Original Stories Fan Fiction ❯ Friendship Runs Thicker than Blood ❯ Break from the Norm ( Chapter 1 )

 

CHAPTER ONE: BREAK FROM THE NORM

Four Weeks Later

“Have you seen Seda?” Nasira asked. It was Monday morning.

“No, I don't think she's here yet,” replied her friend, Anna. They both reflected on how strange it was as they sat in the commons; Seda was usually at school by then.

The bell rang a moment later, sending the students to their various homerooms. Alice, a friend of both Nasira's and Seda's, had overheard Sira's question, and was surprised when Seda was in homeroom already, absorbed in a book. Seda, a fifteen-year-old sophomore in high school, was around five feet and seven inches in height, with midnight black hair tied back in a braid that reached almost to her waist and velvety brown eyes. Normally, these windows to her soul were filled with unshakable humor and rock-solid loyalty to those close to her; today, however, they had a tinge of ice around the edges.

“Where were you?” Alice asked. “Sira's been looking for you all morning.” Seda simply shrugged off the worry in her friend's voice.

“I came up here to read,” she responded.

“Why?” Alice inquired. Something flashed in Seda's eyes.

“I felt like it,” she said. She returned to her book.

After a few minutes, the bell rang, and the two girls crossed the hall to get to their first class, history. Sira joined them in waiting outside the door. The blonde's deep green eyes were filled with curiosity veiling smoldering anger at her friend's strange absence.

“Where were you?” she demanded, poking Seda, who once again shrugged. The classroom cleared, and they filed inside, preempting any further discussion.

Sira and Alice watched Seda during the class. She was taking notes like the rest of them, but she appeared distracted. Her brow was furrowed as she contemplated the projector screen. She would periodically shake her head as if to get rid of a fly. Leo, their rather tall blue-eyed friend who was sitting next to Alice, noticed as well.

“What's wrong with Seda?” the brown-haired boy whispered to her. Alice shrugged.

“That's what I'm trying to figure out,” she replied.

Leo kept an eye on Seda through their next class, which was French. He was sitting behind her, so he couldn't see her face, but she was still tossing her head every few minutes. Once she made a squeaky noise that could have been a sneeze, a repressed laugh, a cough, or a sob; Leo couldn't tell which. She didn't turn around to talk to him as usual. In fact, she barely spoke at all, and she didn't raise her hand once. She only spoke when the teacher called on her to answer a question.

Their teacher gave them the last ten minutes of class to start their homework. Seda pulled out her workbook and started automatically filling in the blanks. Leo tapped her on the shoulder.

“Do your homework, Leo,” she told him without looking up.

“I will,” he said dismissively. “What's up with you? You're acting very strange today.”

“I always act strange,” she responded. “I'm a strange person.”

“This is different,” he insisted. “You're not even looking at me.” She turned around and glared at him.

“I'm trying to do my homework. Stop talking,” she ordered, and turned back to bend over her book again.

“Fine, be that way,” he muttered. She did not respond, and when the bell rang she packed up and left without waiting for him.

The students massed in the commons for the morning announcements. During the assembly, Seda appeared to her friends as being tuned out; she looked very troubled. Nasira noticed for the first time that she looked exhausted. Dark purple circles under her eyes gave her a raccoon-like appearance, and she was very pale.

“You okay?” Sira asked her. Her head jerked suddenly, as if she was coming out from being deep in thought.

“Yeah,” she muttered. Sira didn't press, though she knew that Seda was lying. She looked down to where Seda's hands were clenched in her lap. Sira's forest green eyes narrowed; her friend's hands were shaking. She opened her mouth to remark on this, but something told her that Seda wouldn't respond. She shut it again, brows furrowed.

After the announcements, once Seda was out of earshot, Sira tapped Dave, a friend of Seda's, on the shoulder.

“Seda's been acting strange all day. Will you watch her during the next class?” she requested.

“Okay,” Dave agreed. He continued on his way to class. When he got to the classroom, Seda was already there. She was staring off into space. She didn't react when he sat down in a desk near her.

“Have a good weekend?” he asked. She snapped to with a shake of her head.

“Yeah. You?” she responded.

“Yeah. Are you okay? You seem a little out of it.”

