The next day at school was hell.

Once first period was over, and we were all waiting for second period to start, Ursula came to my table when Jessica, Elise and I were chatting with each other.

“Bella,” said Ursula, sounding a bit devilish. “How did it go yesterday with the perv?”

I was probably a little distracted, because at first I had no idea what she was talking about. “With who, now?” I asked.

“That perv witch,” she explained. “I saw you two at the library. Did she try to put the moves on you?”

Comprehension hit me like a truck.

“Stop saying that, Ursula,” I complained. “She’s not a perv, and you have no right to call her that!”

Ursula’s eyebrows raised in a surprised expression. I had never snapped at my friends before.

“So the perv put a spell on you, and now you’re at her side?!”

“I told you to stop that,” I said, sounding pissed. “You don’t even know her. Karen’s really nice, she doesn’t deserve the shit you make up about her.”

Ursula’s jaw dropped a little.

“I get it now,” she said, “You slept with her. And that’s why you’re defending the bitch. That’s really gross, you know.”

That’s when I really lost my temper.

“Ursula!” I shouted. “Fuck off!” I got up from my chair and gave her a hard slap on the left cheek. There was a moment of silence, and I realized the entire classroom’s attentions were on me. The math teacher was standing in the doorway, looking angry.

“Isabelle, Ursula, you two follow me, now.”

After that, we were in the director’s office for an hour. The director heard each of us separately, and I’m sure whatever story Ursula told him was far from the truth, because I was the only one who got punished in the end. He phoned my parents, and they were appalled to find out that their daughter had picked a fight in school. They told me I wouldn’t be allowed out of the house again for a year. As for school, I got suspended for one week, and was tasked with writing a letter of reflection, or some similar bullshit.

But before that, I still had to go back to class for the rest of the day. Which obviously made everything worse.

Neither Jessica nor Elise were talking to me anymore. They didn’t even bother coming around to ask if I was okay. My friends, or at least the people whom I used to call my friends, just started to ignore me. They were siding with Ursula, which I understood, really: it’s much harder to stand up to someone who’s being bullied than to simply ignore that violence and hope that as long as you don’t say something wrong, you won’t be the next victim. Maybe they didn’t even agree with the things Ursula said about Karen, but by pretending they did, they avoided putting themselves in danger. It was so shallow, so ridiculous, and yet, merely twenty-four hours ago, I was the same as them. But not anymore.

It wasn’t long until I noticed the way people were looking at me. Some with fear, some with disgust, and several others with contempt. I couldn’t find Karen anywhere. I saw Jule in the hallway, and decided to ask them. Jule was one of Karen’s friends.

“What’s going on?” I asked them.

“What do you mean?” said Jule.

“I can’t find Karen,” I told them, “and everyone’s been looking at me weird since I came back from the director’s office. Like for some reason a lot of people hate me now.” I pondered about my own words for a while. I had never been to the director’s office before, so I had no idea how people usually treated you once you have, but I was fairly sure that disgust wasn’t a normal reaction to that kind of thing.

Jule looked at me with what I can only call pity.

“Karen went home,” they said. “This is hard on her too.”

“What is?” I asked, suddenly very confused with the whole situation.

“Isabelle, be frank with me, are you going out with Karen?”

“What?!” I exclaimed, surprised. What kind of question was that? That just seemed like it came out of nowhere. “No,” I told Jule, then.

“Well, there’s this rumor,” Jule explained, “that you and Karen are going out, and that you hit Ursula because she made fun of Karen. Your girlfriend. See what I mean?”

I did. I didn’t like it, but it explained what had been going on. People had been looking at me weird because they thought I was going out with another girl. Or maybe because they thought I was going out with a witch, and there’s people out there who hate witches. Heck, some people might even be calling me a witch as well, and that by itself was enough to warrant me some hate. And it was hard on Karen too, because besides being a witch, now she’d be known as someone who sleeps with girls: a perv, in Ursula’s words. Speaking of her, this sort of rumor just reeked of Ursula. If she’s not the one who started it, then she at least confirmed everything when someone else asked.

