Challenge #00093: Pretense

Jean’s greatest failure in attempting to be normal.

New school. New people. Nobody here knew anything about Jeannie Grey. About the voices. About the creepy things that happened around her. About the way she knew things nobody had told another soul.

All under control, now. Professor Xavier had helped her get a grip on her powers. Stop the voices. Stop the things floating around.

She could feel the thin veneer of normalcy cracking under the pressure, sometimes. She’d done her shields, of course, and could filter surface thoughts so that it took an effort to listen to one person at a time. If she needed to.

People could see. She was certain. She had a big, neon sign floating above her head in letters of fire that labled her in the eyes of these strangers as a weirdo.

_Don’t tense up. Keep cool. Play normal. There is no big sign telling all the normal people what I am…_

A kid about her size in a pretty pink dress and brown ringlets bounced up to her. “Hi! You’re new, right? My name’s Sara, what’s yours?”

“Uhm. Jean?” she risked. “I… I am new here. How did you guess?”

“Oh, lots of little things. General trepidation at the gate. Miasma of fear walking through the playground. You’ve been picked on before, right?”

“Do people always talk like this here?”

“No, I’m one of the few,” Sara confessed. “I get top points in vocabulary, and nobody believes I do all my homework myself. But that’s neither here nor there, right?” She lead her to the racks where schoolbags in noxious colours lined up in neat rows and racks. “You can put your bag here. What year are you in?”

“Four?”

Sara’s face fell. “Okay… i'minyearthree.” She cleared her throat. “There’s swings and monkey bars and a hopscotch set, but don’t go in the sandpit.” She lowered her voice to a whisper, “some of the kindergarteners pee in it.”

“Euw…”

“Exactly. And there’s a pretty neat tree in the back corner, you get a good view of the bay from the third-highest branch if you can get up to it. And it almost always has these butterflies that–”

“Hey, new girl,” said a new kid. A blonde girl in a prettier pink dress than Sara’s. “What are you doing with the freak? Don'cha know it’ll ruin your reputation forever?”

The three other girls in her shadow laughed and echoed each other’s “Yeah"s.

Jean knew them instantly. She knew the type. Mean girls. "I’m new, and Sara volunteered to show me around…”

“It’s none of your business, Sherry Taeborough. Maybe you could stay out of it for a change,” said Sara.

“You shouldn’t hang around with the freak, too long,” said Sherry. “You’ll catch her freakitude.”

“That’s not even a real word and you know it,” argued Sara.

“She should know, she ate a dictionary,” said one of the chorus. All the others laughed.

Sherry got closer to Jean. “I know how it is. New girl, easy to get fooled. But you should know the truth. Sara Louise? She’s two years younger than you and she talks so freaky even grownups can’t understand her. She even got moved up a year ‘cause her Daddy-waddy told them to let her. She’s been kicked out of like, two hundred schools because of her weirdness. Way I see it? You have two choices: stick around the freak and turn into one? Or pick some better friends.”

Jean Grey didn’t even look at Sara Louise for years, after that.

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