"Where are my panties?"

"Do I look like a Victoria Secret store to you?"

Mia gritted her teeth and stared coldly at Eli who was polishing the windows in the hall, the ones he had splashed graffiti on. "My thong I was wearing yesterday, before..."

"Before what?" He glared sideways at her, clearly wanting her to say the words. She sure as hell wasn't going to.

"Just give them back," Mia growled, trying to keep her voice hushed. A few students were glancing their way, but they didn't lay much into their intimate argument. They were too consumed with waiting for the forensic team's official report which was scheduled to go public today. Maybe then they would finally discover who the mysterious genius was.

"Do you honestly think I took them?" Eli replied, aggressively polishing down the window where the stubborn graffiti kept sticking. "You think that us fucking meant something so meaningful to me, I had to steal your underwear as a sentimental souvenir? And here I thought you people were supposed to be smart."

"I'm smarter than you, which is why I know you took them," Mia snapped, crossing her arms. "You're known for being a criminal, and clearly you're a sociopath too or something. Taking my thong, for whatever reason it may have to you, is still considered theft, so I demand you give it back!"

"You demand? Do you ever listen to yourself?" He drawled. "Jesus Christ, you sound like you're presenting a fucking court case. I'm going to say this one last time," Eli turned to face her and then leaned down until he was but inches away from her face. "I. Did. Not. Steal. Your. Fucking. Thong. Did you catch that or would you like me to repeat it in Hebrew?"

Mia blinked up in shock at him and swallowed. Was he telling the truth? He was. He truly didn't take them. "But if you didn't take them, then where are they?"

"That sounds like a shitload of not-my-problem," He flatly replied and then resumed scrubbing down the windows.

Mia clenched her hands and tried to keep her cool. Always a dismissive prick, except for when he was trying to get into her pants - which he now had. She wondered if he was even going to keep talking to her now.

Oh, but she had been so damn stupid. Mia still couldn't remember how it had happened – it all went so quickly; One minute she was drawing his body from memory, the next he was actually there and had her bended up against the wall, juices running down her legs.

Just thinking about it made her insides clench from how mind-blowing it had been, but of course now also came the inevitable part where it was just sheer awkward. She had been so easy, it almost made her feel like a common whore. It was humiliating. Even more so now that she had to go up to him and ask him for her thong back, only to realize he didn't have it.

"Fine, whatever," She finally sighed, shaking her head. "I have to get to class."

"Good luck with the inspiration."

Mia froze in her steps but refused to turn around and get a look at his self-pleased face. Instead she begun walking again, ignoring the fact that her lower abdomen just clenched.

~~~

"Who drew this?" Mr Valenches asked, coming into the art class with a canvas. Her canvas.

"Oh, my God," Mia whispered, quickly clamping a hand over her mouth. It was the sketch of Eli. Of course nobody could see that because she had never actually gotten to the drawing-his-face part. It was just a headless body with a coat of unfinished ink. She had left it in the closed studio the other day and Valenches had to have found it.

Mr Valenches put the canvas on the display easel up front in the class and then looked to his students. When he saw Mia there, he quickly frowned. "Mia, I thought I told you I didn't want to see you in my class until you found your inspiration. Have you found it?"

"Actually..." She could do this. It was her art after all, and since nobody could tell it was him... "That's my canvas, Mr Valenches. I drew it."

His eyebrows shot up with surprise. "Really? You drew it? Who's the model?"

She had feared he would ask that question. She would just have to come up with an excuse. "It's, uh... an anonymous subject, Sir."

"I see," He said, turning to look at the canvas again. "I see you found your muse then. This is amazing, Mia. You've captured the essence of your subjects body art perfectly. I can sense all the stories, the emotions..."

Mia nodded along and smiled, but her mind was racing. Her muse? Was he kidding? It had just been an impulse, she hadn't even been thinking. She just picked up her pencil and drew. That could hardly be described as having found her muse – it was just her mere imagination going on a trip down Boredom Lane.

"Beautiful work, Mia," Valenches finally finished, sending her a smile. "You can come back to class."

Focusing when she heard the words 'come back to class', Mia's head whipped up and looked perplexed at Valenches. "Really?! I can?"

"Yes, on the grounds that you finish this," He said and tapped the canvas. "If your subject wishes to stay anonymous, you can omit the face, just focus on capturing the story behind his art, yeah? Make it feel like we're looking at his heart, not his skin."

Mia quickly nodded, feeling her heart bubble over with happiness. "Of course, thank you! Thank you so much!"

Valenches nodded and then smacked his hands together. "Alright everyone, then let's begin class! Get out your heart and soul and begin creating."

