It was recess for Kindergarten at Cute Cuddly Care. The young children were running around and squealing for no reason while the teachers made a little group and gossiped about their worst behaved students. A green wire fence acted as a barrier from the outside world, consolidating the children's narrowed perception of reality. They all lived in realms of never-ending buckets of candy, butterfly chases, and the dreaded cooties. The girls skipped rope during recess while the boys played soccer. All the girls sang when it was their turn to jump, a short and sweet song:

I like coffee; I like tea.

I'd like someone to jump with me!

One, two, three, switch places!

Four, five, six, switch places!

Seven, eight, nine....

The jumper chose a friend to jump with and swapped jumping places whenever they said, "Switch places!" Oh, how much fun the girls had! Well, most of them. There was one girl who always sat under the shade of the huge maple in the far-left corner of the playground. No one played with her. In fact, most girls made fun of her. They started their own gossip about her (though they were too young to identify it as anything but tittle-tattle) and how stupid they thought she was because she would never do anything but read or write. Her name was Kendall but, as no one else had ever bothered to ask, she preferred Kenny.

"Come on, class!" Miss Liliana called as she, the Kindergarten-2 teacher, rang the bell. Kendall was in Kindergarten-1 as well as some of the girls who skipped rope and most of the boys who played soccer. She got up and brushed off the dirt on her jeans that one of the boys had purposefully kicked her way before. Then, pulling at both of her brown pigtails to tighten the hair ties holding them together, she walked off to the K1 line.

"Kick mud on her next time. My mommy says it's harder to get off of clothes," a boy whispered.

"Why would she come to school looking like that?" another girl asked. "Who wears pigtails anymore? We're Kindergarteners, not babies!"

"She's not very smart," someone else snickered. "She reads all day, but she still doesn't know enough words to speak!"

"She sat and wrote. Again. She's boring," another person commented.

Maybe they don't know, Kenny thought to herself as she walked past. Maybe they don't know what they're doing. Maybe they don't understand how derogatory their remarks are. As the whispers continued, Kenny's grip around her notebook and No. 2 pencil tightened. She told herself she didn't care, but their words always got to her. She was only five after all. Her lips pressed into a tight line as she stepped to the back of the line. The class moved inside.

Cute Cuddly Care was what all the adults tended to call a public daycare—which, in all honesty, was simply a snarky way for parents to tell their richer counterparts that there was no need to pay a private school for their children to receive a pre-primary education. By nature of its classic brick walls, wooden doors, and old desks, however, many people believed CCC was a public elementary. The classrooms did have their pictures, vocabulary words, and art projects to show that the institution was for younger children. The K1 classroom held a nice blue rug in the back of the room with books strewn over it, too. That was the reading corner, and there were three short bookshelves full of skinny books to go along with it.

The class practically stomped through the hallway, rubber shoes squeaking, with their fingers to their lips as a reminder not to talk. Kenny put her finger to her lips with the rest of the class which only roused snickers from her other classmates.

"Look at that! The mute is putting her finger to her lips!"

"What is she doing? She doesn't even talk!"

The mute. The word cut through her stoical facade like a hot knife. Kenny's hand fell back down to her side as she trudged along behind her classmates. Her lower lips trembled, and her eyes stung with tears of frustration. No! She couldn't cry!

2, 483, 687, 835 + 8, 4735, 295 = ? Kenny challenged. She timed herself as the numbers danced in her head. Five point three seconds and she had it: 2, 568, 423, 130. Too easy.

First one hundred numbers of pi? The stinging in her eyes began to fade. 3.1415926535897....

Kenny tuned out everything around her as she recited the irrational number. Not out loud, though. It was true. Kenny was...somewhat mute, for lack of a better term. She'd rued the day the Pre-K teacher used that word to describe Kenny. Now the children found it acceptable to call her by "the mute" or whatever sick names had become popular for her instead of her own name. (One girl who'd been held back the previous year had simply resorted to introducing Kenny as Dumbo to all of her friends; the teacher assumed she thought of Kenny as an elephant from some obsolete Disney movie rather than an idiot and spoke nothing of it. Pre-K had been a particularly harsh year.) She knew her classmates didn't truly understand that they hurt her with any of it—they were just five- and six-year-olds who didn't know what to make of their silent classmate. But that didn't make their words any less cruel.

Shaking her head clear of any negative thoughts, Kenny continued to cheer herself up with her trivia quiz.

Animal time! When hippos are upset what color does their sweat turn? Her bottom lip ceased in its dejected tremble. Red.

