Slowly But Surely

Chapter 5

Chapter Five

It took 20 minutes.

20 minutes, for the people who Marinette thought were her lifelong friends to turn on her AND believe a liar over her.

As she entered the classroom, she immediately noticed the change of environment. It became tense, as if she had been the subject of a matter being discussed earlier.

"Hi, everyon--"

"Marinette, stop acting innocent! We know what you did!" The blogger said.

''What?''

"Marinette, I'm disgusted. I thought you were better than this."

"Better than what?! I have no clue on what I did wrong!''

"Since you want to keep denying it, I guess we'll just have to tellyou." Marinette heard Lila let out a phony whimper.

"Y-you found me in the hallways after school, during the akuma attack and said that I was either with you, or against you. You threatened to take away all of my friends," Lila sobbed.

Through her fake sobs, Marinette saw the malicious expression on the Italian girl's face. The irony of the words she had just spoken. "What? That's not true. During the akuma attack, I was hiding! Not threatening Lila!"

"She's a bully and a liar. Who wants to be friends with that? Definitely not me."

As Alya stormed back down to her desk, Nino followed her in hot pursuit. She paused and turned around.

"Don't be jealous of Lila, just because Adrien wants her more than he wants you."

"For the last time Alya, this isn't about Adrien!"

What is she doing, Adrien thought. She is being incredibly selfish right now. If she had just stood down and taken it, then Lila would have just gotten bored and left her alone. As far as Adrien was concerned, anything that happened to Marinette right now was her own fault.

The whole class looked at Marinette in shock. They had never seen her get snapped at before, at least not like this.

Everyone was silent as they waited for a response from either side.

Marinette stood frozen in the aisle trembling with rage. Adrien attempted to put a hand on Marinette to calm her, but before it could make contact with her, she slapped it away. That spineless moron was not going to touch her, or give her more useless advice.

All Marinette saw was red. "Marinette calm down," Tikki whispered, "You don't want to attract an akuma."

Marinette took a deep breath and tuned back into the lesson as class started, but not before sending a chilling glare at Lila and the rest of her posse.

The gears in her mind began whirring. The rest of the lesson, Marinette was silent. She held back the tears that were threatening to spill from her eyes, knowing she would just be ridiculed even more for them.

The bell rang, and for once, she was the first one out of the classroom. She ran back to her house, and put on a fake smile for her mom and dad.

"How was school?" Her mom inquired.

"It was great!" said Marinette, with fake enthusiasm.

She rushed to her room, leaving a very confused Sabine and Tom down stairs. She started dialing Alya's number, only to realize that she and Alya were no longer on speaking terms.

Rose? Nope.

Juleka? Nope. Even if she didn't believe Lila she would most likely just go along with Rose.

Alya? Definitely not.

She started to delete her contact, but something stopped her. She wasn't sure what, but she remembered their friendship. They could fix things. Right?

Adrien? Hell no. His "advice" that he had given to her sounded an awful lot like victim blaming.

She then spent 5 minutes tearing down her Adrien posters, even the limited edition ones. She changed her background to a picture of her modeling one of her outfits, then switched the computer off.

She stared at the rest of the contacts. Other than cousins, aunts, uncles, and her parents, only two friend contacts were left, Luka and Kagami.

She tentatively dialed Luka's number. He picked up.

"Hello?"

Notes:

I delivered!! YAY!! I'm sorry for not updating as much yesterday, but I was struggling from writer's block (and the mound of hw my teachers gave me, as midterms are coming up). TYSM for reading. 114 READS!! I will try to update twice more today, as I'm currently in school rn. Author signing off!!