The worst time to feel alone is when you're surrounded.

Hoshiko Akira moved with the crowd. She was surrounded by the crowd. But she wasn't part of the crowd. She never had been, and sometimes she thought she never would be.

The crowd of students began to disperse into the separate classes, and her class traipsed reluctantly into the first class of the day, chemistry. The thick air was balmy and stuffy as she walked to her usual desk and seated herself onto the slightly rickety, wooden chair. Unzipping her bag, she extracted her dog- eared, worn chemistry textbook and had just placed it on the wooden, graphitised desk when something hit her on the back of the head.

Studiously ignoring the explosion of malicious giggling from behind her, she extended a hand and plucked the offending article up off the tiled floor. It was merely a thick rubber band, launched from the back of the classroom, but the message was clear enough.

She let it fall to the floor again, and continued to unpack her books, adept with a little more venom the was usual.

The pale, golden sunlight streamed through the ceiling-to-floor windows as the teacher began to chalk up a long, complex and thoroughly boring chemical equation on the blackboard. Not concentrating, her eyes were drawn to the empty chair beside her, and the boy who had once occupied it.

Ryou Bakura had been a good friend of hers. That is, until he had suddenly upped and moved away, almost three months ago. She hadn't seen him since the day of his departure. Nor, she felt, had she received a viable reason for his sudden necessity to leave. Of course, there had been rumours, accidents… but the point was, he had been the only friend she'd had in this school, and once he'd departed, the bullies had descended on her like rabid vultures onto a fresh carcass. Not that the bullying had been anything new. The taunts had been consistent ever since she'd started at the school- She was the weird one, the poor kid, the orphan. They were the rich, pampered children who had maids and ate caviar for breakfast. Still, having Ryou around had made it less of a strain. Now, she had no-one. Ryou had moved far away, and although she had worked extremely hard to get a place in this school, she had recently found herself beginning to wonder why she was still there.

Snapping herself out of her reverie, she stretched across the table and retrieved her notebook, flicked to a fresh page and started to jot down the notes on the production of oxygen, which had just been written up on the board by the teacher. She had recently gotten into the habit of scattering her books and notes haphazardly across the two-seater desk in an effort to conceal her friend's absence, but it did little to ease her loneliness, and it was on days like this when she missed his presence the most.

She pushed a strand of dark mahogany hair back from her eyes and continued to write.

The cafeteria was already heaving with students by the time Hoshiko managed to enter. She was ravenously hungry, and the food was one of the few things she actually liked about the school, so she was quite looking forward to her lunch. She picked up a grey, plastic tray and moved to the back of the winding queue.

From the corner of her eye, she could see an extremely pretty girl making a vague gesture in her direction, then what appeared to be a rude and simpering impersonation. The table erupted into gales of raucous laughter. Ignoring this childish behaviour as usual, Hoshiko picked out a healthy lunch of salad and orange juice. Balancing the loaded tray steadily in her palms, she threw a glance around to make sure that there were no outstretched feet to trip her up. She walked carefully to her normal table beside the large windows, which was, as usual, unoccupied, bar her. Sitting with her back to the window, she plucked up her fork and began to eat the juicy, green leaves of lettuce. As he ate, she slid her Duel Monsters card deck out of her pocket and leafed through the cards she loved so well- Solar Mage, Spellcaster's Valkyria, Change of Heart… And unbounded, a warm memory washed over her like a wave on a beach' shore…

''Why are some cards green?'' asked a younger, more innocent Hoshiko.

''A spell card is always coloured green,'' explained a nine-year-old Ryou Bakura.

''What does a spell card do?'' she enquired, picking up some, and gazing at them with a kind of awed fascination.

''That depends,'' he said patiently. ''Some are used to change the playing field, some power up your monsters, and some can change the conditions of battle.''

''Oh.'' she said. ''So, they're good?''

''Yep.'' he nodded. ''In fact, my favourite card is a spell.''

He held up a jade- green card so she could see. A picture of an angel was painted on it, split down the middle. One half had a bat- like wing, the colour of soot, and the other side had a pure, chalky white wing, with snowy feathers. She held a crimson-red heart in her pale, delicate hands.

''Change of Heart.'' Hoshiko read aloud.

Ryou nodded and a small smile spread across his young face…

A sharp jolt to her arm tore her from her reverie, followed by another barrage of relentless giggling from the far left of the room. A large, white paper aeroplane lay on the table beside her elbow. Snatching it up, she unfurled it to read the (no doubt offensive) message inside. As she stared down, a hard lump of rage rose in her throat, and her mouth hardened into a cold, wrathful line.

