Guillotine [HIATUS]

Chapter 1: An unexpected change?

Julia never liked the stench of the locker room, she could still notice faint traces of sweat in it. PE was her least favorite subject by far. It doesn't exercise memory, nor does it give any special knowledge you couldn't obtain through a quick internet search. She never took this specific class very seriously, mostly pretending she was doing the exercises and staying as unnoticed as possible. The only way these classes were used was to boast about how much stronger one is when compared to their peers. Also, it didn't help that she would always end up alone when it came to form groups.

"Hey, isn't that Julia?", the voice was coming from one of the girls trying to whisper to her friend in the locker next to hers. If she thinks that locker door would block the conversation, she doesn't really understand how sound waves work. Julia thought about warning them that she was hearing until she heard the rest of the conversation:

"Yeah... she is. The best student at the whole school and bla, bla, bla..."

"You don't like her ?"

"Well, it's not that", she looked around to see if anyone's near, clearly missing the subject of the conversation being next to them. If she ignored her on purpose or if Julia didn't have any presence, she wouldn't know. "But she's so unapproachable and scary. If you try to talk to her she just stares at you in silence no matter what you say, it's just so creepy!"

The two of them got surprised by the loud noise of a locker door being closed, with the subject of the conversation staring intently at them. Forcing herself to talk to them, the only thing thing that came out of her mouth was:

"S-So, what...were you talking about?", she said in a trembling voice and with a twisted smile while looking at the ground. Her hands were slightly trembling, but that was normal when it came to this type of situations.

"Oh! U-Ummm... Hey, look at that! You're ready now!", she looked at her friend and pointed at the door with her head that showed a panicked expression,"Y-Yeah you're right! I guess we gotta go or else we'll be late! See you at the start of the class Julia!", then they both ran off to the gym.

Julia felt heartbroken. No matter how many times she repeated this cycle, she hasn't been able to befriend a single person in all of the different classes she's been in. Maybe this year would be different, but, so far, everybody seems to ignore her like she was some sort of apparition. Well, maybe there was a chance to fix that. If she attracted a lot of attention to herself during the class, maybe people would be more willing to approach her? It was worth a shot. She got out of the locker room with a new decision made in her mind. She would give it her all, just this once.

Since the class had begun, Julia's plan to get attention on herself was a success. She was identified as the tallest person among her peers, outperformed every single one of them when it came to do laps around the field, long jump, push ups, stretching and weight throwing. She even amazed herself. Now that she thought about it, she may have amazed all of her classmates a bit too much. Now they stayed even farther away from her. In addition, instead of just ignoring her presence, they seemed to actively avoid it. The teacher signaled her to come to her and told her:

"Julia, I'm going to need to talk to you at the end of class"

She started sweating out of her hands. It was her knowledge that trying different things would bring different results, but it failed more spectacularly than she ever imagined.

The end of the class followed and Julia was left alone with her teacher. Julia was sitting on the blue bench in the corner of the gym. At front of her was a basketball pole which was part of a giant court that went from the wall that was to her left side to the exit that was at the other end. The teacher approached her holding a clipboard and hitting it repeatedly with light taps with a pen she had in the other hand.