“Yeah, I didn't get much sleep last night.” The teacher entered, cutting off their conversation before Dave could express his skepticism, and started a movie. Dave alternately looked at it and at Seda. It was hard to tell in the dark room, but it looked like she wasn't really watching.

She was out of the classroom the moment class was dismissed. Dave tried to talk to her, as her extremely odd behavior had worried him, but when he exited the classroom, she was nowhere to be seen.

Meanwhile, Sira had a class with Anna and Meg, two of her and Seda's other friends. She asked them to keep an eye on Seda during the next class. They both agreed; they had noticed Seda's strange behavior during announcements and were curious at their friend's dazed look. Anna was also eager to find out where Seda had been before school.

Before bio class started, Meg tried to draw Seda into a conversation about the volleyball coach quitting, but Seda wouldn't say more that a few words at a time. Once class had started, her two friends observed that she wasn't really paying attention; instead, she took notes mechanically. They noticed that she kept shaking her head slightly.

They weren't the only ones. “Is there a fly in here, Seda?” asked the teacher about halfway through class.

“No, Ms. Tanner,” Seda replied. “Sorry.” She offered no explanation for her behavior. Ms. Tanner looked at her oddly but didn't press. Anna rather wished she had.

When the bell rang for lunch, Seda was one of the first ones to slide out the door, not waiting for her friends as she usually did. Meg and Anna hoped to catch up to her, but they didn't see her in the hallway, though they had been behind her by only a few seconds. However, another friend of theirs, Jason, stood across the hall, at his locker. Anna went over to him.

“Did Seda come this way?” she asked.

“No, she didn't,” he replied. “I haven't seen her at all today, actually. Why do you ask?”

“She's been acting really weird,” Anna said, and explained Seda's behavior as they walked up to the lunchroom.

Seda wasn't anywhere to be found at lunch. Sira, Anna, Jason, and Leo all looked for her after a while. Anna and Sira even went to ask her mother, who was the dean of students. Neither Seda nor her mother was there, but Seda's backpack and binder were. The two girls shrugged and went back to their friends' table.

Seda was in her next class, drama, still strangely quiet. She did not laugh and joke with Anna and Jason as she usually did, though she sat between them as usual. She only spoke to say her line in their current play. Her voice was just as animated as she read out of the Shakespearean playbook, but Anna and Jason could still tell that something was wrong. Once her scene was over, she lost all her stage energy and went back to looking preoccupied and depressed. When the bell rang, Anna tried to question Seda about her strange behavior, but Seda had slipped away.

Seda's free period was next, and Sira had it with her. Sira waited in the library at their usual table for the entire period, but Seda never showed up. Leo did come in for the last few minutes, freed from his study hall early.

“Where's Seda?” he asked as he sat down, navy blue eyes glancing around the room as if his friend would pop up from behind a bookshelf.

“I don't know. Is it just me, or is she acting really strange today?” Sira wanted to know.

“It's not just you. She didn't talk at all in French class, unless Mr. Rais asked her a question,” Leo confided.

“She wasn't at lunch, and Alice said she was sitting in homeroom when she got there, but Seda wasn't sitting with us before school. She was tuned out during announcements, and her hands were shaking,” Sira mused aloud.

“We couldn't find her at lunch, either,” Leo reminded her.

“That's right,” said Sira. “Something strange is definitely going on.” The two friends talked in whispers for the next few minutes before the bell rang for the next class. Sira went up to geometry, a class she shared with Seda. Seda was already sitting in her customary desk.

“Where do you keep disappearing to?” Sira demanded. “You weren't at lunch or free or at the commons before school.”

“Is there a rule that I have to hang with you guys every spare moment?” Seda asked rudely.

“No, but you usually do,” Sira reminded her, not letting on that her friend's attitude had taken her aback.

“Maybe I don't feel like it anymore.”

“Maybe if you're mean enough, we won't miss you,” Sira retorted, stung; then she saw the tear in Seda's eye, remembered how tense and unhappy Seda had seemed earlier, and felt bad. “Sorry,” she said.

“It's okay,” Seda told her, but she didn't turn around to talk to Sira for the rest of the class. Sira wished that Ms. Petack, who was both friends' favorite teacher, was there, but she was out at a conference for the week. Their sub didn't know Seda as well and so noticed nothing strange about her behavior.

