Scissors and Smiles

Chapter 1: Forfex Fowl

Avoid eye contact, avoid eye contact, keep your head down. Forfex briskly and stealthily walked through the highschool hallway crowded by students, tightly clutching her textbooks and keeping to the brightly painted walls, with her black hood over her head, white hair tucked in, and big blue eyes on the white and green tiled floor.

Typically someone wearing a hat or hood would be scolded by a teacher and told to take it off, but here, Forfex was almost never acknowledged. When she looked like any other student, anyway. With her natural snow white hair, it was kind of difficult for someone to see her and not instantly recognize her.

The yelling and squealing of highschoolers filled the hall, giving Forfex a dull buzzing ache in her cranium, and the occasional nearby slamming of a locker door caused her to flinch and press herself closer to the wall for guidance. She always hated loud noises, along with crowds, and having both combined was Hell on Earth. She always felt like she would get lost in crowds, and that thought made her blood run cold.

Alone and lost did not sound like a very pleasant situation.

Loud sounds simply agitated Forfex and made her head ache. So, she tried to block out her surroundings and focused on her primary goal; to make the trek to her next class without being confronted by some egoistic teenager trying to get entertainment by bullying a timid freshman girl.

Thankfully, she did manage to sneak through the hall without notice. She silently stalked into her still-empty fifth period classroom, and into an empty desk on the far side of the room, in a shady corner. It was her own spot that she'd never claimed, but everyone knew she sat there.

As seconds turned into minutes, Forfex stared down at the light wood grains of the top of the school desk to occupy herself, and students subtlety flowed into the room and took their seats, some individually and some in groups.

She caught gazes and glimpses of faces looking at her, watching her, with hostile expressions. She brushed them off. She was used to the looks of judgement and unkindness by now, but never the venomous names and words that would flow from the lips of her peers that would make her want to crawl in some deep hole and fade out of existence. She definitely wouldn't be missed, so why couldn't fate be on her side?

Exhaling heavily, Forfex dug into her messenger bag for her notes, quietly pulling out the papers and staring down at her ink smeared writing.

Well, these aren't going to be very useful. Frustrated with her luck and stupidity, Forfex slumped back her seat, mumbling curses and regretting giving into her habit of writing everything in pen.

Normally, Forfex would have found something to work on or do, whether it be studying for a test or doodling on a piece of scratch paper. But, today she didn't even feel like a human being. She just wanted to flop down on her face somewhere and be dead, or at least get some sleep. She lifted her hood off of her head, and put her head down on the desk, subtly closing her eyes....

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"Fowl, are you listening? I am giving out important information that needs to be written down, and all I am seeing on top of your desk is your saliva." Mr. Ghenn's deep, rumbling voice speaking to her caused Forfex to wake up from her state of deadness and shoot her head back up from it's uncomfortably comfortable place atop the desk, with her big pools of bright ocean blue wide and apologetic. She scrambled to get out a clean sheet of paper, feeling the silent hot gazes of each person in the classroom burning into her flesh.

Now she really wanted to just die already. Seconds felt like hours as she struggled to get a piece of paper out without ripping it, and she had a sudden feeling of nausea pass through her until Mr. Ghenn continued his lesson and Forfex felt the eyes on her shift away.