CHAPTER TWO

"Yeah? Really? Well, seven to you to, Mrs. Williams!" one boy called from his chair by the teacher's desk in basic art. The girl sitting in one corner of the room glanced at him, but he didn't notice. No one noticed. No one knew she had started the using numbers to replace cusswords over lunch while making up a test. No one knew she was even still alive. It wasn't that everyone hated her or that they wanted her to die. It was just that she was so easy to overlook.

The girl always sat in the corner, at the table by herself, away from everyone else. She was quiet, shy, and studious. She only stood at 5 foot 1, making her easy to overlook. Her hair fell in thick brown waves when she wore it down, which she never did. It was always pulled into a loose ponytail at the base of her skull. She never dressed up; simply wear either jeans or men's shorts with a regular tee shirt and a pullover hoodie if it was cold. She made her self easy to overlook and ignore.

Arnia sat in the back of the room, smiling at the antics of her classmates. She shook her head and laughed as Andrew kept yelling about sevens and fours and knew he'd never knew who started that, just that it was cool, and that was fine with her. She had always been one to not care about getting credit for things, never wanted to be in the spotlight, but always wanted to be the one who knew she was in it even if no one else did.

Arnia was still smiling as she went back to drawing her picture. They had to take a saying and paint a picture for it and she was doing that "Eternity is but a moment in His eyes," a quote close to her Christian heart. She was working on drawing out the basic outline for it, a clock lying on the ground with landmarks in time rather than lines and numbers. It was going to look cool once she had finished with it.

She glanced up at the clock and smiled as she saw that there were only a few moments in class. She quietly placed her drawing in the folder up front for unfinished work and went to grab her book bag off the counter in back where they were supposed to keep them. She was stopped almost at the counter by her one close friend in the class, Amy Misenhiemer.

"You always ignore me, Ms. Sit-in-the-corner," Amy teased her. "O think I'm starting to feel a little insulted over here. I'm just left all alone with Andrew and his fours and sevens and threes."

Arnia laughed, her clear laugh ringing across the room as the bell rang. Someone on the other side of the room actually looked up to see just who had a laugh that contagious and sweet. The two friends walked out of the room and went their separate ways at the main hallway.

Arnia arrived in the gym just a few moments before the late bell rang out over the school. She waved to one of the teachers of 9th grade PE, Mrs. Buchanan, and walked to her locker where her best friend in the world, Kolton, was standing. Technically, Arnia's locker was on the other side of the locker room, but Kolton was the only person Arnia really knew in the locker room. She was one out of many in the 30 foot by 30 foot room of ugly green baskets with padlocks that pass for lockers.

Kolton brushed out her rust colored hair and threw her hair brush in Arnia's general direction. Arnia reached out with a quick flick of her wrist and caught the brush with ease as Kolton pulled her hair back in a ponytail up high with a large grey scrunchie that accented the grey flecks in her blue eyes.

The whistle blew, signaling to them that Mrs. Mansfield had come into the locker room and it was time for their torture of the day. Fortunately it was the last class of the day and the two girls only had to endure it for about 60 minutes when you counted time for changing in and out of uniforms, stretching, roll call, and explanations for the day's activities. Then they were free for the weekend.

Seventy-five minutes later, both girls met up, breathless and tired in the locker room again. They barely managed to get changed into their clothes to go home before the bell rang. Both girls jumped into the air and cheered as soon as they stepped into the courtyard out front of the school. Both girls walked across the street outside the school and separated at Arnia's house, only 2 minutes away from the school, with a promise to meet in the band hallway before school the next day.