Code Lyoko: The New Girl (BK 1)

Chapter 52

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Having spent yet another night plagued with nightmares of the Hermitage and waking up in the middle of the forest with a muddied and torn apart body, Saphire sat curled up in the fetal position on the floor of a bath stall in the girls' restroom early the next morning. She was straining to keep her eyes open when she heard her name echoing through the room, not once, not twice, but thrice. Three different voices — no, four, it seemed, chatting on about Saphire. Wiping away at her eyes and pressing an ear to the door, Saphire quieted her breathing to listen in on the conversation. 

"I see them hanging out sometimes. But...I don't know if they're seeing each other or not." The voice sounded forlorn, tinged with sadness. "I just wish..."

"You've got to get over him. He used you. He used all of us. Odd Della Robbia does not care about our feelings." A sharper voice sliced through the air.

"But why is he spending so much time with her?" A snooty voice inquired. "What makes her so special?"

"You mean other than the fact that she broke Magali's face right in front of him?" The fourth girl asked, her voice full of mirth.

Saphire stared at a spare twig bumping its thick stump against the drain. She leaned over and pinched it between her fingers, laying it gently on its back so it was floating back and forth now.

"Should we ask her?" The first girl asked, voice whiny and desperate.

"You don't think he'd find out?" Snooty asked. "Do you want him to know you're still pining after him?"

"Well..."

"The answer is no." Snooty snapped back. "And besides...what makes you think she'll listen to us? She'll probably laugh, take pleasure in the fact that she's been able to keep Odd Della Robbia at a distance for so long, while the rest of us had to find out after he broke our hearts just how big of a jerk he is."

"Right. She must think she's real special for being the only new girl to not have gone out with him yet. Let Della Robbia break her heart. Once he dates her and drops her, she'll see...she's nothing special."

Saphire almost laughed at the absurdity of the girls' conversation. She was special because she and Odd were friends and he had yet to "date her and drop her"? It was silly to think those Human girls cared so much about what Saphire thought about them. Saphire was no stranger to Odd's ways and dating habits, nor did she care very much, but...if her being "special" meant she stood out amongst the other new girls, then that was a problem. A problem only she would be able to rectify.

Saphire waited until the girls had exited the room to turn off the water and dry her body off. She had been too tired to scrub her hair and was now finding too many torn leaves behind her ears. Though she hadn't made it back to the Hermitage the night before and had gasped awake in the comfort of her dorm instead, Saphire's mind had been filled with dark images of the house, the piano, the broken windows, the scattered documents littering the floors.

The documents. They were so hard not to look at. The ache in her chest always festered when she caught sight of them. When it was time for Franz Hopper to escape with Aelita, what did he stop to grab? Did he go for his journals, his files, his sketches? From the looks of it, it did not seem so. It seemed he had grabbed the most important thing, that being Aelita, and fled for safety in a world he had only deemed safe because of Saphire.

Saphire's existence revolved solely around Lyoko. It was a hunch Saphire always had in the back of her heart, but the theory became solidified upon discovering a tattered and torn, nearly burnt to a crisp journal that Saphire had located in the one thing she was never allowed to touch but could hardly stay away from: the piano.