I follow Phoebe down the hallway to the elevator and asked her, "What is Phys-Ed?" 

She replied, "Sport, basically." I don't understand the last word, and I'm getting really tired of thinking this before I realise what Mamma told me: if I'm during class and I don't understand something I have full permission from the head to use my Google Translator. 

I take out my phone and it translates back to me in Spanish, the word that she said last before going silent and punching in a floor number once we were in the elevator: basicamente, basically. That's what she meant. 

I ask her in Spanish, "What type of sport are we doing in sport?" In the translator, which is programed to answer my voice, it comes out in English in a cool, female automatic voice. I shudder as I think of it malfunctioning, and me sputtering along with it, losing my voice forever. I tell myself that's crazy, and me going insane will never happen. 

"What happened to your voice?" Phoebe asks, turning around to look at me. I'm closer to the red-and-white mosaic back wall, and she's right at the silver double doors. The floor shape is square, with a two-pattern of clear marble red and solid white with grey streaks. The side walls are mirrors with gold rails stuck to them a good ten centimetres away. This way, it's kinda hard to ignore myself, or compare to Audrey, but I guess that's kind of the point. I watch myself point to my phone.

My silky black hair falls to my waist in straight locks, the lower half turning into a mixture of wavy and looped ringlets. Bright green eyes are framed by thick dark lashes and stand out hugely on my pale face. Papa always says that my green eyes and black hair is such a rarity that I might be one in a billion. When I was younger he called me 'his beautiful little girl'. 

For me, that was just a cause to get bullied more by those 'popular' cliques of girls like Audrey, out of jealousy. Sometimes I wished that that I had a brown eyes, like a majority of people. Like I said, being different is good, but sometimes it feels so lonely and hollow. I'd rather blend in like the rest of them, be thousands in thousands, clones exactly the same. But then again, we all have different thoughts and feelings, so that's already quite enough of contrast.

The elevator shudders as we reach the lobby. I follow Phoebe, who was a second ago fired up and ready to verse against Summer (I hate betrayal) and Audrey. Now, in the bright lights of the lobby, she seems to be going back to what she is bullied for: her shyness. 

But then something hits me. She is the shy girl who is new, so how does she get bullied? I speak in Spanish to the translator, then it says in English: "How come you get bullied if you are new?"

She glances back, her hair brightening. Maybe in the dullness of the apartment lights, her hair is dark, but now it glints bright metallic red. I realise the end tips are dyed shimmering bronze for about a centimetre. "I move around," she replies. "Last year, I was at another school, but for all my other years, I was at this school, and I'm back again."

Finally, we reach the school again. Earlier before, I had changed into normal clothes: a white hoodie over light blue jeans and a black blouse. Phoebe has changed into something comfortable, except different from me: dark grey leggings with horizontal black stripes two centimetres apart maybe, a dark dull pink undershirt which the straps showed from under a cotton grey stretchy T-shirt. She wears a black silk scarf over it.

Phoebe leads me to the back of the school, where all the different sports grounds and eating areas are. The basketball courts are teeming with maybe 30 students. We join them just as the coach, a bald-headed man is separating the teams. 

As he reaches us, he counts Phoebe as a five and me a one. We're in separate teams, and if Spanish basketball is different to American basketball then I will never get the rules. I activate the translator as the coach starts talking. It records, then plays back to me in Spanish: "No aggressive tackling like shoving, no talking when your coach is and play fairly!" the voice yells back in a Spanish version of the coach's voice. Everyone looks around as the voice plays, and I flush red as they double over laughing, the group including Audrey, and Summer. The warmth I used to see in her eyes has disappeared, only to be replaced by cold mocking. 

I thought she would have been a good friend. I guess I was wrong. 

Anyway, my team consists of three boys and a girl with a pixie haircut that goes down to her shoulders from the middle like a mullet. Her hair is shoulder-length and not shaved like a real mullet, though, and midnight black along with her thick curled eyelashes that frame unsettling grey eyes and porcelain white skin. Her black clothes and silver earrings and spike bracelets suggest to me that she is what people call 'goth'. 

She stares sharp daggers at me with her piercing eyes, and the message I receive is: I don't care who you are, I don't care if everyone hates me, just leave me ALONE. I get that, and avoid making eye contact with the scary girl. I don't think anyone has the right to hate her, because they probably barely know her, but it doesn't give her the right to hate me when she doesn't know the first thing about me, like my name.

