Chapter 25: Alone

She peeks out from the doorway as Mister Kinneas cleans up the classroom, watching him put away the workbooks and the various pencils that people had borrowed back into their places on shelves. He adjusts his cowboy hat a few times as he works, wiping away the sweat on his brow. As she watches, words clumsily form in her mouth, ready to come out and tell her beloved teacher what had had happened and why she had to ask for another workbook for class.

But Xion remains absolutely silent.

The words die in her throat as she moves away from the door, slowly walking back to the bathroom where her ruined things lay in their watery tombs. Tears threaten to fall down the little girl's pale cheeks as she contemplates ripping out a few of the hooks from the other girls' closets to get her revenge. But even as her hand reaches out to the first door, she knows that she would not do it. Her hand instead drops heavily to her side and Xion crouches down on the floor, hugging the little Goofy plush charm that her father had given her.

The toy is wet, reeking with the chemicals that the janitors used to clean the bathroom floor. But she cradles it anyway, giving it a sloppy kiss on its brown hat to soothe the soul she believed that it contained.

"I'm sorry," Xion whispers to it quietly, rubbing her cheek against its soft velvet fur. "I'm sorry, Goofy." The toy says nothing back to her but continues to give her its usual happy big-toothed smile, barely dampened by its trip through the air and then to the bathroom floor. She hugs it tightly, allowing her dear friend to absorb her tears and to help her control her misery.

Stone, she tells herself. You are made of stone. None of it matters. She hugs the little dog that much tighter, pressing her lips to his soggy hat. They weren't her friends, they didn't like her, so it didn't matter.

The lie wasn't that good, but it made her feel better.

After a few minutes, Xion straightens up again, her blue eyes darkening with determination as she walks back into the bathroom. She grabs her backpack from the sink, nearly stumbling from the intense weight that the water gave to its previously light contents. Carefully tucking Goofy into a small pocket on the side of her backpack, she starts pulling books from the toilet and dropping them inside of the bag, ignoring the squelchy plop of their ruined pages made inside of her bag.

It wasn't her fault. She hadn't put her backpack in the sink, she hadn't put her books into the toilet, someone else had. But Xion would deal with the consequences.

"Who's still here?"

Xion freezes in the middle of cramming a ripped fairy tale book into her pack. She had been caught. She hears Mister Kinneas's voice call out one more time, asking who was still here at school instead of being at home. Biting her bottom lip hard, she looks up to a small window set in the ceiling, wondering if she could somehow get up there and get out with her bundle of soaked papers without him noticing.

But no, the loud clomping footsteps of her teacher come closer and closer, each one thumping with the pounding of her panicked little heart.

She would be in trouble, Mister Kinneas would yell at her and tell her off for letting her books be ruined. He would scream at her for being such a klutz or even worse, he would pity her for being so stupid to have had her things be completely destroyed. He would mock her for it, tease her for being such a goof, and then he would force her to say that she was sorry for something she had had no control over.

The door handle of the bathroom turns, the door pushing in to reveal her teacher standing there before he takes a step into the room. His blue eyes sweep over the frozen child for a moment, scarring each little bit of flesh that they analyze. Xion's hands and her tear-stained cheeks burn with the intensity of his startled gaze but she quickly throws the last book into her backpack, bends down to shove the entire sodden mass onto her back, and shove her way past the young teacher.

"Bye Mister Kinneas, have a nice weekend," was all that the little girl could say to her teacher before running down the hallway, moving too quickly for the hand that had reached out to snatch her shoulder and stop her from going any further to grab. Xion scurries out of the teacher's way, throwing herself into an empty classroom and scrambling under the teacher's desk to hide. She folds her shaking legs beneath her plaid skirt, covering her eyes with her hands as she presses her body against the inside of the wooden desk.

She hears Mister Kinneas yell out her name, to stop and to talk to him, but she remains silent. Her little heart pounds inside of her chest, ba-dump, ba-dump inside of her as the heavy footsteps of her teacher run past the room, obviously intent on finding out what was wrong with his favorite student. What had happened to her.

All that Xion does is drop her head into her hands, letting herself think for a few more minutes. Just a few minutes longer. Then she could go home and no one would yell at her again.

Then she wouldn't be alone.