Sira tried to talk to her friend after class, but Seda was gone. Sira looked for her, even going all the way downstairs to the locker room. Anna was there to get ready for P.E., but not Seda.

“This is getting ridiculous,” Anna said when Sira told her of Seda's absence during free period and odd behavior in geometry. “I'll talk to her at P.E. If she shows up, that is.”

“I'm starting to worry,” Sira confessed. “She's had problems before that made her act weird. Do you think she's started taking drugs, or something?”

“Seda would never do that!” Anna protested.

“She would never be mean to me, either, or Leo, but she was,” Sira said. “I can't help but think that something is seriously wrong.”

“There may be some explanation for all this that isn't cause for worry,” Anna said. “I'll try to talk to her. If I can't, well, we'll give her a few more days before doing anything rash.”

“All right,” Sira reluctantly agreed. Anna gathered up her stuff, and the two girls left the locker room. In the now deserted room, there was the sound of a sniff and a loud crash. The locker room door slammed open, but no one left.

“My friends are too smart for their own good, or mine,” a girl's voice muttered.

No one saw Seda until it was time for P.E. to start. Usually out with her friends long before the start of class, but today she didn't show up until the class was picking teams. They were still playing Frisbee, and so they met outside on the field. Seda seemed more normal than she had all day, laughing and joking with her friends, yet she was more aggressive than usual. She jumped to make catches or blocks that she had not attempted in previous games. Halfway through class, she took a very bad tumble, landing badly from a jump and falling on one of her arms with an audible thump. Her face contorted in pain, and a small noise escaped her before she clamped her mouth shut. Her four friends in that class (Anna, Leo, Jason, and Jerry) rushed over to her with exclamations of alarm. She was getting to her feet and dusting herself off by the time they got to her.

“Are you okay?” they all demanded in unison.

“Yeah, I just fell. I'm fine,” she told them sharply. To prove her point, she picked up the Frisbee that she had jumped into the air to swat down and threw it to one of her waiting teammates.

After P.E. was over, Seda actually walked down to the school with her friends. They talked about their plans for a large group of them and their friends to go ice skating in two weeks. Anna had meant to question Seda, as she had told Sira she intended to do, but somehow forgot. She, Jason, and Jerry got into their waiting cars on the way, so only Seda and Leo were left to go into the hallway.

“If you see Sira, can you give her this?” Seda requested, handing Leo a folded sheet of notebook paper.

“Sure,” he said automatically, taking the paper.

“I'm sorry,” she said suddenly, and just as abruptly turned, black hair flying, and hurried away. She was out of his line of sight before he could ask what she was sorry for or what the paper was. He followed her to ask, but she was gone. He looked in the window of her mom's office, but no one was there. The brunette shrugged; he was confused, but could see that there was nothing he could do about it, so headed to the library. Sira was sitting at her usual table, reading. Leo handed her Seda's note. She opened and read it.

“Something's going on here,” Sira remarked, showing him the note. Sorry for geometry, it read. “Why couldn't she just give it to me, or just come here and say it in person?”

“What does it mean?” Leo inquired. Sira explained the mini-argument from math class. He agreed to the strangeness of it.

“She was acting weird during P.E., too,” he said. “And—well—I'm not sure if this is part of it, but Seda was more aggressive than usual. She fell badly once, and for a moment she looked like she had been hurt, but by the time we all surrounded her she was getting up, perfectly fine.”

“I don't like it,” said Sira. “I'm afraid she's gotten herself into real trouble. Worse than what happened in the fall. I'm afraid she's doing drugs, or something.”

“Seda wouldn't,” Leo protested. “She might have problems, but she wouldn't do drugs.”

“She's doing a lot of things she would never do,” Sira pointed out.

“We'll ask her what's going on tomorrow,” he declared.

But the next day, Seda was just as elusive. In fact, her behavior was the same on Wednesday, and again on Thursday. Her friends tried everything to get through to her: emails both at school and at home, IMs, phone calls to her house and cell phone. She didn't reply to electronic messages, she never picked up her cell phone, and her parents always said she couldn't come to the phone when they tried her house. Seda's friends were becoming worried for her. None of them could think of anything they could do to help her, because she was being so reclusive. They all watched her in class and waited for Seda's mood to change.