SMRLGN Chapter 9

Chapter Nine: Normal part 1
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Yume Gakuen Middle School, Thursday afternoon
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Kathryn's POV
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I looked around at the crowd of students waiting for the busses to arrive. I was searching, searching for Kelly and Morgan. I hadn't seen either of them much that day, except for lunch. In fact...I hadn't seen them much at all lately. Sometimes it even seemed as if they were avoiding me. After ten or so minutes of fruitlessly looking for my friends, I decided to just go home. I boarded my bus without a second thought, sitting down and turning on my iPod to drown out my own thoughts.

The next day, I waited patiently for the busses to arrive, not even bothering to look around to see if Kelly or Morgan were anywhere in sight. After a while of waiting, I was knocked to the ground suddenly.
"KITTY!!!" Kelly yelled. "Kitty, omiwindows I missed you so much! I haven't seen you around! I'm sorry Morgan and I weren't at lunch today, we both got lunch detentions."
"Oh, no worries!" I laughed, forgetting for a lovely second my sadness, and focusing on Kelly, being...Kelly. "How'd you both get detentions?" I asked.
"Passing notes in class." Morgan replied, smirking and reaching down to help me and my little cling-on up.
"No way, really?" I laughed. "Never would've thought you two'd pass notes."

We walked to Kelly's place, laughing and conversing like normal. Normal. I guessed they hadn't been avoiding me, but just had some project to do or simply didn't talk to each other, either. We hung out for the rest of the day, just like normal. There it was again, that word--normal. Normal for me was being with Morgan and Kelly. The last few days hadn't been normal at all, what with the three of us not being together and all, but now...now it was normal.

I invited them both to come to the mall with me on Saturday, the next day, and they both accepted. At noon the next day, an hour before we were supposed to meet, Morgan called me, saying she had unexpectedly thrown up that morning, so her mother wouldn't let her come. That was disappointing, and the lonely part of my brain that was tuned to pick up un-normalness buzzed, but I ignored it. That still left Kelly, right?

At the mall itself, Kelly and I had the usually convivial time we always did at the mall, going to Hot Topic, Claire's, Sephora, and eating sugary goodness until my mom, our chaperone,  told us to get something healthier, so we switched to soft pretzels instead. We laughed, and danced, and never once did my normal-tune buzz, though it was a little awkward when we would find something that Morgan would usually comment on, but Kelly would fill that silence with some spaz-tastic remark or action, like tripping over absolutely nothing, or running into a perfume display(which she did twice in Macy's).

Normal. It was all so...normal.

Too bad it didn't stay that way for long.