I lost my right arm below the elbow during my senior year of high school. I won’t go into detail of the accident that caused it, but needless to say that it was an unpleasant experience that le me mentally scarred for a long time a er the fact. I remember feeling like my life was over then.
I had been right handed up until then, so I had to relearn even basic things like writing and getting dressed. It was exasperating. The only thing worse than trying to adapt was the different way people looked at me in the halls of my high school a er I lost my hand.
They didn’t bully me or anything. Quite the opposite in fact. They’d go out of their way to help me with things whenever I needed help, and being newly amputated I o en needed someone’s help to get even small things done.
Before the accident I was the quiet loner who only stuck to a few close friends and didn’t bother anyone else. A er the accident I became the poor girl who lost her hand and deserved special treatment from everyone around her. People would open lockers for me, carry stuff I dropped, and hold open doors when I was still far away from it.
I know they were just trying to be nice and they weren’t causing anyone harm, but I couldn’t stop myself from secretly feeling embarrassed whenever they helped me. The pitiful looks they gave me when they passed me in the hall felt like daggers stabbing into me. Still, I made sure to thank everyone who went out of their way to help me despite how I felt.
For a long time I prided myself on being a tough girl who could do anything by herself. Suddenly needing the help of other people who must’ve felt obliged to aid me was a constant source of humiliation for me. I felt less like an independent person and more like a school pet that needed to be carefully cared for to survive.
One the bright side, the popular girls who used to push and shove me when they thought they could get away with it no longer bothered me. I guess even spoiled rich girls have some standards. All except one, that is.
Her name was Sophie and she was well-known for being a mythic bitch at our school who’d throw a shit fit if the lamborghini she got for her birthday wasn’t the right colour. With all the personality of a sheet of sandpaper being rubbed against your crotch, she was popular for just being popular and having more money than she knew what to do with. I never paid her much mind and she didn’t bother to acknowledge my existence before I lost my hand, which was fine by me because I didn’t want to be associated with someone like her anyways.
But a er I lost my hand and gained the unwanted collective sympathy of the school, her apathy towards me turned to absolute burning hatred for an unbelievably idiotic reason. Senior prom was just around the corner. Sophie had been pretty much guaranteed the Prom Queen title up until my accident made people know I existed.
Pity votes for me to be prom queen started rolling in as my name skyrocketed to the top of the possible candidates. I held the lead for Prom Queen by the balls without trying or caring. By the time I even noticed that my name was on the list of those nominated by the student body I already had more votes than the next two nominees combined.
Directly below me in votes was Sophie, who apparently took that personally. She started talking shit about me to her friends behind my back and would “accidentally” trip me whenever I walked past her in the hallway. I fell on my face several times because of her.
I was already unbalanced in general due to missing a chunk of my right side and my sudden lack of a dominant hand made me unable to shield myself from the floor whenever she tripped me. One time I fell so badly that I got sent to the nurse’s office with a nose bleed. Unsurprisingly enough, picking on the disabled girl so badly that real blood was drawn didn’t earn her any favours with the student body she was trying to get votes from.
Once she realised this, she decided to try a different approach. Sophie approached me in the cafeteria about a couple weeks before the prom. Despite having caused me no small amount of grief she wore a smile on her face faker than the implants she bought with her dad’s credit card.
She introduced herself as if the whole school didn’t already know her name and asked how I was coping with losing a hand. Had she been anyone else I would’ve lied that I was doing find and thank her for her concern. But since it was Sophie asking me that, I told her that I was doing about as well as you’d expect for a person who’d just lost their goddamn hand and told her in no uncertain terms to fuck off.
She simply laughed off my response. Whether she chose to ignore the shade I threw her way or was just too stupid to realise that I was insulting her I have no idea. She went on to talk about how much she’d been looking forward to being Prom Queen as if I was supposed to care.
At the very end of her self-entitled rant she asked me to not go to prom so that she could be Prom Queen. I shrugged. I honestly wasn’t in the mood to dance anytime soon with my fucked up sense of balance anyways.
If not going to prom was going to get her out of my hair I was more than glad to oblige her. She stopped messing with me a er that. Then, a week before prom, my best friend and longtime crush asked me to go to prom with him.
According to him he’d been planning to ask me out for a while. The fact that I was missing a hand didn’t bother him, though he told me that he’d understand if I didn’t want to go to the prom with him or at all. The truth was I didn’t give a rat’s ass about the prom, but I did care about him.
I really did want to spend a memorable night with him at the prom, but if I did then Sophie would no doubt give me grief about it. I then promptly realised that I didn’t give two shits about what she thought of me. The tough girl I was before the accident wouldn’t have let someone like Sophie keep her from doing what she wanted to do anyways.
