SEEING DELANEY, YELLING AT ME from the end of the hall the Monday after the carwash, makes me instantly worried.

She's shaken. The girl with infallible confidence and wit is shaken, which makes me think I should run for the hills. But I don't. My legs keep tracking closer and closer to her, until her lips are not just moving, I can hear her words. "You need to go to your locker," she mutters, dragging me away from prying eyes.

I don't need to go to my locker actually, since I already have the books I need for the first period in my bag. I know it's serious, and yet I still ask, "Why?"

Delaney manoeuvres us around a corner, hooking her arm through mine. I almost protest, out of habit, because it's not the way to my next class. "It seems our queen is a bit mad about the carwash."

"But we didn't even win," I splutter.

"We didn't. But, we sort of showed the whole town that we can do practically the same thing as Brittany. Same age, same school — except much less cool in her eyes. she's scared people will stop fearing her as much they do now."

I raise a finger, "Delaney, that's exactly what we wanted."

"I know that. Brittany also knows that. So she got her revenge."

Just as she finishes, her grip loosens, because there's nowhere else to steer me to. I just don't notice my locker behind all these people staring. I have to push and shove my way to get through, though I immediately wish I didn't.

The door is wide open, my books ripped and flung over the ground. There are photos of me with lewd, disgusting images Photoshopped on top. The mere sight of the blurred pictures sends waves of ice down my spine. The thought of someone watching me enough to get all these photos of me in class is so creepy. Music class. I actually look around the hall, trying to see if Madison is here, too, stalking me.

When everything seems fine — well, not really — I scoop up the pictures, and take a cursory look before dumping them inside my bag. A shiver runs through me. I never want to see those again.

Across my locker, and my locker only, words are spray-painted in such abundance that they make up the background. It's like, between the photos, Brittany wanted none of my locker visible.

LOSER

FRAUD

WHORE

GEEK

Those insults are just the ones painted biggest. I'd actually have to walk up to my locker and squint to read the smallest of them. Like Brittany wanted: no spaces. I could be called lucky for having avoided being bullied before this year. My name was kept out of gossip, and I made sure to be kind to everyone I met. So, I know why people thought I was a goody-goody.

My mind races ahead of the situation, and all the noise stops reaching my brain as I think. This must either be a warning, or a retaliation. Either way, it means Brittany views us as a threat to her empire. Otherwise, she wouldn't bother doing this.

I'm pleased that she realises we're a force to be reckoned with, but those flimsy feelings are washed away by fear. We might be a force to reckon with, but Brittany's Monarchy is a force to run from. Not for the first time, I'm questioning just how close to crazy we are. I can handle this. What if next time I'm not the target?

"They're all like this." Delaney's voice cuts through my thoughts, and with her voice, comes all the chatter and footsteps that I had lost sense of. "All our lockers."

I step back from my locker with shaky limbs. I hunt around for the lock, but give up after a few seconds. If Terrence picked his way into my locker, then he probably took the lock with him. A souvenir, of sorts, reminding him of all the destruction he's caused.

"Okay, let's go find Drew."

"What about—"

"Everything's wrecked, anyway. No point staying here." In my mind, I've already fabricated a lie about the roof above my locker having a leak that ruined all my textbooks. Mom won't question it further before replacing them.

Right now, the words on my locker are just words. They're only letters strung together, letters that I glare at as if they're the root of my problems. But words are poison, slow-acting. If exposed and left uncured long enough, they could kill.

And I'm not worried for myself, but rather, my friends. Delaney is resolved, like always. She is made of titanium, impenetrable and strong. She looks completely unaffected by this, though the same must have happened to her locker. I know that she's upset about what happened but there's no way she's going to take it personally. If she does, she won't admit to it. She's too strong, too proud for that.

But I'm not so sure about the others. Leah particularly, considering bullying has already destroyed her and Faune so much. Benjamin is the logical one, he knows how to put everything into perspective. Being logical is so hard when your emotions are running wild, though. Like mine are right now. Benjamin has never lost temper around any of us, though I wonder what it would be like if he did.

Drew's locker looks like mine, except there are fewer words tagged on his locker and more general havoc. He's picking up the two halves of a textbook, realising that the damage is too great to be repaired, when Delaney speaks to him. "Do you need help cleaning up?"

