As the bus rolled to a stop, the air felt heavy and wrong. Alex looked nervous. The sound of heartbeats around the girls seemed louder. Faster.

Despite these omens, Kara put an arm around Alex and reassured her that everything was OK. Kara's life so far had been full of difficulties, distress, and worries, but now everything seemed tolerable, because she had found love. For the first time, she really did feel invulnerable, and she felt she could protect Alex from any threat that came their way.

As they stepped off the bus, the grounds outside of the school were unusually quiet. They walked towards the school entrance.

The wind whispered in her ear, calling her name. It felt strange.

Alex had stopped walking and was staring across the parking lot at the entrance to the gymnasium. Kara followed Alex's gaze and saw Lena and Eric standing there. Lena was looking back at her, beckoning the Danvers girls with her hand.

Alex and Kara hesitantly walked past three rows of cars to meet Kara's friends.

Lena looked concerned and sad, while Eric seemed furious like Kara had not seen him before. She could feel his anger, like it was a physical presence standing beside him, and his anger was directed squarely at Alex. Lena whispered in Eric's ear, asking him to wait inside, and he stormed off reluctantly into the school.

Lena sighed and looked at Alex apologetically. "Eric was hurt badly by his best friend last year. He just doesn't understand how friends can do that to each other."

Alex wilted under Lena's stare. She was shaking like the temperature had dropped 20 degrees.

"I don't understand, either," Kara said, getting frustrated and a little angry at Lena and Eric for making Alex feel this way.

"I don't know quite how to say this," Lena tries to explain. "The school always has several old security cameras pointing down the halls at all times. They still use time delay video tape, but it takes really clear pics, I guess. They never actually used the tapes before, so they are waiting for the IT guy to help them figure it out. Apparently some parents called and some kids complained and things are getting out of control."

Lena paused, afraid of this moment.

"I'm sorry, Alex," Lena said sincerely. "I'm sorry Kara. It's not my place to bring this up, but the shit is hitting the fan right now. Eric and I came into school early today, to avoid Donnie and his friend, in case he decided to come back. We ran into the principal and I, uh, heard her arguing with herself about StudentBody's list last week. It seems that the list crossed some kind of line, and the principal had finally decided to take action. They are removing the video tapes from the security cameras, and the principal is going to look at the tapes today and figure out who taped the lists up in the hallway."

"What does that have to do with us?" Kara asked sharply, anxiety growing.

Lena looked at Alex, offering her the chance to explain.

Alex opened her mouth, trying to summon the bravery, but nothing came out. Finally she forced out, "I am StudentBody. I created the list."

"What do you mean?" Kara asked, certain that Alex meant something else, even though her meaning seemed clear.

Alex tried to continue, but all she could do was put her hand over her mouth.

Kara finally understood that there was no secret meaning. Alex had just confessed to publishing that Kara was the ugliest Freshman in Leesburg High.

Kara took a step back and shook her head and stared intently at Alex, expecting to wake up, or maybe thinking it was a joke, or anything, but Alex meant exactly what she had said.

It seemed unreal, like the random crazy ideas that come to people in their dreams. Kara didn't know how to feel. She felt dull. Empty. Alex kept on talking, pleading, crying, but Kara felt blank, non-responsive.

Then suddenly she asked quite calmly: "How could you do this to me?" It was more of an innocent question than an accusation. But Kara's feelings were changing. Kara had never imagined herself as angry towards Alex before. She didn't think she could ever feel that way, so she didn't immediately recognize the emotion when it arrived.

Lena broke the silence by explaining the chain of events since last tuesday. "Apparently, publishing this list was considered a kind of verbal assault. If it had been only published on Alex's blog, they couldn't do anything, because it would have been done off of school grounds, but as soon as the lists were distributed in the halls, the school now feels like they must take action, if they can recognize Alex on the tapes..."

"How could you do this to me?" Kara asked again, more insistent.

When Alex finally answers Kara's question, she says: "Because I was afraid."

"Afraid of what?"

Then Alex explained in a burst: "I was afraid of everything. I was afraid of what mom would do to us. I was afraid of what people would think about us. I was afraid that you would love me. I was afraid that you wouldn't. I was afraid because you were so beautiful. I was afraid because I loved you so much."

Kara shook her head. "It doesn't sound like it." Kara didn't know how to react. Those answers didn't make sense. She didn't know if she understood anything, anymore. Finally, she just walked away without saying a word.

And that might have hurt Alex more than if Kara had yelled or even hit her. And Kara didn't care.

Alex stepped forward to follow Kara, but Lena stopped her, "Let her go. She needs to think."