When prom night came, I power walked into the venue with my best-friend-turned-boyfriend holding my shiny new prosthetic hand. He helped me pay for it to be delivered in time for the prom and it did wonders for my confidence. Instead of people pitying me for my missing limb they were gushing over my cool new cyborg arm and asking me how it worked.
I was more than happy to tell them too. For the first time since my accident, I felt whole again. Not everybody was as excited for me however.
Sophie glowered at me from a dark corner of the venue the entire night. Her usual clique was nowhere to be seen. I guess most of them decided to jump ship to save their reputation from being associated with her.
Honestly at that point I doubted she’d get to be Prom Queen even if I hadn’t attended. To my surprise, I had a great time at the prom. I introduced my new boyfriend to my friends and they all took to him right away.
There was a little accident when I tried to hold my fruit punch with my prosthetic hand and ended up crushing the cup, but we all laughed it off. I kissed my boyfriend on the cheek and excused myself to the bathroom so that I could clean the fruit punch off my dress. As you can imagine, it took me a while since I still wasn’t accustomed to using my le hand or new robotic hand.
When I was finished I looked at my watch and realised that the Prom Queen would be announced soon. I hurried back to the dance floor and was met with a scene straight out of a fever dream. Everybody from the teachers to my boyfriend were out cold on the ground, many of them still holding spilled cups of fruit punch in their hands.
Standing in the middle of the dance floor among the passed out attendees was Sophie wearing the Prom Queen sash over her hot pink dress and a tiara on her head. For the first time that night, she was smiling. It was not a happy smile however, but one fueled by pure delusional insanity.
She turned to look at me with crazed bloodshot eyes and let out a laugh. “I'm Prom Queen! Me!
Not you! ” She screamed before charging at me. I noticed the kitchen knife in her hand just in time to bring my prosthetic arm up to defend myself on instinct.
The tip of the blade snapped off the moment it hit my prosthetic arm. That seemed to surprise her, and I took the opportunity to backhand her with that same prosthetic arm. She dropped to the ground like a sack of potatoes and I immediately called the police.
Police investigation revealed that she’d spiked the fruit punch at the prom and was there waiting for everyone to fall unconscious. I wasn’t going to be the only victim that night either, just the first. She revealed in an interview that she’d planned on killing everyone who didn’t vote for her to be Prom Queen.
To this day I’m thankful that my boyfriend, now my husband, helped me pay for that prosthetic arm. If it hadn’t blocked that knife, I and a lot of other people would’ve died that night at the hands of a girl who took prom way too seriously. I broke up with my boyfriend about a month before prom night.
We’d been dating each other since the start of high school so it felt like a big part of my life was over at the time. I was inconsolable. I shut myself off from my friends and family who had never approved of my boyfriend in the first place.
My mom took great joy in rubbing it in my face, saying “I told you so” right a er the break up. The only person I felt comfortable around enough to talk about it was the school counselor, Doctor Marcus. He was probably the only member of the school staff I actually got along with.
Everyone else just tolerated my existence as a background character in their classroom. Doctor Marcus was the only one who seemed to recognise me as a person. He made time for me whenever I needed someone to talk to about stuff that was bothering me.
The counselor's office became sort of a safe space for me to relax when life had me feeling down. The smell of the lavender air freshener he liberally sprayed the office with became a comforting scent to me. I’d o en talk to Doctor Marcus for hours on end about stuff my boyfriend did whenever I thought he was being a jerk to me while we were dating.
I think part of the reason why we broke up was because he heard about how much time I liked to spend with Doctor Marcus and got jealous because of it. If that was the case then the break-up backfired on him because I spent even more time at Doctor Marcus’ office a afterwards. Sometimes I talked about my problems.
Other times we just lounged around and chatted about random things while munching on some snacks he kept in the office. He went out of his way to make sure he always had salted almonds stocked in the office since he knew they were my favorite. When my self-confidence was at an all-time low he was the one who told me that I was worth it.
It was nice having someone to talk to in that trying time. Stupid teenage me might’ve done something stupid if not for all the emotional support I received from Doctor Marcus. I’m still grateful for it to this day despite what would later happen.
A er a few weeks of sulking away from each other, my boyfriend and I finally made up through text and got back together. Of course, I couldn’t be happier. I’d have an actual date for prom instead of being forced to go alone.
The next time I visited Doctor Marcus’s office I excitedly told him that my boyfriend and I got back together. A worried look came across his face when I said that. He told me that I should be careful about him since guys like him can get pretty dangerous when they’re jealous.