There is a mess everywhere, and the floor around his locker is collaged with pages from books and black and white photos. "No," Drew drops the book, "Let's just find the others."

We find Leah kneeled on the floor, trying to piece together a page of music. "Are you okay?" I ask, taking her trembling hands in mine.

"The music," her voice cracks. "I've been working on it for ages. It's my composition for my music class, and I need it to pass midterms. I've loaded the majority of it onto Sibelius, but still. This is the original. All my thoughts and emotions."

I stand up, surveying her locker. There's only a few words painted here, but I think Leah's been called enough words before to last the rest of her life. She's very distraught about the music being torn up, understandably.

"Drew, Delaney." I call them over, from where they're having a sombre conversation. "Can you help pick up all the torn music pages here? I guess we'll try to piece them together later."

The nod, and begin the task with a gravity similar to funeral attendees. We are halfway to Benjamin's locker when we see him round the corner, bumping into a shorter boy before apologising politely but absentmindedly. He can look right over the crowd — he's freakishly tall — to me, and a few strides, he gets to us.

We're all a bit shaken up but luckily, we are fine.

"We need to talk," Benjamin says stonily, before marching right past us, down the hall.

The library is empty before the first period starts. The five of us bundle in quickly, searching for a corner at the back where no-one will overhear us talking. We find our seats in the chairs at one of the tables set up for study sessions.

Leah speaks, pulling me out of the carousel of images that keeps playing in my head. "I expected something like that to happen."

I nod, distractedly, in agreement.

Delaney is raging, looking all aggravated and stern. "See, I'm not even scared of them. Just so fucking pissed. Textbooks aren't exactly cheap these days, not to mention all the notes I took down."

I already know the answer, but I ask anyway. "If we take this to the authorities, will they listen to us?"

"No," she sighs slowly. "High school teachers don't really care about bullying. People have tried before. They'll blame someone for the mess, but won't do anything to punish the Monarchy."

"So, what's our next move?" Drew asks, leaning back into the chair. It creaks under him, a stiff-sounding screech that has me thinking it will break, and he sits right back up again.

"We continue with the plan," I reply, thinking about what our strategy was. "We got what we wanted. Attention. Now we get our message out there."

▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

Benjamin's house is the closest to the school. After school finishes that week, he drives the five of us there to discuss the progress we made this week.

Delaney's combat boots rest on the armrest, swaying left to right softly. She's draped over the couch, limbs stretched out like the svelte limbs of a jaguar. "Drew, you look high in this photo," Delaney says, holding out the camera for Drew and Benjamin to see. I find it incredibly fortunate that we won a camera just before we needed it.

I know that she's stumbled on a collection of photos that Leah took of Drew jokingly, ending in a full-on photoshoot, because I was there at the time. At one point, Leah said, "More mystery! You need to be so mysterious, that you don't even know who you are."

The majority of photos we took don't have the same levity to them. Over the last few days, we've been scouting the school, camera changing hands and eyes on alert. It took only a few minutes in the halls to find what we were looking for, and a few days for us to gather enough evidence to supply our whole campaign.

We found pretty incriminating material, too.

Brittany throwing her lunch on a poor freshman, Madison getting her homework off a shy-looking girl, Reece getting into a fight with a teammate, Derek pushing a boy to the floor, sending papers flying.

Benjamin told me of a harrowing experience, when he went into the boys' bathroom. Boys taped to the toilet, hair dripping wet, eyes hollowed out by fear. Some weaker boys stuffing toilet paper to their faces, trying to stem the bleeding. Along with those recounts, Benjamin also informs me of how these sort of breakdowns are quite common, if not expected.

And though we want the school to acknowledge what goes on away from teachers' eyes, asking those people to join the movement and expose themselves would be selfish. Hopefully, later on the track, they will feel strong enough to stand up to this.

Though my phone camera's quality is subpar — compared to the handheld we won — for the day we first saw the damage, I had to make do with it, because we needed to get photos of the graffiti on our lockers before they were cleaned.

I want the photos and videos to be turned into a short film, including music and dialogue, the works. With Drew's high-tech computer software and Leah's musical flair, we might make a masterpiece.

Leah leans against the side of the couch. Her knees are drawn up to her chest, cocooning her into her own little world. An iPod rests on her kneecaps, her head is dipped and occasionally, her lips mouth along to the lyrics of the song. Delaney is responsible for the captions and wordplay. After all, pictures can only do so much. My job is to work alongside Delaney and create a storyline. Call me a director, of sorts.