Scrawled onto the crinkled sheet was a barely recognisable doodle of Ryou and her.

They had drawn her cross- eyes, she was running around with her head on fire, screaming manically in a speech bubble above her head-''Look at me, I think card games are real!''

Worse still was the roughly scribbled sketch of Ryou. They'd drawn him, knife in hang, chasing a screaming boy, blood dripping down his chin from his mouth. Beside it, in an elegant script, were the words- ''No wonder that murderer left- to get away from you!''

Hands shaking with rage, the words slicing her like burning knives, she violently crumpled the paper into a tiny, compact ball, and flung it onto the tiled floor so hard that it bounced. She could feel the rage bubbling in her stomach, like the magma chamber of some long- dormant volcano, as she glared angrily into the porcelain, perfect face of the plane's envoy. With a smirk curving her well shaped lips, and one perfectly shaped eyebrow cocked, Mizuki Yamamoto dared her to come over. Mizuki had decided that Hoshiko had been bad news the second she'd walked into the school. An outsider, on a scholarship, not wealthy enough to pay the ample school fees. That was bad enough, but the whole situation had rapidly deteriorated after that incident five months ago, and even more so after Ryou had left. Mizuki and her gang of popular kids made Hoshiko's school life a misery.

She stared into those cold, beautiful cerulean eyes for another instant, feeling the wrath pulsate and rebound inside her. But no. She would not rise to the bait that was now dangling above her head like a carmine rag held in front of an enraged bull. And though she longed to charge, Hoshiko knew perfectly well that Mizuki would simply run to the Headmaster and she would be in serious trouble. Forcing herself to take deep, calming breaths, she ripped her gaze away from Mizuki's contemptuous sneer, and instead began to eat her unfortunate lunch once again, stabbing each morsel of food and though each had done her a great personal wrong.

Hoshiko shouldered her heavy schoolbag, and feeling as though she was being released from the most horrific of prisons, walked purposefully through the school gate. Behind her, in the spacious car park, crowds of bustling students flocked hurriedly onto the buses. She was one of the few pupils to make her way home on foot, and although her home was actually quite a distance away, she preferred it that way. It gave her time to think, to reflect on the day, however bad it might have been. And today had been bad enough, to say the least. She angrily swept aside the swell of furious thoughts and feelings that had risen in her psyche like a wall of turbulent water. She would have time to deal with those later.
She ambled onwards, watching absently as her feet, in their jade green trainers paced monotonously- left, right, left, right... always pounding the concrete pavement, seemingly knowing the route off by heart, for she had walked these streets so often that her feet simply carried her to her particular destinations automatically. She violently shook her head from left to right, attempting to rid herself of the robotic mood she had found herself straying to so often recently.
But then she realised where she was.
With a jolt to her heart which must have felt like being shot, she realised which house she had unconsciously halted in front of. Normally she raced past this particular dwelling with head down, eyes studiously averted as to not glimpse the building which held so many memories for her... both joyous and terrible.
Ryou's house stood like an empty shell, polished pure white and empty. And, like the way a shell is said to whisper the sound of the murmuring sea, the deserted house seemed to susurrate her memories back to her.
The blue door was still adorned by the brass ''34'', and the white rose bushes were beginning to bloom, their buds swelled delicately, as though pregnant with an infant. The windows where raven- feather black. From where Hoshiko stood, she could almost imagine them as sorrowful eyes, begging her to return, the breathe life into the old house, now and forevermore the perennial ghost of its past self.
Worse still were the swings, still residing solemnly outside the lonely house, like a forlorn sentinel, ripped from its childish purpose to guard the home of children- but children long gone. The wooden seats swung gently in the sultry breeze, emitting a slight creaking noise, as though the absent children were somehow, in the past, sitting on the swings, swinging joyfully back and forth as they had once done so often... when the balmly summer breezes came...

Ry! Shiko! Let's go and play on the swings!

No... not that... it hurt too much.. still a fresh wound after all the years...

And there came a day when there were only two children to laugh and play, for the third....

Suddenly, she whirled around, away from the bubbling cauldronful of memories, away from the festering pain of the past. And, ignoring the heavy weight of her schoolbag pressing against her spine, she broke into a sprint, and she raced away from the old house, which seemed to stare after her with anguish, wishing for her to return, just as she wished desperately for Ryou to come back and ease her hurt, her anger, her ever- growing sorrow. For she had been left alone. Abandoned. Of the three, only she remained. Ryou had taken flight three months ago... And his sister had literally spread her white wings and flown away years before, leaving Ryou, leaving Hoshiko, leaving the world itself to weep…