I told him that it’ll be fine since we already talked things out. A er a long heart-to-heart my boyfriend said that he was fine with me talking to Doctor Marcus about problems I couldn’t share with anyone else. Seeing that I was happy to be back with my boyfriend in time for the prom, Doctor Marcus dropped the subject and we ended up chatting about my hobbies and ambitions a er high school instead.
When prom night came I put on a brand new dress I bought just for the occasion and took a cab to the hotel where the prom was being held. I waited at the entrance of the venue for my boyfriend to arrive. Then I waited And waited.
And waited in front of the hotel until I could hear the Prom Queen being named. Every text I sent was marked as read but I got no reply. I broke down in tears in front of the venue, feeling betrayed by the guy who I thought I’d marry one day.
Just as I thought my night was ruined I felt a hand touch my shoulder. II looked up and saw Doctor Marcus looking at me with concern. He asked if I was alright and I shook my head to say no.
Then he asked me if I’d like to go home, to which I nodded so ly. I accepted his offer to give me a ride home and got into his car. Once inside his car, I immediately started to calm down.
The lavender air freshener he used for his car smelled just like the one he used in his office. It was like I was in the counselor’s office again. He even offered me some of my favorite salted almonds he kept in the glove compartment of his car to help ease my nerves.
I didn’t think much of it and began snacking away like I usually did in his office. I told him my address and he drove away from the hotel into town. I slowly regained my composure as we drove through town in awkward silence.
I opened my mouth to speak but paused when I noticed something strange. The smell of lavender air freshener had become ingrained in my brain a er spending so much time smelling it in his office. I knew it by heart at that point, but another scent was there in the car with me.
Something metallic and foul that faintly lingered within the pleasant lavender smell. Like day-old meat being sold at the supermarket. I thought about saying something but didn’t want to be rude.
Doctor Marcus was already going out of his way to help me deal with my own problems again for the millionth time. I didn’t want to risk offending him by an insensitive comment about his body odor. My vision started to blur.
I presumed that it was probably just the stress of everything that’s happened getting to me. When I told Doctor Marcus that I was feeling a bit lightheaded, he simply told me that it’s normal to feel that way when stressed and assured me that everything will be alright soon. I couldn’t see it very well, but I could’ve sworn his lips curled up into a smile when he said that.
I was about to fall asleep just as Doctor Marcus abruptly slammed the brake of his car, causing me to lurch forward in my seat. I struggled through my blurry vision to make out what was going on outside the car. The last thing I saw before I fell unconscious was red and blue lights flashing towards me, accompanied by the sound of sirens which faded away into silence.
I woke up in the hospital the next day. My parents were there waiting for me and my mother immediately hugged me when she saw that I was conscious. I asked them what happened to me and where Doctor Marcus was.
My parents hesitated to say anything and told me that it might be better if I heard what happened from the police themselves. A few minutes later two policemen walked into the hospital room. I couldn’t believe what they told me.
Or rather, I didn’t want to. Doctor Marcus had been arrested for the murder of my boyfriend. He found out where my boyfriend lived through student profiles and drove there before the prom to kill him.
He bludgeoned him on the head with a baseball bat before wrapping and stuffing him in the trunk of his car. The same car he drove me in a er my breakdown at the prom. The foul smell I got from the car when I rode in it was coming from the dead body of my boyfriend in the trunk.
Drg tests on the almonds Doctor Marcus gave revealed them to be laced with drugs that made me lose consciousness. I don’t want to know what he would’ve done to my unconscious body had the police not found his car in time. Had a neighbor not noticed Doctor Marcus hauling my boyfriend’s wrapped up the body into his car trunk, he might not have been caught by the police and I would’ve been killed or worse.
The experience has le me traumatized to this day. Not because I was almost killed, but also because it would’ve been at the hands of someone I thought I could trust. I was a foreign exchange student in America for my senior year of high school.
I’m Japanese and when I first arrived in America I couldn’t speak a lick of English. I was already a shy and socially awkward girl to begin with, and the language barrier made it even harder to make any friends. Most of the people who bothered to make an effort to talk to me were people who I would later learn are called “weeaboos” that would ask me about Japan and anime nonstop with broken Japanese.
Yeah, it wasn’t fun having to deal with them all the time because no one else wanted to go through the trouble of trying to talk to the weird foreign exchange student. The only person who I could talk to freely was a guy I’ll call John for the sake of this story. He was smart, good-looking, immensely popular with the girls from what I could gather, and spoke perfect Japanese.
