Scars Part 5.

   Alice was aware of the change in her seat partner the minute Connie sat down that morning. Instead of seeming awkward and embarrassed, the girl sat in an aura of anger. She dropped her pink bag carelessly on the floor, slammed her notebook down on the desk and began scrawling doodles. Not the usually hearts and flowers, but words. Dark, black words. Alice looked at Connie with new interest. What could Miss bright, sunshiny cheerleader possibly have to be angry about? She wondered. Shrugging, she turned to her own writing, pouring herself back into her own world, where characters were dancing in a moonlit night.

 

  Connie, frustrated and cranky, scratched out the sentence she had just written, accidently flinging her pen out of her grasp in doing so. It landed under Alice’s desk. Both girls felt, rather than heard, its echo as it landed on the hard white floor.

 

Alice swallowed, setting her pencil down. She reached under the table and felt around. Neither of them breathed, vaguely aware of the other’s thoughts. Alice found the pen and handed it back to Connie without even turning her head.

 

 In that instant, as the two hands touched, Connie’s need to blame someone for her troubles erupted.

 

   “Why do you even come here?!” She exploded, wrenching the pen from Alice’s fingers and jumping to her feet. “You don’t have friends, you don’t come to school events or activities, you don’t even seem like you learn. All you do is sit there scribbling in that stupid notebook all class long every single day. So why do you bother coming to school? Couldn’t you do that at home without ruining everybody else’s life?” The silence that followed this outburst was deafening.

 

  Connie gasped, disbelieving of her own words. Horrified with shame, she collapsed into tears and ran from the classroom. Alice watched her go, dumfounded and confused. A spark of anger flickered in her chest, for this blow hurt her worse than all the jabs she had received since the beginning of the year. Connie, with her good-natured countenance and sweet smile had always treated her with careful avoidance since that first awkward encounter. Her beauty and popularity seemed to flaunt itself in the wake of Alice’s ugliness and loneliness. She tried not to be jealous, but she was. She hated when people avoided her or treated her as if she didn’t exist, but at the same time it seemed to make things easier. After all, embarrassment was preferable to outright hatred. Now, to hear the girl say such things cut Alice deeply, realizing that Connie had been one of the few people in the school that she had never heard whispering jokes or snide comments about her. But now this. Connie, pretty, kind, ASB secretary, cheer squad, straight-A Connie, hated Alice just as much as the rest of the world.

 

  A single tear slipped from those ice blue eyes.