XII. The Girl Who Refused to Fight Back
- Feb 20
- 2 min read
Updated: Apr 2
They kept her in the east block, where the walls were streaked with mildew and peeling paint, and the ceiling leaked whenever it rained. Every sound carried there: the slam of doors, the scrape of trays, the laughter that always sounded like cruelty.
She was delicate compared to the others. Pale. Bones like glass under her skin. The kind of girl who apologized when someone else bumped into her. She moved quietly, her hands always folded, her eyes always fixed on the ground. The guards forgot she existed until someone hurt her.
There was a group of girls who ruled the floor. They were loud, hardened, and hungry for weakness. She gave them everything they wanted. She flinched at their footsteps, gave up her food, her space, her dignity. They called her Rail Rat. Dope Doll. Corpse-bitch. She never reacted. Maybe she thought if she stayed passive long enough, they’d eventually lose interest.
They didn’t.
When a new girl arrived—big, angry, and desperate to belong—the others gave her an initiation task. The attack happened in the showers. By the time they dragged her out, she was barely breathing. Her ribs were cracked, nose broken, one eye swollen shut. She spent a week in the medical ward, staring at the ceiling, counting the seconds between heartbeats.
When she returned to the block, the whispers started again. Then the laughter. Then the fists. She didn’t run. She didn’t even raise her hands to cover her face. She just curled in on herself, whispering something too soft to hear. Maybe a prayer. Maybe an apology. It didn’t matter. No one was listening.
A week later, the alarm went off at dawn. Doors slammed. Voices shouted. They found her hanging from the top bunk, a torn sheet knotted around her neck. Her feet touched the floor, just barely, her toes curled like she’d tried to change her mind at the last second.
The girls screamed when they saw her. Not from guilt, or horror, or shock. From excitement.
And standing there, watching the guards carry her small body down the hall like an inconvenience, I felt something cold shift in my chest.
I told myself I’d seen worse. That this one was no different from the others. But that was a lie.
Most versions of her carry something inside them. Beneath the grief and the fear and the guilt, there is always a spark of the person she could have been. Even in the worlds where she breaks and the light in her eyes flickers out. Even then, she fights to survive in whatever morbid, twisted way she knows how.
But not this one.
And I wondered, as I stared at her lifeless face, if this was what awaited them all. If every version of her would eventually break the same way, given enough time and enough suffering.
The thought didn’t sit well with me.
The search continues.
M.