He told me that his grandfather was Japanese too so he learned the language to be able to talk with him when he was just a kid. I thought it was cool as hell that he could speak two languages so fluently and asked him to teach me some English so I wouldn’t feel so out of place at the school. He agreed, and soon we were hanging out almost every day with dates disguised as study sessions.
Naturally, with John being as popular as he was, a lot of the girls there were jealous that an upstart foreign exchange student had just stolen his time away from them. They would speak badly of me behind my back or sometimes right in front of me thinking that I wouldn’t be able to understand them anyways, not knowing that my English had improved dramatically thanks to John’s lessons. The most common sentiment was that John only hung out with me out of pity, which I couldn’t help but agree with to some extent.
I never confronted any of the girls about what they said. It might be a cultural thing, but Japanese people tend to value conformity and a non-confrontational attitude. Standing up for myself seemed like a selfish thing to do that’ll inconvenience other people.
Besides, I didn’t want to stir up any trouble by causing a scene when I was barely able to cope with the culture shock as it is. For a long time I thought that I was being a burden to John who only tolerated me because he was too nice to turn me down when I asked him to teach me English. When prom night was approaching I got a few guys who asked me to prom in broken Japanese too, but I politely turned them all down for.
. . obvious reasons.
Surprisingly enough, John didn’t ask any girl to prom even though any single girl at school would’ve jumped at the chance to go with him. Hell, some girls even took the initiative to ask him to prom. He turned them all down and kept hanging out with me a er school every day for our English lessons.
One day during our lessons I asked him if he ever had a girlfriend. He told me that he did have a girlfriend once but they weren’t together anymore. He didn’t elaborate on what happened to them though so I didn’t push the issue.
I just assumed that it must’ve been a bad breakup and that whoever that girl was must still be regretting it now. He then asked me if I ever had a boyfriend and I truthfully answered that I’d never been in a relationship before. At the end of our lesson that same day I casually asked him if he was interested in asking any girl out for the upcoming prom.
He looked me dead in the eye with a lady killer smile and said that yes, he did have a girl in mind for prom. Then, without any hesitation, told me that that girl was me. My heart nearly exploded in my chest from excitement when I heard that.
My brain was slower to react and I must’ve stood there staring at him incredulously for a good two seconds before I gave him a hundred yesses in response. Rumours and shit talk about me tripled throughout the school when news got out that John had asked me out. I didn’t pay them any mind.
Nothing they said mattered to me because I knew that my night at the prom with John was going to be the best night of my life. My host family was happy for me when they heard that I actually got a date for the prom. When I asked them if it would be appropriate for me to wear a traditional Japanese kimono to prom instead of the typical formal dress they were nothing but supportive of the idea.
I was supposed to spread Japanese culture in America a er all. It was only natural that I’d choose to wear something distinctly Japanese to the prom. My host mother managed to rent a beautiful white silk kimono with lily patterns for the big night.
She even helped me put it on with some help from Google. She made a little mistake while helping me put it on that I only noticed later though. Kimonos are traditionally wrapped le side over right.
Instead, she wrapped my kimono with the right side over the le , which is usually reserved for corpses being prepared for funerals. By the time I noticed the error I was already at the prom venue and I was too lazy to try to fix it. I waited for John to arrive at the prom, getting many stares and some compliments in the meantime.
Then, a girl I’d never seen before approached me. She told me that I shouldn’t have come here right to my face. Surprised, I told him that I was a student too and was here with a date.
She told me that she knew all about me and my date, and that I should’ve stayed away from John for my own sake. I felt a chill run down my spine. This was the first time I’d actually been confronted by a jealous girl.
Still, I wasn’t too afraid since we were still in a populated area. I asked her who she thought she was and she fell silent. Then, she told me that she was only here to, in her words, “take care of something.
” Before I could ask her what the hell that was supposed to mean, she walked off without another word. John never made it to the prom. I spent the night alone with people laughing at me for thinking I had a chance with John.
Then, the next day, John’s body was found drowned in a nearby lake. He’d gone missing from his home and a passerby noticed his shoes floating on the waters of a nearby lake. When they searched the lake for him, his body was not the only one they found.
There was another body there that looked like it’d been decaying in the lake for at least a year. It was identified to be a missing girl who just so happened to be John’s girlfriend when she initially went missing. The wounds on her body suggested that she’d been killed before being dumped in the lake.
The investigation on the girl’s disappearance turned murder reopened and evidence surfaced that suggested John might’ve been the one who killed her. Although nothing had been definitely proven, I immediately knew that John was her killer when I saw the picture of the missing girl in the news paper. Because that girl who’d been rotting in the lake for a year looked exactly like the girl who approached me at the prom that night, saying that I should’ve stayed away from her boyfriend.