Yes, Kara needed to think. But she also needed to feel. She needed to cry. And she couldn't do any of that right then. She couldn't feel anything.

But she must have been feeling something, because her legs were wobbly, unsteady, like the ground was about to give way under her feet.

X X X

Kara was the living dead through her first two classes of the day. Maybe if the reading was Scarlet Letter, she could have found relevance in her literature class. Kara's attention sparked briefly when her history teacher taught about Benedict Arnold, but then everything was blah blah blah again when the teacher moved on to describing what the Continental Congress was doing during the war. Her mind closed up and went dark. It was like silence, but hard to breathe, like she was sleeping in a coffin.

She got a lift in Biology class, because Lena and Eric were there.

Eric was much calmer, now, and Kara felt calmer, too.

Still she barely listened to the teacher at all, and it still felt like silence, but more peaceful, like she didn't HAVE to listen, and that was how she wanted it.

After the class ended, the trio stayed behind in the classroom even after the teacher left.

Lena asked her how she felt, but she knew. She just wanted for Kara to open up, as though just talking could fix anything.

Kara explained that she felt like her heart was torn out and like her mind didn't work. She felt like her world was destroyed all over again.

Lena and Eric raised eyebrows and looked at each other. Oops, Kara thought, was that a mistake? Somehow Kara just assumed that Lena and Eric both knew about her origin, maybe from reading Alex's mind. She let the cat out of the bag. So careless! Or maybe she meant to do it, because suddenly Lena and Eric seemed like the only people who cared about her.

Eric asked Kara if she wanted a drink of water, and the look in his eyes made Kara uncomfortable, not because he was creepy, but the opposite, he looked so caring and out of character that it made Kara wonder if she looked broken.

Kara shrugged off both Eric and Lena, and stood as if she was about to walk away, but she stopped with her back to them. "Don't worry about me. I feel fine, now."

"You don't feel fine," Lena corrected. "And you don't feel nothing. You feel like there is a black hole inside of you that won't let anything out, and it is trying to consume you. You will need to forgive Alex before you can move on."

"You want me to forgive her now? I just found out about this!" Kara said, feeling incredulous at the suggestion, then she sighed and shrugged. "Don't worry. I'll forgive her some day. Whatever. It's no big deal."

"No," Lena objected. "You'll never really forgive her until you allow yourself to feel the pain. Love is too strong to win back by just waiting for it to happen. You'll need to fight to forgive her."

"I don't want to love her anymore," Kara asserted, but she knew it was a lie as soon as the words came out. She remembered the whole weekend in a series of flashes. For a moment, she felt like she should cry, but the emotion stuck in her chest like a weight. "How can I forgive her when I can't understand why she did such a horrible thing."

"Everyone has done something horrible in their lives," Lena revealed. "Everyone thinks horrible thoughts about each other every single day. I hate knowing what people are thinking! Sometimes the best people have the worst thoughts, because they feel so strongly, but usually their better angels win out, and they do the right things, because their love is stronger than the ugliness they can't completely control. I was only near Alex a few times since we both started high school a year ago, but from those few times I could tell that she was torn up about something. I just didn't know she was torn up about you. I guess she had let some evil take over for a day, like she was trying to kill her own heart, before the rest of her being rebelled and drove the evil away. All I can sense from Alex now is pure love and crazy strong pain for what she has done, and she was feeling that even before her secret came out this morning."

"I guess," Kara said skeptically while shaking her her head. She didn't want to think about it anymore.

The three walked to the cafeteria together, and Lena and Eric wanted to eat with Kara, but Kara didn't feel like she would be good company, so she ate alone, like she had done many times before.

Alex had dropped by the cafeteria and sat across the room, watching Kara, looking like she wanted to say something. Kara didn't want to talk to Alex or hear what she had to say. She moved behind a pillar, out of Alex's view, and shortly after that, Alex moped out into the hallways.

Kara had tried to forgot about what Lena had said about how everyone does bad things and thinks bad thoughts, but the words haunted her. How could anyone do something so mean to someone they loved?

Then Kara remembered the horrible thoughts she had had, not about Alex, but about her parents sending her away. During the trip to Earth, she had cursed her real mom and dad so horribly for sending her away and not letting her die with them. They had put a horrible burden on her to go to an alien world, raise a bratty baby, and leave everyone she loved behind. She had hated her parents for months, and even believed they had deserved to die.

But that wasn't really so bad for her to feel that way, was it? At least it was understandable that her mind would lash out, given the trauma she had been through.

But the bad thoughts had continued.

