Author's Note: I realize that Galinda's actions may seem totally uncalled for, given only the information that is presented in this chapter, which I know is rather short, but it's more of a prologue so please bear with me. It will eventually make perfect sense and won't seem like such an overreaction. Thanks. Morianna Phoenix

Chapter One

It was a Friday night and most of Crage Hall's freshmen socialites were out at parties. One of the most notable of these students was absent however. Instead of accepting any of the dozens of invitations she had gotten, Galinda Arduenna had rushed out of the dining hall directly after supper and hidden herself away in her room. She sat with her back against the headboard and her knees hugged to her chest. Her head was lowered, her neck and shoulders hunched, as if under a great weight. Sparkling tears like liquid diamonds fell down her blush-reddened cheeks. She stared blankly at the off-white wall on the other side of the room for a minute. Then she clenched her eyes shut and bit her lower lip in an attempt to hold back the sobs that were trying to snake their way out of her chest, up to her throat. She bit her lip until it almost bled. Finally the sobs forced their way out of her, wracking her tiny frame, making her shoulders shake.

As she cried the same thoughts ran in circles through her head. The same memories replayed themselves.

She was thirteen. All the boys already flirted with her. She liked the attention, but she didn't really like the boys. She kept trying to tell herself that she didn't like them because, while they were nice enough, they just weren't up to her standards. There was a part of her mind that would whisper, 'It's not that they don't meet your standards. It's that your standards don't and can't apply to them, not when one of your standards is that they be-'. And at that point, she would smother the voice in the back of he head and tell it to keep quiet.

She was fourteen and she had learned how to flirt back with all the boys who poured attention on her. She also found her own attentions wandering. She found that it was not as easy to ignore the voice in the back of her head anymore, the one that kept telling her something about herself that she didn't want to hear. She certainly could keep herself from acting on her impulses though. No matter how much of an act life seemed to be, she resolutely kept that part of her under lock and key, away from the rest of the world, especially her parents.

She was fifteen and in her third year at a private, newly-all-girls secondary boarding school. There were no more boys to flirt with. No more way to drown out the voice or the impulses. No more parents to hide from because they thought she was old enough that they stopped visiting the school on weekends. There was one particular girl on her floor of the dormitory building who caught her attention. Her name was Aura. She was beautiful, gorgeous even. And she liked Galinda the same way Galinda liked her.

She was sixteen and she had just gotten a letter from her parents, informing her that they were pulling her out of school. She stood with the letter in her hand and her eyes filled with unshed tears of shame and sorrow. "Won't you miss me Aura?"

"Of course I'll miss you. You've been my dorm-mate for three years. You're my best friend." The word 'friend' had never stung so much.

"Is that all I am," Galinda asked, the tears threatening to fall at any second, her voice shaky.

Aura sighed and pushed a stray wisp of her wild red hair away from her face. "Yes, Galinda. A good friend and maybe I'd even call you a 'friend with benefits', but you're just a friend." She had gone home with a broken heart. Her parents got her a private tutor and she was home-schooled for the remainder of the year. They also hired a woman to be her Ama, to chaperone her when she was out with her friends. Her father had told her quite firmly that he would have none of that nonsense, not from his daughter. And he had only allowed her to attend Shiz on the assumption that she would be under the strictest supervision of Ama Clutch.

Here she was now, seventeen and at University. She had a little bit of freedom now, for the first and probably last time in her life. She had the closest friendship she'd ever built in her life, one of the precious few that were not built by the social ladder. And now she risked loosing that friendship along with a great deal of her freedom. If anyone found out she'd 'relapsed', Ama Clutch would once more be looking over her shoulder at all times. And if her parents found out, oh there'd be hell to pay. She would possibly even be disowned. When she started to think of what might happen to her if her secret was told, she decided it would be better to drown herself in the bathtub. Why not? It was a large bathtub and she was very small. It wouldn't be easy to accomplish, but it was possible. These thoughts turned her sobs into wails of emotional agony.

She got up and made her way to the bathroom, slowly turning the doorknob, and pushing the door open, not bothering to close it behind her. She took off her dress and stood only in her slip, her now-bare feet cold on the tile floor. As if in a trance, she turned on the water in the bathtub to a very comfortable temperature. 'That way the water will be easy to just slip into. My head will go under and I won't even care. No! No,' she told herself, 'don't think like that! You don't really want to die! Do you? I don't know what I want. I want it to stop hurting.' She felt like she was already drowning. She fell on the floor in a heap, too weak to move. 'Maybe it really would be better that way.' This was her last coherent thought before she became too faint to think at all.