I was naive. I thought being kind would make people like me. I smiled when they laughed at my mistakes. I nodded when they whispered behind my back. I wanted friends… real friends. But all I got were masks — masks that hid cruelty.
"Come on, we're your friends!" they'd say.
"Yes, yes," I'd nod, trying to believe it. But their "friendship" was a twisted kind of entertainment — a game I didn't even know I was playing.
There were three of them I had to endure every day: Witchy, Bitchy, and Shitty. (Oh, I mean Winry, Berry, and Sira — but calling them anything else would've been too kind.) They were loud, chaotic, and completely obsessed with making me their personal comedy show.
If they were bored, I became the punchline. Need me to dance? Sure. Share my secrets for laughs? Why not. Even the smallest things that hurt me became their fun.
Once they joked about my parents.
"Does your mom's nose make pakoras (fritter) too?" one giggled.
I told Shitty, "That's mean!"
And she shouted to the group, "Look how sensitive she is! She cries over everything!"
And everyone laughed. At me. Always at me.
Sometimes they made me play hide-and-seek near the old school well. "Go hide under that ladder, nobody will see you!" they'd say. And like a fool, I did. My tears were their entertainment; my pain, their hobby.
The haunted-house trip was their masterpiece. They left me alone in a dark room and ran off, pretending they'd "forgotten" me. I was eleven then — the youngest in class, small and clueless. But that day wasn't the end of the joke. It was just the beginning of something else.
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It happened one afternoon.
They'd pulled another prank, and I ran — too fast, too blind — straight across the back lane behind the gym. The next second, the ground beneath me vanished. I fell.
Not into a normal gutter — no. This wasn't the kind you see on the streets. It was narrow, deep, lined with metal. My heart hammered as I hit the bottom, half-soaked in dirty water, coughing, dizzy.
When I looked to my left, I froze. There was a tunnel. Narrow, silent, stretching into the dark.
And because stupidity was apparently my superpower, I walked toward it.
After a few steps, a faint light shimmered ahead — cold, bluish, mechanical. Then I saw it: a huge glass door, reinforced with an iron-grilled mesh full of small circular holes. To the side, a metal panel blinked faintly, its surface covered with a fingerprint scanner and flickering lights.
I shouldn't have gone closer.
But I did.
The air was heavy, humming like something alive behind that glass. And then — someone moved.
And then my eyes met someone else's
My fingers trembled. My pulse rang in my ears. That one glance… changed everything