The Compass and the Quill [Under Revision]

4. Treason of the Trustworthy

The professor was rudely cut off as I raised my fist and slammed it onto the desk. With a rare surge of strength, I stood up forcefully, making my chair scrape backwards and hit the desk of the girl behind me. She let out a little scream. The whole classroom turned to stare at me as I clenched my fists and glared venomously at the two girls to my left.

"Miss Sanders, care to explain why - "

"These two were whispering nonsense about me!" I shouted, raising my voice in hopes of keeping the tears away.

"What?!" One of the girls who had been talking exclaimed. "That's a  lie!"

The teacher scowled. "Miss Sanders, sit down."

"I'm not lying! They said that I was going to stab someone with my pencil! Why would I want to attack anyone with a pencil?"

"Lower your voice, Miss Sanders, or you will face disciplinary action."

My anger intensified. The coil in my gut began to unwind again and I felt my control slipping. In a futile effort to reign in my temper, I squeezed the pencil in my hand as hard as I could. My sharp ears caught the faint screech of the wood complaining under the strain. "They're lying," I growled in a lower voice, pointing accusingly at the two girls. "They wanted to call 911. They're mean."

My cheeks burned with humiliation in addition to the anger. I was dealing with this in the most immature way possible. Children in kindergarten whined to their teachers. High school students sucked it up and dealt with it themselves.

I was such a loser.

"We can talk about this after class, Miss Sanders. There was no need to disrupt the lesson. This kind of behavior is unacceptable."

Wasn't anyone listening to me? Did these people get paid to treat me this unjustly? Whatever - enough was enough. If I let these people get away with this nonsense now, they'd do even worse things to me later. I clenched my jaw, lips curling inward in a silent, tight-lipped snarl. Without moving my head, I snapped my eyes to the teacher's. He went rigid, eyes widening as they locked with mine, mouth falling open in a silent scream, fingers loosening and letting the marker in his hand drop. Trapped, like a bird in the eye of a snake. "I am not lying," I growled. "And I don't kill."

The scorn in the room had long since turned to fear. Belligerent satisfaction - sweet poison - alleviated some of the pain in my heart. They should have listened to me the very first time. Now they had to suffer the consequences.

My body burned. I felt like my clothes would actually catch fire soon. The teacher's lips were moving, but I couldn't hear him over the thundering of my heart. The muscles in my arms screamed in pain, unable to take the strain of the unprecedented strength with which I was squeezing the pencil. Prudence told me it wouldn't bode well to just stand there and glare without responding to the teacher, so I tried to read his lips.

Leave right now, he was saying.

Wasn't he aware of what was about to happen to him? "I said they were talking crap," I growled, my voice deeper and much less human than before. "What about them? Don't they have to leave?"

I'll decide that, said the teacher.

"Wrong answer."

Everything before my eyes went blindingly white. All auditory input vanished, as if someone had ruptured my eardrums. Surprised and rather scared, I blinked rapidly - and as if someone had flipped a switch, the white vanished. For a fraction of a second, I saw my classmates rubbing their eyes and heard their shocked, fearful whispers. So I wasn't the only -

BOOM.

This time, it wasn't me. It was thunder - louder than I had ever heard before, as if a bomb had gone off right next to my ear. Screams rose into the air as lightning flashed again, followed by even louder, angrier thunder. The windows rattled and their glass panes shattered, showering people with glass; all the while, I stood stock-still, petrified by the sound so reminiscent of another stormy, but much more horrifying night. The lights flickered eerily, and without warning, burst one by one. Glass shards got into my hair and my clothes, yet I stayed still. Because I could see what I already knew would be in the sky - dark blue clouds with an eldritch glow.