She hated her step parents for trying to make her forget about her real parents and call them mom and dad, as though they could ever replace her real parents. And she hated Kal-El for abandoning her to them.

Now she regretted those feelings, but the feelings had never made her do anything really bad. She had never lashed out at them or hurt people. Not much, anyway.

And she had never struck back at fellow students when they had mocked and abused her during the first few weeks of school. She certainly had the power to do that.

So yes, she had had terrible thoughts, but they were all understandable. She just forgave herself because she knew she had gone through one hell of a trauma, and she was a much better person now that she had learned how to deal with the pain.

But Alex didn't have any excuse like Kara had. Her life was awesome by comparison, Kara thought.

At least that was what Kara always saw. But now she had to wonder: was Kara's trauma was really greater than Alex's? Maybe Alex had gone through a lot that Kara never appreciated: She had given up her status as an only child, and the only object of her parent's affection. She had taken in an alien and given up half of her things. Her dad had just died. And her self-identity was being shattered as she realized that she was madly in love with her own sister. Apparently, that was a big deal on this planet. Wasn't that excuse enough to make her lose her mind a little, and try to prove to herself that she wasn't in love with her sister by doing something so horrible?

Kara stood up suddenly, feeling enlightened. She still didn't understand why Alex had created that list, but she understood how Alex could feel strongly enough to do something so wrong, and that revelation twisted and jolted Kara's heart.

She stared at Lena, who was eating a few tables away. Their eyes locked, and Lena simply nodded. Kara wasn't sure what that meant, exactly, but it seemed that Lena thought Kara was thinking the right thoughts. Or at least feeling the right feelings.

When lunch was over, Kara wandered around aimlessly, while other students headed to their next class. Kara continued walking as the hallway traffic thinned and eventually she was wandering alone again. Nobody stopped her or asked her why she wasn't in class, but she didn't think her soul could survive an hour of geometry problems. Besides, she knew all she needed to know about geometry to solve real life problems.

After a short time, Kara could see a teacher walking down a hall at a right angle to the hall she was walking, and in a few seconds they would meet at the vertex, when the teacher would ask Kara why she wasn't in class. Kara hurried silently down the hall, her feet barely touching the floor, and she hid in the lab, which was deserted at this time of the afternoon.

Kara sat in the corner where she and Alex had been proving their love for each other on Friday, as they had shared an apple. It seemed like so long ago. She could see the apple core still on the table, next to a bunsen burner. Didn't they clean this place since then?

No, wait, this apple was fresh.

Then it occurred to Kara that Alex must have just been eating the apple here during lunch break a few minutes ago. Alex had been eating here, just like on Friday, only this time she had been eating alone.

Tremors shook through Kara's body, and that was when the dam broke. That heavy weight in her chest started overflowing, and Kara felt like she was choking and she couldn't stop the tears.

X X X

After several minutes of mourning, the tears slowed and the aftershocks subsided. It was then that Kara heard a faint voice coming from the adjacent room.

Strange. There was no classroom adjacent to the lab, only a closet, as far as Kara knew.

She squinted her eyes and peered through the concrete wall. On the other side was a tiny room filled with A/V equiptment, including several tube televisions and one of those new flat screen TVs. Sitting on a chair in the middle was a young, rough looking man wearing a X-Files T-shirt and sipping on a Coke. He was watching a B/W image on one of the smaller TV screens, where the image advanced in intervals of about 3 seconds. Kara looked harder. Now she could see that the image was from a fixed camera pointing down one of the school halls, and the only movement on the screen was from a teacher walking down the hall. Then he fast-forwarded the video tape several seconds, until a second person was talking down the hall.

Only then did Kara realize what the man was searching for on the tapes: StudentBody AKA Alex. He was waiting for her to stick the infamous lists onto the walls and catch her in the act.

Now Kara faced a choice.

Should she let Alex get what she deserved? Kara wasn't the only victim of StudentBody, either. Several other girls were proclaimed as eyesores on that list, too, and some were treated more horribly in the chatrooms than even Kara. Yes, Alex was guilty as sin. That one glimpse into her soul was far uglier than the worst photos of anyone on that list. All Kara needed to do to serve justice was walk away.

But despite everything, Kara still loved Alex. Despite everything, she trusted the Alex that she knew. Alex was a good person, or Kara was the worst judge in character in the world. Maybe she was. And maybe that meant that Kara was just as bad as Alex, because Kara didn't want the person she loved more than anyone to get what they deserved. Not even if part of Kara hated that person right then.

She wasn't quite sure what to do about it, though. She couldn't just barge into the A/V room, push the guy aside and grab the tape from the machine. And she was no magician with brilliant trickery.

