Well, that didn't go as planned.

You had gotten into one of your almost routine squabbles with Cartman at school, and the fatass, after appropriately calling him a fatass, decided to catch you off guard in the halls when nobody was looking and ambush you with his utter fatness. He proceeded to mercilessly wail on you, leaving you a bruised, battered wreck within the span of maybe two minutes. The kicker? Your wallet with the lunch money your parents gave you felt suspiciously lighter.

As you laid there against the locker, your chest rising and falling with staggered breaths and a sharp tang of iron on your lips, you wondered how things got this bad. But then you remembered: this was Cartman you were dealing with. Like an apex predator - a big, fat apex predator - your fate was sealed the moment you made eye contact with him for the first time.

Maybe you'd just... close your eyes for a moment and contemplate all the choices you've made in your ten years of life so far.

"Whoa. Are you dead?"

The sound of that dry, somewhat raspy female voice made you open your eyes, and you looked up to find Henrietta, one of the Goth Kids that hung out behind the school, standing above you. Her mascara-lined eyes grew disappointed once she saw you stir.

"Oh. Never mind." she muttered, then took a drag from the end of the cigarette holder between her fingers, smoke escaping her dark amethyst lips after a few seconds. "You still look like sh*t though, way more than any of these conformists usually do."

She looked fairly disinterested as you gave her the rundown, then took another puff from her cigarette. "Hmm. So, you knew he saw you as a target, and yet you still chose to argue with him every other day, even when he deliberately baited you into it? And now you're surprised that he kicked your ass and stole what little cash you had?"

...

"That's pretty goth. I like that. Still, you should probably get up before people start thinking you're a corpse. The other goths might try and use you as a sacrifice."