Disclaimer: If I owned any of this, I would not be spending my entire life on this site.
Author's notes: First Lain fic. Flames will used to toast marshmallows. Bye-Bye.
I can't shake the feeling that something, no, someone is missing. I count heads like the teacher always does. Eighteen dark-haired heads bending earnestly over pastel or neon notebooks like I should be. Eighteen girls a little younger than me because I'm an idiot; eighteen little Japanese schoolgirls, like there always has been and most likely will be until next year. I shake my head and stare at the empty space in the third row where a desk should be but isn't. An empty space I've never noticed before, or at least, I never noticed how strange it was to have a desk missing from the front of the room, in the third row when there are four. Why there, where everyone will notice a desk missing? Why not in the back of the room, in the fourth row where no would see it, if they're short of desks? Or short of girls to fill up the desks, and they didn't want there to be an empty desk so they took one desk out and put it in storage? Unless there were supposed to be twenty girls and one died, the girl who sat in the first desk in the third row, and the moving-men came to put the girl's desk in storage, and they didn't feel like rearranging the desks just then, so they didn't and they want to the next day or the next, until finally they just forgot and the desks never got rearranged?
What must it be like to die like this? At thirteen and you've never really lived? Watching your body wither up fast, like a cut flower, or burn up like a log in the fireplace, and scream and scream and have doctors staring over you, looking like Halloween ghosts or horror story clowns and then suddenly it flashes in your brain this, this horrible site, will be the last thing you will ever see? I stare at my hands, tears welling in my eyes. Did she know? Could there have been anything, anything at all for her to live? Could anything have been different? Could we have been friends? I'd like to think… if I had met this girl, I would have liked her. Because she must have been like me. No one's spoken of her, not even Alice Know-It-All and her friends, so she must not have had any friends here. Unless… If she died horribly, like murder or suicide, no one would talk about it because would be too painful. Unless she died scared and alone, and no one was there for her in death, like no one was there for her in life, no friends and a family that doesn't care and so there's nothing, no one to keep you around. Unless she did it to herself, because no one cared. Unless…
If there was something wrong with her, something horrible and dangerous none of us could understand, and she had to go away so no one would be hurt.
I can't make myself stop crying now. I can't calm down, and I know everyone is looking at me, staring like people always do when they look at me. I try to tell them about the dead girl, about how she's scared and sad and horribly alone, and Alice, little Alice, pats me on the shoulder and tells me it's okay, only I know I'm okay, but the girl, that poor girl isn't, and why don't they see the empty place were a desk should be?
Reika taps her head and some of the others giggle. I'm not crazy, I'm not at all crazy.
They're the one who are crazy.
A/N: Great. Now I have another big, fat, ugly, EPB on my hands. *Sigh* Review so my Muse won't conk out, okay?