A/N: Requested anonymously on tumblr as "angsty April," so I had some leeway.
What you get is some HS-era April angst. No A/A, but hey that line's been toed before in this fic.
Being picked on sucks.
Stacy Knoblauch, resident coolest clique-leader of Pawnee, was basically April's arch-nemesis. Every day, it'd be something silly or barely even worth noticing. Tripping her up when she walked past Stacy or her gang of indiscernible trolls to get to her seat in class was common, but April just figured out a path to take every day to avoid that.
Getting her lunch stolen out of her locker, too. In fact, in eighth grade her locker went from a place where she could stash notebooks that no one on the planet should read or risk death by fire to a sparse hole in the wall that was raided every day by that same gang looking for a new way to mess with her.
It was easy to ignore. They were morons.
People just did their thing, and theirs happened to be picking on her. It wasn't that big of a deal, and it's not like April stood back and took it all. Dead raccoons showed up in the Knoblauch yard, and signs in red lipstick or marker meant to look like blood declared that they had seven days to live.
Sometimes, though, being picked on sucks.
It sucks like learning her grandmother died in the middle of class, the only person in April's family that really mattered to her because she was, quite literally, a witch. April never moped, or at least that's what she wanted to believe, but that day it was too much. She'd never again go to her abuela's and read chicken bones, or talk about rituals and sacrifices in joking tones, quiet so not to disturb her parents.
She couldn't just take a bus across the state anymore, frighten her parents to the point of getting search parties, all because she wanted to go see her. April started the day having a grandmother, and having this weird, crazy old lady connecting her to that vaguely serious dark side that she cared about, and then, in the next moment, she was gone.
So, of course, the stashing of her purse in a trash can bothered her. Getting laughed at, told she was a freak, and having her clothes yanked on because they're too black sucked.
For once, April let her guard down and everything hurt.
It hurt all the way home, all the way into her bed, and into the softness of the pillow against her face. She wasn't inhuman; April felt things, and she felt them so extremely that she often just bottled them up until they went away. Or, at least, until she could handle them. Oftentimes, the bullying went away.
It's the first time that April really felt the hatred pointed at her in school by those kids, and by the girls that claimed to just be making a joke.
It's the first time that April considers how little she has there, and now with the only person that really mattered in her life just gone, what she has at all.
And, for the first time, April's scared.