Immortal, Take Three

I'm kind of getting tired of rewriting this story, but since I'm adding at least a month, I don't really think I have a choice.

Chapter One- Emma

I was the bane of Woodrow James High School.

In lovely Woodrow Heights, the breeding grounds of the entitled, it was not difficult. I did not skip school to get my hair done. I did not play sports, I was not a Young Einstein or Politician, and my clothes were not hand-stitched from fine Italian silk. They were from Hot Topic, the antithesis of everything Woodrow James students were about.

They whispered about me in the halls. I revelled in it. I basked in their silent, unadulterated hatred; in all honesty I enjoyed the sense of power it gave me. Not that it was hard to illicit a reaction from these people, quite the contrary; however, given the circumstances, I felt especially empowered. If they knew the real reason I was there--what I really was, and why--I could not imagine they'd hate me any less.

If they knew what I was, they might be terrified. Or perhaps they'd want to be me; who could tell with these people?

To be honest, the tedium of high school was getting to me. Not because I had attended many times before--if I bothered to count, it might have been around three times I'd ever set foot in a school. I had been privately tutored by the finest teachers in the world, perhaps more fine for the experience they had then for any aptitude in teaching. The teachers here were inferior in every way; how old were they? Forty, maybe fifty? They were children. I could not learn from children.

Of course, I was not here to learn.

The English teacher's voice broke me from my reverie; he was a bald, tired man around fifty. I imagined that, no matter where one could be, teachers would be the same--dejected and pathetic, knowing what they had once considered their life's work meant nothing to the sleepy drones that passed through their class. The allure of working in an extremely wealthy district had worn off for this man; he was exhausted. In some ways, I could relate.

"Mr. Vazques, have you heard a word I've said?" He slapped his fancy aluminum pointer onto his desk; the sound reverberated throughout the room. The class, a measly fourteen people, stared at me. Other people would've burned red at this point; I stared at him with icy coldness.

A silence ensued. The teacher was feeling daring, and met his own watery eyes to my cool green ones. It couldn't last long. They were all terrified of me, these scuttling, pathetic insects; so convinced of their own importance, their superiority--

The door opened behind us with a bang, and all eyes--including mine, I am ashamed to say--turned back there. And there was a girl, somewhat small in stature, thin and lithe in a way--a girl, with auburn-brown hair that fell past her shoulders in a single warm wave--a girl, with the soft hazel eyes and long, dark lashes of a young deer--a girl, who was in every way warm, in every way sweet and pretty and almost childlike with the nervous smile upon her rose-pink lips.

If I had known--if I had known, in that instant I first saw her--if I had known, I would have walked out the classroom and out of the school without a second thought. As it was, I turned back in my seat, ashamed of falling victim to the trivial curiosities of this lower class of human.

Her voice echoed from behind me, reminiscent of early spring; her voice was quiet, unusual for this school. "Um...I'm pretty sure I'm supposed to be here."

The teacher smiled with warmth I didn't know he was capable of. Was it a knee-jerk reaction, around this girl? "You must be the new student. Emma Dupont, is that right? Come in Miss Dupont, find an empty seat somewhere."

Dupont...perhaps she was French. Almost immediately she sat down beside me--the only seat available, I suddenly realized--and smiled in that tentative way one smiles at someone they don't know but might like to. I stared straight ahead, focusing for once on the teacher instead of my own thoughts. The disappointment that I did not smile back emanated off of her in waves.

Emma Dupont. If only I'd known.

Ta-da. I know you love it. You don't have to tell. No, actually tell me. I'm a shameless attention whore, after all :D

I could tell you about my day but that would involve more writing.