They say that the deepest hate is concealed love. I'm not sure if that's true…but I've never hated any girl as much as I hated her.

I tried to understand how my hatred managed to consume me to the point that I could never even look at her without feeling a dissatisfied shiver up my spine. Sure, I had never been the nicest person, even to my closest friends, but I rarely hated someone out of my own blindness, and failure to see their good aspects.

In grade eight, I tried to dismiss my hatred as jealousy. Perhaps it angered me that Heather managed to be pretty in her own, awkward way, without trying as hard as I did. It drove me crazy that a girl who never wore makeup, and basically wore the first thing she saw when she woke up, could still be so beautiful. Of course, I realize now that she was never any real threat to me. Even if she was beautiful, she didn't have the self-important confidence that I did. She was beautiful, but not in the way I strived to be.

Somehow, even this didn't help me. By grade eight, hating her became something like a drug. I realized that the more horrible things I said about her, the more she would do to cover up whatever I insulted. I suppose that before she became the topic of gossip among my friends, she never really thought about what she wore, or how she fit in. But I remember that all I had to say was, "I can't believe what Heather Sinclair was wearing yesterday. It's like she never grew out of her brother's hand-me-downs."

Within a few days, her "brother's hand-me-downs," were replaced with brand new, expensive label clothing, and a new haircut. When she started looking too good, I, considering myself the "queen of fashion" at the time, decided that ear-length hair wasn't good. I supposed that, at fourteen, any girl denied membership in the "popular" clique would immediately change. But I later found out that I was far from right.

How could a mostly self-assured girl who lived on the fringes, but was cool in her own way, give in to peer pressure so easily? Regardless of her reasons, I never really cared. Anyone who knew me would know that I like to control people. In fact, I highly doubt that I would ever have been as "beautiful" as I was in my eighth grade year, if manipulation hadn't been my forte. When I liked Spinner, and Terri was in the way, all I had to do was appeal to her low self-esteem to turn her into a bigger klutz than she had ever perceived herself to be. And please don't think that I had no idea that Ashley would do E. Perhaps I didn't suspect that she'd break that night, at that party, but I had counted on ruining it for her, to lose her as competition.

Yes, I know. I was a coldhearted bitch. I could turn the nicest girls into what they weren't, simply through making them believe that I wanted them another way. When that didn't work for Ashley, I had to use Jimmy to prove it to her. How do you think the poor girl felt when first he was bored with her, and now her best friend was tired of her perfect demeanor?

But pretty soon, I was bored with myself too. No matter what I had, there always seemed to be something left that wasn't mine. That something, or someone, was all I could think about for a long time. Every time I saw the lonely brunette walk down the halls, I would have to verbalize any fault I could find in her. Not because I hated her, but because I was almost afraid that there was nothing wrong with Heather Sinclair. That she was everything I thought she was. The girl with the most flaws eventually became my only flaw, and the small part of me that loved her was her only redeeming quality.

As happy as I was on the surface, for the next few years, I was the one left miserable, while Heather started to recover from my torture. Heather started to make friends with Alex, Sean, Jay, and Ellie, while a single act of revenge had lost me my boyfriend.

I wasn't sure if the feeling I had for Heather was actually love, or if it was just some messed up side effect of everything that had happened to me. But even before Dean, when I had still been the flirtatious girly-girl I was now, I still felt that way about her. And I had no idea why.

Now, I was sitting a few feet away from her, outside for lunch. Her hair was no longer straight and silky the way it had been when she had tried to redeem herself. She wore it in a sloppy ponytail, and wasn't hesitant about wearing glasses instead of contacts. Even so, she still looked beautiful to me. She was like the girl from Never Been Kissed, who everyone picked on and resented, because she had never discovered that she was beautiful, and didn't need the hottest boyfriend to prove it.

If my eyes weren't failing me, she was approaching my table. "What's she doing here?" Hazel demanded.

"You know…there's more to life than picking on other people," Ashley reminded us. "Why can't you just leave that girl alone?"

"Paige," she said, her hazel eyes meeting mine.

"What do you want?" I asked her, using my typical defense mechanism.

"To talk to you," she said. "About why it is you hate me so much."

I rolled my eyes. "It's not that I hate you, hon, it's just that you're a loser and everyone knows it."

Was that the best I could do?

She, in turn, rolled her eyes back. "Did it ever occur to you that some of us aren't interested in your special little clique? You've all treated me, and my friends like shit since you got here, and I just want to know what the hell I did that was bad enough to make you spread lies about me around the school, and tell everyone what a freak I was."

My mouth went dry. I had no answer for her.