~*~

  Alice sighed. She stooped and set Connie's chair right side up and collected Mr. Alden's scattered papers. Looking at them she noticed an A+ on the paper she had written. Trying to smile, Alice could only manage a weak grimace. She couldn't shake the raw feeling that came every time anyone looked at her with that embarrassed expression she had seen on Connie's face a few minutes earlier. Setting the papers on the big desk, Alice walked slowly to the window, thinking. Outside students were arriving. Soon they would pour into first period classes, then the next, and the next. They would go home, eat, sleep, and repeat the whole process the next day and the day after that and the day after that. Every day for years. Two more years in her case. Then what? Most would move on to a four-year university, more education.

Education? She thought. What were they really learning? She looked around her at the school, the students. Did they really learn anything here? No one knew how to behave around her. She didn't know how to behave around them. Surely things like that should be taught as well as Algebra and English.

Wearily, Alice sank back into her seat. Mr. Alden opened the door and a train of kids piled in after him. Connie came back, sitting down next to Alice as if nothing had happened. Connie's soft brown eyes so conspicuously ignored her that the raw feeling grew sharper than ever.

Class started and Alice retreated to her writing, barely listening to the lecture as she lost herself in a world of magic and mystery where she was a beautiful maid twirling around a woodland camp-fire among a crowd of dancing peasants.