Chapter 2

Alice

I closed my eyes tightly and covered my ears with the purpose of not listening to the voices that exploded in my head, but they were still there, crushing me completely, harder and harder, causing me anguish punctures in every nerve of my brain.

I writhed in pain in front of everyone and dropped the chalk accidentally, letting it fall to the floor. I did not know what was happening to me. Why was I listening to different voices? Was I going crazy? I could hear the sound of the chalk cracking against the floor and shattering or listen to each whisper as if it was next to me or as if they were being told loudly. My legs wavered and the throbbing pain in my head rumbled and rumbled, as if it wanted to tear my brain out.

I could not take it anymore, if I stayed longer in that class, my head would end up exploding.

"Miss Alicia" whispered Ignacio, impatient, ignoring again that Alicia was not my real name.

He reached out quickly to touch my temple, but he pushed his hand away at the last moment, as the students sighed, remembering that I had something similar to the winter plague.

Then, I ran out of the classroom, opening the door with an incredible speed, as if my life was on it. Nobody said anything about it, but I assumed that that scene would only increase my bad reputation.

Tears threatened to spurt out, but I held them back just as I passed a teacher standing guard in the hallway. She was absorbed in the paperwork of exams in front of her, on a large, olive-green table. Her name was Esther and her eyesight was as bad as her ears. He wore huge bottle-topped glasses that made his eyes look much smaller than usual in a woman and it was said that she never heard cell phones in class or whispers during an exam. For that reason, I was not surprised that she did not find out about me when I walked by her and entered the girls' toilet.

Just when I put a foot inside, a strong smell of marijuana made me want to turn around, since it had not been my intention to go there to become a passive smoker, but it was the only place where I could hide, evade and forget what happened minutes before. I was fifteen and that meant they would not let me go home without the consent of one of my parents.

However, the smell was too much, so I decided to leave the sink. I was about to leave, when the group of girls who had been smoking swept my way. I knew them very well, since it was not the first time they tried to make my life impossible with their cruel comments. There were three of them and all of them older and taller than me, though that was not very difficult to surpass me in height, since I did not exceed the meter and sixty.

They looked at me with a smile and I thought that they must found themselves so bored that they had nothing better to do than to embitter my existence. Each of their lashes was painted in dark black in an exaggerated way, two of them had the same pink chewing gum lipstick and the last one had a green electric dyed hair and was going with a very bright red in her lips.

"Look girls" said a brunette with very curly hair approaching me, but not so much, as she was afraid of catching the winter plague. "It's our friend: "Cold"" said with incomprehensible hatred, since I had never addressed them or done anything to become the center of the teasing.

Then, she took a cigarette from her pocket and lit it quietly in front of me, swallowing the smoke and spitting it out on my face. I coughed, since I could not stand the smell of marijuana.

The girls passed the cigarette without leaving the door. I wanted to get out of there and in that moment, I could not think of anything else. I took a step towards them, but they resisted, I did not want to touch them because with a simple touch I could freeze a layer of her skin. One thing was very clear: I did not want to hurt anyone. That had been my great fear throughout my life and if I had never decided to defend myself it had been mainly for that reason alone.

"You're sick, we do not want you in this high school or in any other. You should stay at home so as not to hurt anyone." told me the girl with the electric green hair. And that was precisely what I had always wanted, to be able to stay at home and for my mother to take care of my education. However, that was totally inadmissible and impossible.

"Are you deaf?" asked the other girl.

"No, but you have no idea how much I'd like to be." I roared, annoyed at their accusations against me.

Another of them raised an eyebrow in surprise and I noticed the dark hair in her roots. The one with the curly hair had to be thinking the same thing, since she read the address of my gaze.

"You're dyed, right? Or not? Your hair is almost white, unnatural and your eyes are so blue and dead that look like the many that appear in the movie "World War Z"" asked in a clear and sharp voice. It was not the first time they made fun of my physique, so I was not surprised that they said my eyes were like those of a zombie. Actually, they resembled too much, since sometimes the pupil did not distinguish with the blue of my iris, as if from time to time it would freeze or become cloudy, but it only happened to me when I was sad, which is in most of the cases.

They were also right in that my hair was so blond that it looked white sometimes, but luckily I did not come out much in summer and it did not clear up more than usual. My skin, like the color of my hair, was also pale and looked sickly. However, even though my hair was almost white, my eyebrows were not so clear and could be distinguished well.

I sighed patiently and tried not to swallow the smoke that they spat with such parsimony from the mouth.

"What do you want?" I asked, tired of the situation.

"How stupid ca she be?" I heard in my head the voice of the one with curly hair.

"I hope Brenda will stop this soon, she almost touched me before" I heard another voice.

My mind could not burn anymore at that moment, but I still tried not to scream. The same thing was happening to me in class and it would not be long before I fell to my knees on the floor because of the pain.

When the girls saw my face of suffering, frowned and their face was all surprise.

"Cold?" asked the one that seemed to be the head of the group. This time, her eyes seemed a bit worried.

I screamed of pain in the middle of the bathroom and surrounded by those three girls

"Let me out." I managed to articulate with difficulty.

They were so scared that they could not move, not even blink.

"I said go away!" I screamed, totally out of me.

And then it happened. It had been hiding inside of me for so long, that when it happened my heart skipped a beat, scared. I had hit a girl with ice. Ice that had come out of me. How could it be possible? I looked at the guilty hand and it freaked me out to see that it had turned blue and had small pieces of ice. Then, I saw the girl unconscious on the floor and my chest rose and fell frantically, this could not be happening. However, it was true and there were witnesses who had witnessed it.

Before I ran out of there, I could only hear the screams of those girls.