Lara got around four hours of sleep that night, and woke up two hours before school started. Feeling preoccupied, she almost drunk the jam instead of the Orange Juice, almost washed her mouth out with Witch Hazel instead of mouthwash, and almost packed a jar of mustard in her lunch instead of a water container.

Walking to school was unpleasant for her. She was trying to get the hang of writing down what she wanted to say instead of signing it. Taylor wasn't helping her much.

"It's too slow." Lara scribbled.

"Mmmm…..Sorry, couldn't read it, too messy. You're going to have to get better at that. People won't know what you're saying."

Lara sighed, feeling miserable already.

"I'm not going to stop signing, you know. Maybe I don't want anyone to know what I'm saying."

"Oh, yeah, like you're gonna get far doing that. You're going to screw up at school!" They rounded the corner and began to approach school. "Anyway, look at me and swear that you won't hang around that kid. Promise?"

Lara ignored her and kept on walking. "Please?"

Lara spun around and gave her a scowl. Some words don't need to be spoken.

Walking past the other kids was the hardest part. Like the previous schools, her peers became suddenly quiet whenever she would walk by, and stare at her like she had two heads. As soon as she was gone, the whispers started. Her next door neighbor was in her class, and his name was Curtis Danko. Class was hell for her. For the first portion of the day, her teachers didn't understand why she was writing things down and became aggressive with her. One took away her notepad before she could explain, and then asked her all the questions from the lesson. Lara just sat and stared at him until he started yelling and she was kicked out of class. After a while, Lara became fed up waiting for him to come out to yell at her for being mute, so she walked down the hall and began to explore the school. The halls were deserted, and the classrooms were full, so she grabbed her homework and knapsack and decided to explore outside of the school, and before she knew it, she was walking home. When she was almost off of school property, she thought she heard the insane barking of a dog, but turned around to see her teacher sticking his head out of the window and yelling at her, with most of the kids behind him watching her, giggling viciously. Lara cocked her head to the side for a moment and then turned her back on them all.

Lara came home twenty minutes before the end of the school day feeling frustrated and annoyed. As soon as she stepped through the front door, she heard her mother talking calmly on the phone, using the voice she used whenever she too, was aggravated. Lara walked right past her and into her room, where she gently closed the door and lay down on her bed, staring at the ceiling. Lara smiled bitterly at the idea that she would ever make friends anywhere. Everywhere she went she was treated with extreme caution, like she was a bomb ready to explode at any moment. Well, after they learned she was mute, or 'disabled' as all the adults referred to her as. The kids called her retarded. Even though she couldn't talk, she was still fully functional in every other part of her body, including her mind. She supposedly was very intelligent, with an IQ over 130, but Lara doubted it very much, as she got poor results from schoolwork tests and projects and assignments, but she supposed that was because she never tried to do well.

Twenty minutes later, her mother knocked on the door, and let herself in.

"The teachers are pretty upset with you." She announced to Lara. Lara kept on staring at the ceiling, her face neutral. "They say they sent you to the hall, and the next thing they knew, you were outside with your knapsack and walking down the street. They also say you were being disrespectful to them by not answering their questions, and didn't say a word to them all day, even when they said they greeted you with a friendly tone of voice and manner."

"How am I supposed to talk to them if I've got no vocal chords, they don't know a word in my language, and they take away my notepad and don't give it back?" Leta signed violently.

"Um…" Lara's mother's lips twitched upwards as she was trying to swallow her smile, "I told them about you being mute when they were done rant-… talking to me about the problem."

Lara kept on staring into space.