For as long as RC could remember, the night had been her ally. Not that she had no other friends or anything. Because she certainly had quite a few of those.

It just seemed like the night knew her better than them all. It knew her inside out. It knew her secrets.

It knew how she changed and got into her bed by ten, how she pretended to close her eyes and be asleep when her mom went round checking on her, how she would then proceed to toss, left and right, right and left, until she could take it no longer.

By now, her parents would be dead asleep. So would her sisters. But more importantly her parents. She wouldn't want them knowing that she was still wide awake.

She would sit up, her back against the headstand, braving it through cats fighting over the garbage can in the dead of the night, listening to the wind whistle in through the loose windows of her room.

Every night, her routine was quite set. Very little changed. Sometimes, on more exciting nights, RC would venture out of the comfort of her bedroom into the vast dark unknowns of their living room, heading for the bathroom.

That was about it.

She did not consider herself a night time wandered. Not in the least. She was more a night time thinker, who had no trouble thinking up the most absurd thoughts as though it were second nature. And it seemed that it certainly had become her second nature.

School sucked, to say the least. Every day, RC would get involved in roughly ten fights, neither of which were started by her, and now, she had gotten into the tendancy to breaking random pieces of stationary when half her classmates victimised her, and made her the villain whenever the chance arose. Which, ordinarily, seemed to be every ten minutes.

She hated them.

Every single one of them. She hated the very idea of them. Every night, she would pray for a solution. Not like, a devout prayer to God, or whatever. More often, it was a silent plea to the darkness.

Please darkness of the night, please hide me till I graduate, please make them go away.

She found it ironical how she could find peace and contentment in the pitch darkness of the night, while suffering and bearing burdens beyond her during the brightness of daytime. She did not hate daytime. Not in the least. She hated the things and people it brought with it. It was never different.

RC was suffering.

In every way that it is possible for a fifteen year old bespectacled girl, who was fighting weight issues, and several other insecurities, to suffer.

Her heart, she felt, had been broken and pulverised a long time ago. She held herself guardedly. All the time. She wondered if anyone noticed. If her parents noticed. More than that, she wondered if anyone cared.

It ate her up that she was not good enough to fit in, or even different enough to stand out. She had never understood her place, no matter how hard she tried.

She and Allie had been best friends in fifth grade, back when the idea of a best friend had meant something to RC. Back when her heart was still intact, though scarred, as would be normal for a bullied ten year old who was only trying to be nice.

Allie had been a less than adequate friend, any fool could notice that, who seemed to want more from the relationship than she was ready to give. But RC had accepted her anyway. She still had a friend. She felt comforted by just that.

It, predictably, did not last long. RC soon beat Allie in the end term exam, officially making her Allie's number one arch enemy. Which RC knew, was going to be tougher than it already was.

For a few months, RC was hot gossip. She had no friends, and she had no life.

RC sucked.

Mallory was the next predator. She was taller than RC, slimmer than RC, more important, it seemed, than RC. She was from a world that RC had only ever dreamed of being a part of. The world of Its. Where the important ones resided. It was a wrong match right from the start. Mallory was a bitch, to put it politely. She would sit behind RC in class and gossip about her to her other Its.

RC could deal with that, no problem.

The real blow that actually not only killed RC's heart, but also pulverised it, was when Mallory joined forces will Allie to convince the entire grade that RC had cheated on her final exam.

As her rotten luck would have it, RC was stuck in the same class as these withering fools in high school. On day one, when they had purposely tripped her and made sure to ridicule her in front of their new band of bff's, RC wondered how much more she could manage.

Lately, she had come up with a different way to deal with all the emotional trauma. It was not the best of ways, but it seemed to help distract her from everything else. She had gotten into the habit of purposely stabbing herself with the compass point on the back of her hand until it would bleed.

She would only stare and stare as the pain of it would envelope her grief, her outcasted unfitting grief. In the grand scheme of things, she was prey.

Tonight, though, something was different. After rolling around, as she usually did, for a few hours, RC sat up, pulling the blanket off her and letting it fall to the floor. She tugged the old t shirt down to her hips and got out of bed.

Her heart was fluttering unnaturally. She felt some sort of urgency. An urgency she could not understand or comprehend. She walked out into her bedroom balcony and watched the stars for a while, trying to distract herself.

Unfortunately, the mosquitoes won at distracting her first, leaving her with no choice but to retreat back into her bedroom where the annoying swats could not get to her.

It felt strangely symbolic, the mosquitos, and her. She spent the night pacing, not stopping at all till her mother's alarm clock rang in the morning.

***

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