But she did have some real magic, of sorts, and she was in a lab with a bunch of cool stuff all over the place. Maybe a little amateur trickery would be enough.

Kara scoured the shelves and table tops, looking for anything to trigger an idea.

In an isolated cabinet, separated from everything else was a small box of vials labeled "ACIDS", and a round disk of black metal the size of a container of blush that Eliza used. A label under the disk read, "CAREFUL: RARE EARTH MAGNET."

Then Kara knew what to do, even if she didn't think it through carefully. But she knew that video tapes could be ruined by magnets.

She opened the window nearest the A/V room and looked outside. The other room's window was only about 5 feet away.

She grabbed a pencil from a table, then leaned out of the window and tossed the pencil at the other window. It tapped lightly against the glass, but did not even capture the worker's attention. She tried again with a scalpel, throwing this a bit harder, and, to her surprise, the window shattered.

"What the fuck?" A voice asked from the other room, as he jumped from his chair to investigate.

At this point, Kara literally flew out of the lab door, opened the door to the A/V room, flew in like a gust of wind, and just like a gust of wind, she sent papers flying everywhere. She put the magnet on top of the small video tape player, to which it stuck like it was glued, and then she left and closed the door just as quickly.

"WHAT THE FUCK?!" the voice asked again, this time completely bewildered.

Kara, now back in the corner of the lab, watched anxiously as the worker looked everywhere around the room, trying to understand what had just happened. After about five minutes of scratching his head and cleaning up papers, he returned to the video tape and continued playing.

For a moment, Kara thought her ill-conceived plan was a complete blunder, as the tape continued playing just as it had before. But after about a minute, the image on the screen began to distort with waves of static and distortion. A minute later, the image was almost unrecognizable, as every rotation of the reel of tape in the cassette erased the contents a bit more.

The worker let out one final, exasperated "What the FUCK!" and Kara smiled naughtily, taking a bit of pride that her scheme actually worked.

When she heard doors opening and footsteps marching around the school, she knew classrooms were letting out, and students were migrating to their final class of the day.

Kara was tired of being alone and decided to rejoin the school community, so she walked out of the lab, and she walked right into the A/V investigator who had finally given up and was storming out of his room.

"Oh! I'm sorry, Miss," he said, awkwardly, then quickly walked away.

"I'm sorry, too," Kara said, but she doubted he had heard her.

X X X

When the final bell had signaled the end of school for the day, Kara had not learned one single thing from her classes, but the whole day had been an education that would affect her for the rest of her life.

Alex was waiting for her by the bus again. Kara walked right by her, as if ignoring her, and stepped up onto the bus. Alex looked down and didn't follow, as though Kara had kicked her while she was down. Kara paused and gestured with a wave of her head for Alex to follow. Kara took a seat by the window in the back, pressing up against the side, leaving Alex plenty of room to sit down beside her. But she folded her hands on her lap, and crossed her legs defensively, when Alex joined her.

Kara knew Alex was feeling terrible, and she felt her heart going out to Alex, but her own hurt was still there, pushing them apart like a tide.

Finally, Alex sobbed, her breathing labored, as she whispered across the growing gulf between them, "I'm sorry."

"I know," Kara replied with a tired, soft voice, as she looked out the window.

They sat quietly for a minute, as student piled in, and somehow with every student that stepped on board, Kara felt a little bit more alone. Finally, she reached over and took Alex's hand in her own.

Alex held on tight and then surrounded Kara's hand with both of hers, as though trying to surround Kara with an embrace, but only daring to touch her hand.

Kara let Alex hold her hand while she kept looking out the window. She didn't want to look into Alex's eyes again, at least not until she could see Alex the way she saw her yesterday.

The bus pulled away from the curb. As they slowly drove by a series of parked vehicles, their window passed within a couple feet of Eric's window on an adjacent bus. Eric was staring right back at them, and he looked daggers at Alex, who felt her heart race from his stare.

The bus started to pick up speed, as the vehicle left the parking area and approached the on-ramp leading to the highway.

Kara had that disturbing feeling again. It was a sense of foreboding that was palpable and seemed to permeate the entire bus.

Kara saw the driver go limp in the front of the bus, and, a moment later, a screeching sound pierced the silence, and a girl in front screamed out. Suddenly, the bus hit a bump so hard, it felt like the impact might break the bus in half, as the bus careened over the curb on the on-ramp and raced downhill towards a ravine.

If Kara wasted any time plotting how to make this rescue seem like an illusion, she would be too late to save anyone.