but because she lived it.
They’re not very far into “The Rapture”. From what she’s hearing, they’re only just reaching the point where her father’s madness becomes noticeable. She’s not sure how she feels about how it’s portrayed in the book; a lot of things that happened got glossed over or ignored entirely. A lot of the things Jimmy had tried to get them to believe him about Castiel had frightened Amelia and Claire; it’s far from a good memory.
None of that matters now.
None of that matters in the wake of “And then the bitch had the gall not to believe him!”
She’s telling herself to calm down. That these girls don’t know what it was like; that they’ve only read the bits and pieces of their lives that make Jimmy look good for accepting Castiel. They didn’t live through it, through the fear that her father was slowly going insane, talking out loud to invisible people and the increasingly dangerous stunts designed to try and prove to his family that he wasn’t.
This she tells herself while the two supernatural fangirls rant and rave about how stupid and mean Amelia is for not believing that something special and magical was happening when Jimmy tried boiling his hand. How they would have known instantly that angels were real and that Jimmy had been chosen for something more. That they would have stood by his side and supported him in ways that Amelia was just too dumb to know how. It is at this point that the narrator leans towards her friends conspiratorially. “She totally deserves it when she gets possessed by a demon later on.”
Claire snaps.
There really isn’t any other explanation for it. One moment she is trying to calm down, trying to stop listening and the next… the next moment little miss narrator is screaming in pain as Claire stomps on her fingers hard enough to crack the screen on the iPad underneath them.
By the time she’s pulled off of the girls, Narrator-girl’s fingers are definitely broken and Fangirl’s got a truly impressive shiner. Their non-fangirl friend is covered in scratches and bruises from where she tried to pull Claire off and only got violence in response. Claire doesn’t get away without injury, either. There are scratches on her face from the girls fighting back, and her lip is split. There are bruises starting to bloom along her arms and her ribs ache from where she was grabbed.
She remains defiantly silent when they’re sent to the principal. Her silence is taken for the admission of guilt that it is when the trio blames her for starting the fight. It’s taken for the lack of regret that it is when she refuses to explain why she attacked them. She’s so stubborn about it that she remains quiet throughout the wait for her ride home, and then on the ride itself.
She has a week’s suspension as a result of her actions. She doesn’t plan on explaining.