Lena Hale, the miserable freshman girl, walked down the street with a black expression on her face. Her lip was curled, her face was set, her eyebrows were pointed down, her brown eyes were glinting furiously in the mid-afternoon sunlight. It had been another day of torment, for not one of the uncongenial souls at her high school liked her at all. In the words of some famous guy, she reflected, she was not at all unlike Mt. Everest to her classmates; she was cold and there.

“You don’t make things easier for yourself by being so detached,” her counselor had said with an infuriating sense of calm behind her words. “If you’d just try to fit in a little more, then you would make more friends,” she stopped when she saw Lena roll her eyes. “Let me finish, Lena. If you tried to be more normal in the eyes of your friends, you wouldn’t have these problems.”

“That shows me how much you know, Miss Degree in Pyschology,” Lena said darkly, putting every ounce of contempt she had into those sarcastic words. Her counselor tried to snap a retort back at her, but Lena was on a roll now. Nothing was going to stop her from getting her two (or maybe three) cents in. “Now, let me finish. You’re here for me to talk to, not for you to lecture to, right?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “If I were to stop acting “abnormally,” like you say I do, then they’d just figure I was so desperate for friends that they’d either laugh at me, ask what the hell was I thinking, or let me be their ‘friend’ so they can poke fun at me.”

The counselor was trying to keep her air of serenity, but wasn’t doing a good job. Lena knew that it wouldn’t take much more for her to lose it entirely. So she smiled a sickly sweet smile and kept going.

I may not be the social whiz I’m sure you are,” Lena declared mockingly, “but I know enough of teenagers and what bastards and bitches they are so that I don’t get stepped on.” Lena took the opportunity to lean in towards the counselor and said in an soft yet icy tone, “I bet you never were a teenager. You probably wandered around friendless from age twelve to eighteen. You probably just sat alone at your lunch table and fantasized endlessly between bites of tuna salad sandwich about getting the cute guy a few tables done while not noticing that he’s making out with his extremely hot girlfriend.”

The counselor said, “I did not sit alone while I was in high school.”

“Denial, hmm?” Lena chuckled. “And I thought that shrinks like you were supposed to be smart. You can’t even cover up your pride long enough to try and prove me wrong about my ‘misguided, angry, unworldly way of thinking.’”

Lena remembered that meeting had ended up with her getting a new counselor and a very long and loud car ride home…

But she knew, continuing to tread down the street in a downtrodden manner, that she was right. Making ‘friends’ would only get her stabbed in the back painfully and multiple times. And then, she turned around. She had a terrible feeling that someone was watching her.

Lena was almost right. Paul Lesison was walking down the street, too. The sophomore with the brilliant blue eyes had his headphones on and was singing something that Lena could hear only snatches of.

“…don’t take it so bad. You know the summer’s coming soon…from the moon…take a deep breath girl..I wrote a…to play for you…”

He turned around and looked at Lena and waved once, looking only slightly embarrassed that he had been heard, and he continued to sing in his tenor voice, “I wrote a valley winter song to play for you.”

Paul got to his house and waved to Lena before walking through the threshold into his redbrick house.

Lena waved timidly back, and then continued to walk down the hill that led to her own little house. When she got to her room, filled to the brim with posters of her favorite bands, she went to her bed and cried a mix of pent up frustration and happiness.

Oh my God, she thought. Somebody noticed my existence.