True or false: There is a species of hobo spiders. Her posture straightened, the thought of tears gone. True.

How do you stop a kangaroo from jumping? Her face began to harden, and any emotion was once again concealed. Hold its tail off the ground.

"Good job, kids!" Miss Kaylee smiled at the children. Most of them smiled back brightly. The world was brighter, ethereal, in the eyes of most five-year-olds. Their standards were either inexplicably low or higher than the atmosphere, and how this induced a curious joy in her classmates Kenny was not sure. Miss Kaylee still managed to embrace those same childlike qualities, holding each of her students up to impossibly high and inexplicably low calibers as well. Kenny just glanced up at her teacher with impassive eyes.

Miss Kaylee blinked, frowning for the slightest moment before she went on.

"Alrighty! It's math time, kids!"

The class groaned and huffed exaggerated sighs. Kenny's lips twitched downward. She hated how quiet she had to sit when her class got stumped on the easiest problem that could be solved in less than a second. How she knew that at the high school across the street, teenagers sat at their desks learning things that weren't at least this insulting to her intelligence. It wasn't a particularly nice thing to say, but math time made her bitter enough.

"Okay, class," Miss Kaylee started with a small smile on her face. She was almost always smiling which caused most of the kids to believe she was unbelievably happy all the time. Kenny knew she wasn't. Miss Kaylee's facade was nearly as believable as her own, but Kenny noticed a lot of things.

In fact, what with her strained lips and tired eyes, Miss Kaylee seemed stressed today. However, it was math time and Kenny'd nearly cried less than a minute ago, so the young girl didn't care very much at all.

"Today we will be reviewing addition!" the teacher began, going on with her lesson. She wrote on the green chalkboard with a thin piece of white chalk:

2 + 5 =

7 + 1 =

6 + 4 =

3 + 3 =

10 + 11 + 8 =

"Does anyone know what the answers to these problems are? The last one is kind of hard!"

Multiple kids raised their hands to impress Ms. Kaylee with their intellect while others had their faces scrunched up in concentration. Mental math was a new concept for them and an advanced concept for—excluding Kenny—Kindergarteners in general. Some took out pieces of paper to write down the problems. Most of the children raised their hands with the wrong answers, but Miss Kaylee would praise them anyway. That was how she worked, and Kenny supposed she could appreciate that.

What she did not appreciate, however, was this: "Kendall! Why don't you solve a problem?"

The entire class, the entire Kindergarten class, went silent. Their eyes, their attention, drew to her like moths to a lamp.

She was still sitting.

"Come on! Don't be shy!" And Miss Kaylee was still smiling.

Kenny's chair scraped the waxed floor loudly as she got up. Everything seemed to be going in slow motion. Her cheeks were on fire and, no doubt, red with embarrassment. A tremor shook her hands as her heartbeat accelerated. Her thoughts were slow and confusing, and she was nearly to the point of tears again—and this was all because this had never happened before. Miss Kaylee knew to skip over her, especially during math time. It was their silent agreement.

Kenny quickly formulated a plan. She would answer wrong, of course, and her classmates would whisper and giggle about her behind her back as they always did. She would then shuffle back to her seat looking miserable so Miss Kaylee would feel guilty. She would never be picked again. Kenny took a breath, attempting to calm her nerves, and started with shaking feet towards the chalkboard.

However, something happened. That was the only way she could describe it, the only way she could describe how something like this could just intrude her mild existence. Just when she thought she'd brought her anxiety to a suitable level to enact her plan, an undiluted sense of panic blossomed in her stomach. Minute black dots peppered her field of vision. Kenny'd read about floaters before, but these dots weren't tricks of the eye. They multiplied and grew bigger within seconds until a thick darkness surrounded her.

Then she couldn't feel or hear anything.

It was as if all of her senses—even her sense of direction—had been stolen. There was only darkness, tossing her around, mocking her, pressing down on her until she couldn't think of anything other than the word darkness, and nothing else in the world existed anymore....

And then she was in her seat again.

"Wow," Miss Kaylee breathed. She placed a hand over her heart, and her eyes were wide with genuine surprise. She was clearly more impressed than she had ever been. But at what?

Kenny looked at the board and almost gasped in shock. All of the problems on the board were answered correctly in pink. In her handwriting. She felt something cold and skinny in her palm, and she didn't even have to open her hand know it was a piece of chalk.

Pink chalk.

When had she done this? And how? And what was that darkness?

Miss Kaylee grinned, and Kenny's heart sank. "Wow, Kendall. Wow."

Wow, indeed.