~~~

That afternoon as she was walking towards her car, Mia felt like jumping and dancing. Her morning had been a little rough, but the rest of the day had been absolutely genius.

Speaking of which, everyone had been gathered in the closed auditorium when the head of the forensic team had stood up on the podium and spoken the long awaited words – only they weren't the words people had expected to hear.

"As much as we have uncovered about the mystery genius, we can – as most of you already know – confirm with absolutely certainty that the genius is not a student of the Alexandrettia," He had said, causing a loud outrage from the students. He had raised his hand and continued when silence then fell again after a moment, "However; We can say with confidence that the genius is male. The age was harder to determine, due to the poorly constructed letters, but our expert puts him within the age of 15-20 years old. Other than that, there is not much we can reveal to the public," He said and made the crowd of students raise their voices in complaints again. "We will continue to work on decoding the handwriting, but with not much else to go on, we can only hope that the genius responsible will step up and take credit for his doings. For while he has provided us with an answer we have been trying to find for decades, he has also created many new questions."

The speaker had finished off with a few more words, but none that Mia had put any ears to. She had been too exhilarated about her own day and how it had panned out. Now, after a long day of finally working alongside her classmates, she was tired, both mentally and physically. All she could think of was getting home to her bed with a frozen lasagna.

"I don't fucking care if you're dying on the pavement and you only have one breath left – call me back!" She suddenly heard a familiar voice snap. Mia stopped in her tracks, turned around and found Eli by a payphone at the bus stop, slamming the phone back in its place. He then ran his hands through his hair before he with a violent, angry move punched the metal frame of the payphone, letting out an angry curse. Mia watched as he let out his frustrations before he finally managed to calm himself and look up. Their eyes met.

"What the fuck are you looking at?" He growled at her. "Mind your own fucking business."

Mia knitted her eyebrows together at his hostile attitude. There was nothing new about that, but he seemed extra agitated right now for some reason. Whoever wasn't replying to his calls was clearly pissing him off.

"I was, I was just worried on behalf of the pay phone," She replied, pulling her bag higher up on her shoulder. "If you break that, you have to pay for it."

"Yeah?" He said, cocking a provocative brow. "If I break your pussy, will I have to pay for that, too?"

Shocked, Mia just blinked. She didn't even know how to respond. He was practically calling her a prostitute.

"Fuck you," She spat, turning away from him, fishing her keys out of her pocket.

"You already did."

Swallowing hard, Mia tried to ignore him and just focused on unlocking her car. Thankfully he didn't say anymore, but simply just took a waiting position by the bus stop. She saw him pull up his hood as she climbed into her car.

For just a brief moment, Mia tried to picture herself in his worn out shoes; He was standing there by the bus stop, had just used a payphone instead of a cellphone, and was clearly tired and angry after a long day of cleaning. Whatever his personal problems were, they were clearly affecting him, too. When you looked closely, you could just see the little frown on his face as he stared down at the pavement.

"Don't think about it," Mia whispered to herself, shutting her eyes, leaning her head against the steering wheel. "Don't ask him, don't ask him, don't ask him, he'll say no anyway..."

That much she knew, but she wanted to ask him if he wanted a ride to wherever he was going, instead of waiting for the bus for another twenty minutes in the brisk air. He was only wearing a hoodie, after all.