Surprisingly, though, I didn’t really care about Ursula just then. My only concern at that point was Karen. I had no idea how she must be feeling, but I really wanted to be by her side. I don’t know why I worried so much about her, then. We weren’t even that close, I was barely an acquaintance of Karen’s, really. Maybe it’s just that I felt responsible for the mess, since it was me hitting Ursula that caused the rumor to start. Maybe she didn’t even want to see me, what if she blamed me for the whole thing? But one way or another, I needed to go see her and find out.

I got my bag from the chair, and started running toward the school gates. But when I was about fifty meters away, or so, I stopped. There were two figures standing before the gates, and looking from afar they reminded me too much of two certain people whom I often called “mom” and “dad”. I can’t deal with that. They did say they’d lock me in the house for a year, and combined with a one-week suspension, that would make for about ten days until I was able to see Karen again. That won’t do. I needed to see her now.

I took a turn to the left and started running around the building until I was in an area which was hidden by some trees, just next to the school fence. Then I did something I never thought I’d be capable of, and jumped over the fence.

I ran all the way up to Karen’s house (which thankfully was just two blocks away). I was too scared that if I stopped for a moment, someone would find me and bring me back to school, or to my parents. I rang the bell on Karen’s door, and waited.

Moments later, I saw her come to the window of her room, on the second floor.

“Isabelle?” she asked. She seemed surprised to see me. “What are you doing here?”

“I wanted to see you,” I admitted. “Is that bad? Do you want me to go?”

“No, it’s okay,” she said. “Hold on.”

I heard her run outside her room and down the stairs. Then I saw Karen open the front door for me.

“Come in,” she told me.

I walked into her house again, for the second time in two days, and went up the stairs with her. Once we were in her room, Karen immediately jumped on the bed. I walked up to her and sat beside her, there. Only then I realized that her eyes were a bit swollen and red. She had been crying.

“How’s the fallout?” she asked me.

“The fallout?” I repeated, unsure if I understood her question.

“From the fight,” she explained. “How much trouble are you in?”

“Oh, that…” I said. “It’s not too bad. A week of detention, I’ll be grounded at home for a lifetime… oh, and I’ll have to write a letter of… whatchamacallit? Repentance?”

Karen giggled. “A letter of reflection,” she explained. “To rethink your mistakes. I’m familiar with those.”

“Oh, are you?” I asked, smiling. “Any interesting stories about your past, miss Karen?”

She laughed. “Dummy,” said Karen, before hitting me on the head with a pillow. “I can’t believe I was here all worried about you.”

“Wait, about me?” I asked, surprised.

“Of course about you!” Karen proclaimed, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. “You just hit a classmate, and you’d never done that before. Then people started to badmouth you. I kept thinking that it was all my fault, that maybe if I hadn’t talked about Ursula yesterday, this would never have happened.”

I wondered about that for a moment. For some reason, it made me happy that Karen had been worrying about me.

“It would have happened anyway,” I told her. “Because after I got to know you better, yesterday, there’s no way I would have let Ursula keep talking shit about you.”

“It didn’t work, though,” Karen remarked. “She’s still harassing us.”

“Right,” I said, remembering the rumor.

“Why did you come here, by the way?” she asked. “You already said you wanted to see me, but that couldn’t be the only reason, right?”

“To be honest,” I said, as we looked into each other’s eyes, “I was worried about you.”

Karen chortled. “Okay, so now’s my turn to ask. Why would you be worried about me?”

“Well, I couldn’t find you at school,” I explained. “Jule said you had gone home, that this was hard for you. And with the new rumor, I thought you might be feeling down about that. I was right, wasn’t I? I mean, you were crying…”

I pointed at Karen’s eyes. She turned around to look at a mirror nearby, and made a funny sound with her mouth, to express her annoyance.

