No One Loves the Ugly
Jason's accustomed to his quintessential method of note passing. He's been practicing the proper way to flick a folded note so that it lands perfectly on the recipient's desk. He notices his friend, Koontz, is idly tapping his pencil on his biology notebook.
Maria sits in the farthest corner of the room, her messy hair covering her left eye. Her lips are always glued shut, and she rarely speaks. It has become a custom for everyone to call her 'Invisible Maria'. She sketches a picture of Koontz, bright-eyed and eagerly chewing on his eraser.
'Bite me.' He scribbles onto a ripped corner of a college-ruled notebook. The frayed edges from where he tore it out are lying across his desk haphazardly. He folds the corners neatly, and then positions it properly upright between his fingers. With one swift tap, he's sent it airborne, and across the room.
Koontz receives the note, and fumbles it between his fingers. His upper teeth grind into his bottom lip as he carefully lays it flat on his desk. Giving a lip-bitten glance toward Jason, he takes his lead pencil and hunches over his desk, as he does not want to be outdone. 'You'd like that, wouldn't you?' Koontz passes the note to Maria, and nudges his head in Jason's direction. Maria numbly holds the note and leans over towards Jason to pass the note. Their biology teacher notices the girl who does not speak edging out of her desk.
"Maria! No note passing in class!" Mr. Cheque strides over elegantly to her desk and gives her a disgusted look. She promptly picks up the note. Upon inspection of desk, he notices that she has been doodling over her notebook instead of taking notes.
"Why haven't you been copying what's on the board? This isn't art class!" Mr. Cheque looks at her drawings with an idle eye. The girl simply hasn't been taking notes like she should have. His eye rests on the picture of another student from his period. Disgusting. "S-sorry," she mumbles, but before she can gain the confidence to finish her sentence, he neatly puts her sketches in one pile, giving her a gentle look. He proceeds to rip them cleanly in half. Her voice hitches on a sob, and Mr. Cheque walks away, discarding her art in the nearest trashcan.
As soon as Mr. Cheque turns around, Koontz swipes the note off her desk and tosses it to Jason. He pauses to look at Maria's solitary sketch in the margin of her notebook.
"That's pretty good, you know." He then goes back to his seat, and for the rest of the period, she buries her head in her notebook. Maria lifts her head momentarily to see Jason blowing a kiss to Koontz. She places a shaking hand to her forehead and quietly cries the rest of the period. She cries, but she knows exactly why. Because no one loves the ugly.