It turns out that we're versing Audrey's team, which has Summer, another girl with heavy make-up and two boys. We take our bibs then head to our positions, just as the coach blows the whistle and I fail to defend a easy-to-catch, weak shot from the other team's centre. One of the boys try and defend the person who receives the shot from passing. I catch their pass, then throw it towards the goth girl. She doesn't make an effort to catch it as Audrey takes the ball. 

But she doesn't continue the game as Summer and the other girl walk towards her. Summer walks reluctantly but the other girl seethingly and with full confidence. The coach isn't looking this way and helping another girl who has fallen down.

My team doesn't even stop them. They just watch on, smiling cruelly, though Miss Goth's expression looks unreadable. Audrey passes the ball to me hard in the gut, and I topple backwards to the ground putting my hands out to stop my head from hitting the floor. I wince as I study my palms. The skin is torn and ragged, and bare flesh bleeds openly. It's a mess of dirt and skin and blood. 

Audrey's unknown friend kicks me with her brown leather running boots. I feel my stomach lurch and retch the nothing that's in there. My clothes are mixed with black crumbly concrete now, and Audrey leans down and offers me a hand. In my dazed state, I take it and she just wrenches it out of the air. I fall on my face, and feel blood poor from my upper lip. 

"You know, Haven, you're not good enough to be a person. You should be a place, where people stand and rub their dirty shoes on. Or, if you suprisingly are a disgusting, unloved person, you should belong in a place. Probably a dumpster by the look of you," she hisses.

She offers me her hand again, and this time I don't take it, realising her plan to late. One of her friends has gone to the coach, and his bringing him over here, and it looks like Audrey is helping me. 

"Coach Birming!" she cries. "He"- she points to a random boy on her team -"shoved her and now she needs a nurse!" 

"I did not!" gasps the boy who is puffing from all the running. He is the only one other than Summer and Miss Goth who didn't laugh but be a bystander. He is pulled by the wrist to the coach, then he breathes, "My office today, after this is all sorted out."

He looks horrified and scared. The coach looks at me and he says, " Let's get you to the hospital wing, dear."

I try and explain, but with my fogged mind I find I'm mixing English and Spanish together. "He did not shove a mi, Audrey empujada me!" 

The coach apparently thinks that I'm speaking gibberish, so he sends Phoebe, who has come over, to take me to the hospital wing. I tell her, "Audrey pushed me, not the boy." 

"I know," she says, her voice steely. I shudder. She really is formidable when there is no-one around. In front of other students, she tolerates bullying and cowers, but with no one around, with someone she felt comfortable with, I'm certain she would be fierce and lively. If the person who bullied her was a friend and she didn't know she was being betrayed, she would send the person sniveling back to Mamma. Which reminds me that Audrey is also the cause of Mamma's anger with me. 

I stagger to a room in the school, which is quite big and holds six beds with white sheets and blankets, white desks and machinery, red hospital kits and white cabinets stocked with clean white cotton bandages. White, what I though to be an evil colour. The walls are painted that green-blue Covid-19 masks that doctors and nurses wore, not the everyday light blue ones you saw in shops. The ones that were pale minty green tinged with aqua. 

The nurse there was dressed in white leggings, a white knee length frock and a grey apron. She washes my hands with a few yelps from me and the wound on my upper lip. She then gives me a peach-smelling cream coloured balm to apply to my lips, and rubs a stinging paste onto my hands. I yelp and wince a few times. My right hand is okay, so she puts a band-aid on the largest gash that was responsible for the blood. My left hand is the worst. Now all the skin and dirt is gone, it leaves one deep red stab, and two other major scratches. She wraps that one in bandages and pins it with a band-aid coloured tape. 

"I don't have permission to stitch it, so I'll have to send a letter home to your mother of father to give me a thumbs up," she tells me. Phoebe activates the translator for me and once I understand I give a small nod.

Then she makes me sit down for five minutes before we go. Phoebe is silently fuming with anger, and I am seething for revenge. Phoebe tells me the names of the goth girl (Lilith) and the second friend of Audrey's (Tarini). Well, this incident settles it. Audrey, Summer the traitor and Tarini are going to get it.