“Plethora.... “ Alice bent heavily over the tattered paperback volume on her lap. It was recess again, but as always she barely noticed. Her only concession to the daily one-thousand-eight-hundred seconds she expended on the courtyard was that she now slouched cross-legged on icy concrete with her back to the pockmarked brick wall. The rest of the day she was slouched in scared wooden desk in a somber classroom with paper windowshades and three year old posters on the walls. Alice didn't like the classroom either, but at least there the world was smaller, and she could take care of her friends in the desk.
“What are you reading, Alice in wonderland?”
Alice shuddered. One of the mean little boys was near her again, and now it was leaning over her with it's sticky sweet breath and gooey fingers and wet, wet...
“I said, Alice Balice, what are you reading??”
She raised her head slowly to glare at the awful imposing creature, squinting to protect her eyes. Dirty dark hair in strands like seaweed, grubby skin with a greenish tint, a mouth rimmed with faded crimson crust. Coat bleached from rolling in the snow, dangling off him and open because the zipper was broken. And the sneakers...
With a surge of detached dismay Alice suddenly found herself ensnared by the rapturous miasma of those sneakers. Brown and sweat stained, they were so thin that Alice could see the boy's toes between the tattered fibers. She watched in wonder as the lacy membrane stretched and strained with every shift in weight. Almost, almost, she could see each thread grimace and sigh with the limbo, hear the creak as they bent atop of their eternal neighbors. She could cry at their torment, she could give each a name, group them into families long forgotten...
“C'mon, Alice, what are you reading? Lemme see, c'mon!”
Alice barely noticed as her book was lifted from between her slack, waxy fingers. Would they recognize each other? What would she...
“The dictionary?”
The reverie died.
“Alice in wonderland, you're reading the dictionary?”
He throat was suddenly clay. Her book... it had her book? How dare it, that horrendous, dirty... She tried to regain her feet but stumbled in her fury...
A shrill gong fell like fire on her ears, and she crouched down, curling within herself. Dimly, she heard a thump next to her, and the swollen roar of people choking doorways. Alice blinked, and gathered her fallen comrade to her chest. The one-thousand-eight-hundred seconds were gone.
Unsteady on uneven feet, she wove her solitary path back to the dark, refrigerated classroom. She hoped the glue had kept an eye on the new pencils, like she had asked it.
I'm not really sure where that came from...
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