09 December 2008

The Party, Part II

She trudged the familiar path, feeling more alien than anything else.

Defiantly more alien. The faces around her were crazed and discombobulated; swirls of flesh-colored blobs surrounded by a sea of chaos. What are they? She thought, a small frown on her odd features (they all used to say pixie-little features, but she had to forget that – didn’t she?). The bell sounded three times, a call to classes that lay beyond her understanding for the minute.

And who can focus on classes anyhow, without the added distraction of a slowly crumbling façade of a normal person? Her old shining eyes were just a mask, something to hide the emotions inside her. Who could blame her? They could never accept her, had never. It was made painfully obvious when the party happened. “You live closer,” they said, “he doesn’t have a way home.”

So what? She had thought, instead of vocalizing.

The familiar walls of the school were foreign to her. She coasted through the day on autopilot, not engaging in any of the things that once delighted her. It’s because of them, she tried to convince herself. They are the reason I’m like this. Though even she knows that’s not the whole truth. More precisely, it’s “them-and-me-and-the-whole-world”.

It’s not too enormous a problem, though, and she knows it – even if she wants to deny it even to this day. Why let them control her life, control who she is and how she acts? No one can let anyone do anything to them without their own consent. She could no more force them to make her miserable than she could move a mountain. But it seemed so.

She was alone.

Alone in the truest sense of the word. She had done what needed to be done, and they resented her for it. Called her a traitor, called her a turncoat, called her an immature little girl and told her where she could shove those dreams of her’s. She had, for once in her life, stuck up for herself and look where it got her – alone in the one place she used to feel whole, shuffling from one blur of a class to the next, trying to contain tears that threatened to fall at any moment. (and she had prided herself once on her ability to not show any emotion whatsoever.)

But it was futile. The tears fell silently, no one paying the least bit of attention to her. It was no different then other times, times when similar things had happened to people. The rest of them, the vague shapes she had noticed before, they did nothing. She was avoided like the plague. Those who had cared, they tried to comfort her, but she wouldn’t have any of it. They were shoved away as if an invisible force field surrounded her. Glancing over her shoulder, trying to be discreet, she would see confusion written on their faces.

She saw the hurt in their eyes, and turned to hide the guilt in her’s.

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