"Just drive away," She said to herself and turned on the engine of her car. She knew he would say no anyway and probably drop some sarcastic remark about how now that he had dicked her, she started doing him personal favors perhaps because she thought she'd get one back. She was too tired to listen to his shit, so with only a pinch of bad conscience, she drove out of the parking lot and home.

~~~

"How the hell can the systems crash?!" Zoe shouted, tapping furiously on her laptop. "A whole school filled with computer geniuses and nobody can fix the damn servers? Have they ever heard of binary code?"

"Has anyone but you?" Anna tiredly groaned while all of them sat in the cafeteria, eating their lunch. The servers had been down all day which meant that pretty much every student at the school was riled up. They couldn't access the program's the school provided them with to do their homework and it was causing chaos. Zoe and her group of computer geeks were particularly hit; the calculus program they used to design and solve their mathematical problems with was also down, meaning that nobody could access their stuff.

"This sucks!" Zoe shouted again, hitting the Refresh button on her laptop over and over again. "They should've fixed it by now, why haven't they?"

"Maybe because they're not as smart as you?" Mia suggested.

Zoe sighed and finally shut her laptop. "I'm in hell. What if they lost everything and we have to start all over?"

"Honey, calm down," Anna voiced while reapplying her clear lipgloss with a little mirror in her hand. "Just give them a few more hours, it'll be up and running again."

"Easy for you to say, your entire future isn't resting on their servers," Zoe scoffed and laid her head on top of her folded arms on the table.

"It does, too!" Anna argued. "I'm writing my dissertation on international humanitarian behavior, concerning the other or the same gender when it comes to creating a partnership," Anna told, staring hard into her mirror. "My mama always told me; 'Smart girls get degrees, pretty girls get whatever they please'. Well I'm here to tell her that we can do both!"

"Amen," Mia preached as Anna snapped her fingers. "We are the next generation. Let's show them how being blonde and dressing nicely has nothing to do with our level of intelligence."

"Tell that to my mom," Zoe grunted, blowing a lock of her blue her out of her face. "She thinks that dressing in black makes me look, and I quote; 'like someone the grim reaper would date'."

"Wow. What did you say to that?" Mia asked.

Zoe shrugged. "I told her I'd keep wearing black until they invent a darker shade."

~~~

The whole day the server-glitch persisted. Tech people were running in and out of the server room – Mia even took a glance in whenever she saw someone come out. Motherboards and hard drives, wires and cables were in a mess in there while a big, black screen just kept on rolling with a green, unreadable text. Zoe told her that that was binary code, a string of 1's and 0's combined in a way that programmed the severs, but if someone accidentally screwed up the code, the whole system could crash, like right now.

That meant that they had to find the glitch, but with so many servers and hard drives, it was difficult to figure out where it was. Each server contained thousands of lines of binary code, each a line that had to be checked for just the smallest error. Understandably, that took time.

"And until those dumbasses in there find the goddamn error, our hands are basically tied," Zoe grumbled as they headed down the hall, past where Eli was working the floor with a mop. "All we can do is return to our manual textbooks and read up on our material until it's fixed. I almost never use my textbooks, I just use them to store my notes. This sucks."

"I'm sorry, babe," Mia said and wrapped an arm around her. In the corner of her eye, she saw Eli take a glance at her. She blocked him out. "You want to do something after classes, maybe go get some pizza?"

Zoe shook her head. "Nah, I just wanna go home and mope. Thanks for the offer, though."

"No problem," She smiled. "What about you, Anna? You're being so quiet."

They both turned and found Anna staring at Eli who was facing back to them now. She was staring at his ass.

"You think he squats?" She smugly grinned, practically drooling.

Mia felt her blood begin to boil, but she didn't know why. "Anna! Stop that!"

"Why? I'm horny and single and I bet he's ready to mingle," She grinned, biting her lip.

Mia clenched her fists. "Anna. He's a criminal." That you slept with. "He trashed the hallway, remember?" Was she trying to convince Anna or herself?

Anna rolled her eyes and made a dismissive wave with her hand. "Whatever, he's still hot. I might ask him what he's doing later."

"He'll probably be at Low Point," Zoe spoke up, shrugging a little. "He's there pretty often, chatting up girls with his friends. It's that bar I told you about."

"Oh." Mia said, trying to brush it off as nothing. In truth that was a big punch to her self-esteem. Even though she already knew it, it was never nice being confirmed as just another girl on his list. Anna wanting to be on that list too only made it so much worse. "Well good for him. Let's get to class, why don't we?"

"Fine," Zoe sighed with her head hanging. "Off to the ancient land of textbooks."

"I'll catch up with you guys in a second," Anna said, her eyes still trained on Eli. She didn't even bother giving them a look as she waved them goodbye.

And so Mia was left glaring after her as Anna walked up to Eli with a flirtatious smile on her lips; The guy Mia had fucked not even one week ago.

She had no claim on him, but when he turned at the tap on his shoulder and gave Anna the elevator look, it hurt. She could picture this being her punishment, seeing her friend go up and hit it off with the guy she had let fuck her, even though she loathed him. It would just be the cherry on top of all the bad decision she had made around him.

So with a deep breath, she forced herself to look away and follow Zoe down the hall to her class; The class where she now had to go draw him.

– There really was no escaping Karma.

• • •

Karma is the baddest bitch in the world. She has no menu, but you always get served.