WHAT SHE STARTED CHAPTER ONE - by Khadijah Mohammed

I still remember it like it was yesterday.My heart was pounding as I ran across the field. I couldn't see Tessa, but the long grasses couldn't hide the sound of her — I could hear the blades brushing against her skin, soft and quick, while my own footsteps thundered beneath me. I don't know what ran faster that day, my legs or my mind. My mind had one instruction: catch her.Tessa was running away from me.She was smallish. Light-skinned, freckled, short brown hair. Not a beauty exactly — but the kind of girl you'd stop and stare at anyway. She had that kind of look. For a moment I was certain she could no longer hear me. And as she slowed to catch her breath, I came from the side and pushed her hard into the ground.She fell fast. She fell hard.She never got back up. That was two days ago.I sat in class now, staring at her empty seat a few feet away. By now she would have been whispering gossip the moment the teacher turned away. She would have pressed her gum into someone's hair and watched them discover it with quiet satisfaction. After class she would have gathered her little circle and found someone new to pick on. Tessa would hurt anyone to get whatever she wanted.She hurt me once. So I hurt her back.Her parents were never in the picture. The story the town passed around was that her parents were siblings. The day that got out, they both disappeared and left Tessa and her sister behind. That was ten years ago. When her sister turned sixteen she was arrested for drugs and hadn't been out since. Tessa had been on her own ever since. People always said she would end up like her sister eventually. If you think about it, I kind of did the town a favour.I could see her friends through the window — they were never in class, come to think of it, they were barely ever in school. They were probably waiting for her somewhere. They would wait until they got tired.I moved from one class to the next. Physics. Chemistry. Football practice. Our team had just qualified for the state competition and the whole school was buzzing about it. I went through the motions.When the final bell rang, I put in my airpods and walked out with everyone else. School to home was about fifteen minutes and I walked it without thinking. I greeted my mum and went upstairs, dropped my bag on the bed and headed straight for the shower.The relief I had been carrying for two days settled over me like something I had forgotten the name of. I hadn't felt it in a long time.I came back downstairs and sat with my mum. My dad wasn't home — he never was anymore. I didn't like leaving her alone. When dinner time came I made the food, fed her, gave her her medication and helped her to bed. I set my alarm for 5am.It rang, as it always did.I woke, did the chores, cleaned mum up, made her breakfast, and got myself ready. Airpods in, I headed out into the morning.I noticed the crowd before I understood it — first a few people, then more, all moving in the same direction, pulled by something I couldn't see. I followed slowly, not thinking much of it. The murmuring reached me before the crowd parted enough to show me anything — low voices, urgent, overlapping.Did you hear?Since last night, they're saying.Just lying there.Who would do something like that?I tried to keep moving, to take another route, to mind my business. But then, at the corner of my eye — a flash of blue. A skirt. The kind Tessa was wearing the day she died.I stopped.I told myself I was wrong. I pushed back through the crowd anyway, shouldering past people until I was close enough to see clearly.I was wrong.And then I wasn't.It was her. Tessa. Lying in the street, still and pale, exactly as I had left her — except I hadn't left her here. Someone said she had been here since last night. Someone else said the same thing. The words passed through the crowd like a current.I stood there, airpods in hand, and for the first time in two days, the relief was gone.

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