/\Under The Plain Sea/\

/\Beneath Those Harsh Waves/\

"Dear, look out there, what do you see?"

"I see an ocean."

"What about it?"

"It's blue..?"

"No, child, look closer."

"I see the waves crashing up on the sand and washing away prints in the sand."

"Okay, young one, tell me when you see more."

Keira walked through the halls, footsteps like clicks in a room full of noise, so unnoticed but so obivious. The piercing ice blue in her eyes glinted against the shiny surfaces, and glittered on the windows leading to the vast ocean. Her head turned to look at it, Mother's words whispering in small echos in her brain.

Her brow creased and she squinted at the rippling, roaring waves. What more was there to see?

This was the question that everyone always asked themselves when looking at someone. They saw them, made mental notes on the looks, the clothes, the personality, cold or warm, black or blue. But what more was there to see?

Everything.

Keira, a lonely freshman, didn't know that under that surface of plain blue was a rainbow of colorful corals dancing under the waves. She didn't see it, so she didn't note it. She didn't note that under that surface lived a society of animals all working to make the oceans thrive, working to help the coral grow, pushing to keep the never ending cycle rushing like wind in a windmil.

Keira didn't see it.

For now.

With a dismissive frown and aggrivated shake of her head, she continued down the halls, passing all those people that she thought she knew.

That she saw with blind eyes.

The next year rolled along and just like her age, her heart grew colder.

Junior year rolled along she had two cuts on her wrists, one for her hate, and one for the hatred she recives.

Senior year is frostbite lurking in the innocent-looking snow, she is called every possible name, scarred in every possible way, tortured by every method people can form.

Keira sits alone on the ground, surrounded in a semi-circle prison cell of people yelling, chanting, and hitting her, pounding her bruises, and most of all seeping all the possible hate with those slicing words into the scrapes in her heart.

Broken bones were nothing like the surreal pain when your heart falls off its bike and cuts its knee open. The physical torture she was treated with was nothing near the feeling when your heart gets scratched by the cat.

And those words are the cats, those mocks are the hard, rocky roads. People looked at her and saw nothing but the outside. A wolf, a beast, a bomb waiting to explode and attack, looking twisted like the wreckage it would cause. They sae nothing but her appearance, nothing but her rude attitude.

But they never saw the coral beneath the vast ocean. They never saw why she was so rude, they never saw that her mother was dead and her father always gone and her older brothers abusive and her uncle an alcoholic. They never saw her diving to avoid flying beer bottles, they never saw her choking as her brothers suffocated her. They never saw her dad, so rarely there, screaming at them. They never saw that she was born with a heart and throat condition, they never saw the sudden dizziness of movement. They never saw her starving, wishing to lose weight, wishing to not be so UGLY. Wishing to not be so FAT.

That's what they didn't see. So they continued.

"You are fat."

She cut off her amount of calorie intake.

"You are ugly."

She put her hair in a style covering half her face.

"You are hostile."

She looked at her boney hands and saw harm and danger.

"You are rude."

She looked in the mirror and saw a wildfire in her place.

She looked up into those blue eyes of the one boy like her, watching in silence at her. And underneath those eyes, she saw the coral. She saw the animals. She saw it all. And Keira smiled, knowing that no one in that semi-circle saw the coral in her vast ocean eyes, nor did they see it in anyone.