“Shit, I do look horrible,” she attested.

“Are you feeling better, now?” I asked.

Karen turned around to look at me, and chuckled. “Do you even know why I was crying?” she asked.

“Uh… because of the rumor, no? ’Cause… now people will think that you really do like girls.”

“I don’t care what people think,” she stated. “Really, it’s just one more rumor. It’ll die down like the rest of them.”

I tried to make sense of that in my head. “But if you weren’t crying about that, then…”

“I told you, you klutz. I was worried about you,” Karen explained. “You got sent to the director’s office because you were trying to help me. I felt horrible about myself, then.”

“Don’t sweat it,” I told her, probably sounding braver than I really felt. “I just did what I wanted to. I don’t even regret hitting Ursula, she had it coming.”

“What about the rumor?”

“Half of it is true, anyway,” I told Karen. “I did slap Ursula because she was badmouthing you.”

“And what about the other part? About you and me being lovers?”

I chuckled. “Honestly?” I turned my head to look into Karen’s eyes again. Her face had that same expectant look from the previous night, of when she asked if I would ever date another girl. I answered her question now with the same honesty I had had, then. “I feel kind of honored,” I said, smiling playfully.

To my surprise, I saw Karen’s cheeks turn beet red. Oh, come on, what kind of reaction is that? The girl fidgeted, and looked around the room as if she was looking for something. Or maybe she wasn’t looking for anything in particular, and was just nervous. When she did turn to look at me again, her eyes were filled with that same look of expectation from before.

“Do you mean it?” she asked me.

Karen’s words, along with the look on her face, made me realize just what it was that she was thinking.

Oh.

Oohhh…

You don’t mean…?

I shook off my insecurities. Karen was still in front of me, waiting for an answer. I didn’t have to think about my answer. In a brief moment of comprehension, a number of things suddenly became clear to me. Among those things, Karen’s feelings for me, and my feelings for her, were the most important.

“Yes,” I said, looking into her eyes. “I do mean it.”

In the next moment, Karen did something I wouldn’t have expected. She half-leaned-half-jumped on me and glued her lips to mine. I was surprised and amused by that sudden attack, so I pulled back, laughing. What an honest kind of kiss! It wasn’t passionate, or sensual, it was more like a 12-year old kissing someone else for the first time.

I’m sure Karen had no idea why I was laughing. A brief expression of despair flickered on her face. But after a moment, she started looking confused and smiled at me awkwardly.

“What?” she asked.

“It’s nothing,” I said. “You’re just too cute.”

Karen started blushing again, which added to the cuteness. I leaned closer to her, and whispered:

“Kiss me properly.”

I placed one hand on the nape of her neck, and pulled her in for another kiss.

We kissed each other for a few minutes, then laid down on her bed facing each other and smiling. That felt like bliss.

“It’s like I’m under a spell,” Karen remarked. “Are you sure you’re not a witch yourself, miss Isabelle?” she joked.

“I am,” I joked back, “and you’ve fallen for my evil plan. I’ll never let go of you now.”

Karen chuckled. “What a mean witch, you are.” She snuggled up to me. The smile faded from her face. “What are we going to about school?” she asked.

“We’ll figure something out,” I said.

“I was scared today,” she confessed. “I kept thinking you’d never want to see me again. And then you show up at my door. That was really…”

“Sweet?” I suggested.

“I was going to say ‘reckless’,” said Karen, “but I guess it was pretty sweet, too.”

We stared into each other’s eyes for a while. Karen intertwined her fingers with mine. I knew that at some point I would have to get up, leave her side and go face my parents, school, and the rest of the real world. I knew that being by Karen’s side also meant that I would have to fight to protect her, and us. But at that moment, as we were together, it seemed like none of that mattered, like nothing else existed in the world apart from the two of us and that room.

[ End. ]