It's harder than she said it would be, considering I've only moved here over the summer. Every move I make is tentative, and I find myself second-guessing decisions. I don't want to offend any of the students — and teachers, for that matter — with how I portray this case of bullying. And, though I've made to censor every face other than ours, and the Monarchy's, the worry of putting some sensitive things out in the open is killing me.

"That's exactly why you need to do this. We've been side-stepping and sensitive for years now. Treating the topic delicately, and dancing around the bullying hasn't made the school any happier," Delaney says. "I'd rather you be the one to slap some sense into them."

I sigh, and that's all the answer Delaney needs. Her head drops again, skimming over the photos. She's been very flippant about her writing job, only having looked through the photos these past few days and nothing else, though we are planning to launch the video next week. I suppose art can't be rushed, and I trust that someone as clever as Delaney will pull together something spectacular.

So, I shuffle over to the coffee table, where Drew and Benjamin are huddling around a laptop.

"Can I just take a look at the photos you've decided to use?"

Drew slides his laptop over to me. A movie editor programme I've never seen before is open, displaying a roll of photos. As I look, I can feel some ideas come to me, until I stop on one photo.

The Monarchy is not doing anything offensive actually, just walking calmly down the hall. The way they always do; superior, and frighteningly. I didn't take this one, but it's harder to look at than I thought it would be. In the photo, most of the students are staring, and with every furtive glance, I see so much pain and hatred. How does someone write that down?

One shot of Madison comes up, nose tilted downwards towards her phone. The classroom she sits in is unlit, making me think a documentary or movie was playing, and the glow from her phone scrapes eerie, cavernous curves into her cheeks and eyelids. The more I look at Madison, exactly the way she is looking at her phone, the more my chest constricts, and I don't know why.

With a dull pounding in my heart, I realise why this feels wrong. I scan the room, to notice that Leah has disappeared.

"I'm taking a break." I say this more to myself than anyone else. Drew hums lightly, enough to let me know he hears, and Benjamin gives me an unnoticeable nod.

Leah knows how much power lies in words and pictures and film. She knows exactly how much damage it can cause. She knows all of it, through direct experience. I find her sitting on the third highest step of the staircase. Her legs are pulled up to her chest, hiding the lower half of her face, encircled by her arms.

"Madison," I say, soberly, as I take a seat on the step beside Leah. "We're doing what she does. Are you okay with that?"

"I say I am. But I don't feel like it. Even though she— they deserve this and we aren't trying to hurt each other, this still feels like a revenge plan."

I grimace, because that's exactly what I'm thinking. "You know it's not though. Fighting fire with fire. That's all it is. We're only playing by the rules they set."

"Hate cannot defeat hate, only love can do that." She looks up at me, her cheeks flushed light red. "What do you think of that?"

"I think love can only exist between equals," I answer deliberately, at length. "Until the Monarchy starts treating everyone in that school like equals, retaliating is the only choice. They won't listen to love."

All is silent for a while, and I'm content to just sit shoulder to shoulder with Leah, until she says suddenly, "Why would I feel this guilty unless we're doing something wrong?"

"Because you think we're doing the same thing as Madison," I answer, without missing a beat. "You're nice, and righteous. It's the best thing to be, especially when everyone around you isn't."

"But I never thought I'd be doing something like this, and— I'm worried about what kind of example I'm setting for Faune."

"You are not Madison, and you never will be. You're showing your sister that she should fight for what she believes is right. That no-one can hurt the people you love and get away with it. You're showing her to be strong."

"I feel like I'm the flaw in all of this. Benjamin and Delaney are so smart, you're so self-assured about this, and everything Drew says always seems to make us feel better or laugh. I'm scared that I won't see the plan through because I'm too weak."

"The other three are different from you, but that is a great thing. They might be going through problems of their own, too. In any case, feeling helpless doesn't mean you're weak. Feeling guilty doesn't mean you're wrong," I reassure her, slipping an arm around her shoulders. "Don't mistake what you feel for who you are. You're smart, strong and we need you."

The single breath that Leah exhales lasts several seconds, and has such an intense significance that I imagine all her stress and anxiety flowing out with it.

"Thank you, Sophie," she mutters into my shoulder.

I smile gently. "No problem."