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very bad.
    She knelt down to set
her bag in front of her locker. It wasn’t until she rose turn the
combination that she noticed a flyer taped on her
locker.
    It looked like the
cover of a Playboy magazine.
    “Charming,” she
muttered to herself.
    She was just about to
tear it down and wad it up when she realized it wasn’t quite what
she’d first thought. It was indeed the printout of a Playboy cover,
but whoever had made it had photoshopped onto the model the face of
Aradia's mother.
    She hadn’t made
anything of it at first, but she’d seen dozens of students either
holding or looking at handouts on her way into school.
    For the first time
since she was five, she did not hold back.
    A group of three girls
had been passing her way, holding a flyer and giggling. Aradia
grabbed the leader of the pack by her sweater with enough force
that she dropped the flyer and her notebook.
    “Hey!” the girl, whose
name Aradia neither knew nor cared about, protested. “Lay
off!”
    “Not the mild-mannered
bitch you’re used to, huh?” Aradia said. The girl struggled, but
Aradia’s fists might as well have been steel vices. “Who gave you
the flyer?”
    “Lay off,
freak!”
    “Who gave you the
flyer, hmm?” Aradia demanded.
    Her anger was such that
she was well beyond shouting. No, her voice was amazingly level in
tone, but just as firm and unyielding as her grip.
    “Kasey gave it to me.
He gave out all of them. Let go of me!”
    She didn’t really need
to add the last bit. Aradia was already on the move.
    She used a more mild
form of her summoning ability to find her foe. It didn’t have any
visual manifestations, and was weaker than her bright, glowing
light, but it could lead her in the right direction if she was
close to what she sought and her will was strong enough.
Unfortunately for Kasey, her will was strong, and she was very
close.
    He saw her coming. He
was on the second floor of the Stevens Library, which was probably
where he’d made the copies of his flyer.
    “Heya Rai,” he gloated,
knowing that was a nickname her mom used for her. “How’s
it–”
    He didn’t get the
chance to complete his sentence though. Aradia accelerated to a
full sprint in the few final steps between the two of them. She
flung aside the table he’d been sitting at and barreled right
through him with a tackle that would have made an NFL linebacker
proud.
    Aradia wasn’t thinking
about how strong she was or how far her lunge might propel them.
She also wasn’t thinking about the fact that they were on the
second floor and in front of a window. In the moment, lost in her
rage, she just didn’t care.
    Both she and Kasey
plunged straight through the window and down, landing with two hard
thuds on the concrete parking lot below.
    Aradia was actually
hurt far worse than Kasey. Yet, with her enhanced healing, she
recovered from the worst of her injuries in just a few
days.
    Kasey, miraculously,
suffered far less than he could have. He took some cuts to his neck
and arms from the glass of the window and broke three ribs, but
that was the extent of his injuries. The doctor who examined Kasey
impressed upon him how much worse it could have been.
    Given the nature of the
situation, it was difficult for the Prestons to convince Kasey’s
family not to press charges. For them it was Jensen all over again,
only older now, and with potentially greater repercussions.
Ironically, Aradia would have probably ended up in juvie if not for
Kasey himself. He had strongly urged his parents to let the whole
situation go. Partly, he recognized he’d been a jerk to pull the
stunt he’d pulled. Stronger, though, was that he didn’t want to
draw any more attention to the fact that he’d been thrown through a
window by a girl.
    After that episode, her
parents, who had already been discussing leaving Arizona for
Aradia's benefit, decided enough was enough.
    The Prestons would have
accepted the first jobs that came their way. It worked out, by
chance,