Tiffany's Story- Day 3

Wednesday arrives.  Before dawn, Tiffany leaves the house to go for a run. She runs through the darker areas of her town, where there are no dogs to warn others of her passing. She makes her way to school, arriving an hour early drenched in sweat. She goes to use the locker room’s showers, picking up the spare set of clothes she keeps in her locker for these kind of days. The school’s cheerleaders come in the use the showers early- 45 minutes before school, instead of half an hour. The captain hates Tiffany, and there are no coaches or friendly souls to protect her, only the toadies of Sabrina.

In art class, she organizes the paint bottles everyone tosses around before getting to work on her own project, and the teachers offers thanks as always. She puts the earphones to her music in her ears and gets to work, droning out the chatter of her classmates. This painting is almost done- it shows a blizzard on a mountain peak, a hiker struggling to reach a shelter far off in the distance. She finishes painting the figure in, then sets it aside to dry before starting work on a pencil drawing. There would be no new assignment until next week, so she starts drawing a face; a dancer with porcelain features, thin enough her cheeks are hollow but still far more beautiful than most. The teacher taps her shoulder to get her attention when the bell rings and says “Good work! If you want to turn that into a finished portrait I’ll grade it as an extra assignment. Remember, portraits aren’t just about drawing a face, they’re about showing the person's personality.” She tunes out the world again after he walks away, and spends her second period of art class drawing a frame for the piece. She starts at the sides; they are the dancer’s feet. One foot has a bandage wrapped around it, the other is left bare; both are bloody and blistered and mangled. Along the bottom there is a series of mirrors with different poses of the dancer reflected within them, and a single black rose forms the upper boundary, the thorns piercing the skin and adhering the rose to her calves, almost forming a chain. All the outlining is accomplished when the bell rings; over the next two days she will shade in the details.

Tiffany doesn’t actually have much homework to work on during study hall, so she works ahead. She does not know which questions the teachers will deem unimportant and not assign, so she simply completes them all, careful to ensure she will only receive a B score regardless of which questions the teachers disregard. After school, Tiffany cannot bear to hear the dogs along the shortest route to her house, so she takes the long way around.