Dear Diary,

Hi, it’s Is. It has been the craziest day.

It all started today in the quad. I met up with Alex and he was so cute, giving me a little hug, and the next thing I knew Maggie had thrown a lasso around us and was literally tying us together. Don’t ask me where she learned to lasso. Anyway, she threw us over her shoulder, (she’s freakishly strong) Alex bending backwards and I was bending in ways a person never should on top of him. Of course we were yelling and screaming the whole time, but Mags paid us no mind and just hummed "Witchy Woman" as she plopped us down behind that big oak on the side of the school building. It took me all of first and second period to cut through the ropes with my powers, and the principal was pretty upset. Don’t ask me why I didn’t turn in Maggie, but she has enough detention slips under her belt already.

The other day she gave me a doll that she had found in the desert, saying it looked familiar. It gave me a vision of something, like a pole, with a dead sheep on the top of it. I don’t know what it was, or where. I don’t know why I didn’t tell the others about the vision, but something told me not to. Maybe because I just wanted to have something to myself for a change. I’ve already had to share Max and Michael, and I even have to share Alex with Maria and Liz sometimes. It’s just nice to have a secret of my own.

I don’t know why I can’t be friends with Liz and Maria. It’s not that I don’t like them. They’re the kind of friends I’ve always wanted, not Gracie and Tiffany. But I guess that’s why they scares me, just like Alex scares me. Because they’re exactly what I’ve always wanted but would never let myself have.

I can’t be vulnerable. Maggie said to me once that to be vulnerable means to never let the weakness show. I didn’t know what she meant then, because I had always thought it was the opposite, like any normal person. But I watched her for a while and she was always trying to let people in, trying to get them to open up. And she would always do it by letting her insecurities show. Therefore, she is the last person that anyone would ever think of as an alien.

Maybe that didn’t make any sense, but I think I finally get it. I just hope I might be able to put that knowledge to good use.

But I’ve been getting better. Me and Alex are taking it slowly. It’s a little strange when I kiss him. Kind of like the acid in my stomach somehow finds its way to my heart and eats its way through it to the soft spot that’s always been hidden under my ice queen routine. It’s weird. But nice.

Gracie and Tiffany are always saying that image is everything. I guess, when you think about it is. Max has this image of the leader, the protector. He may be just as weak or vulnerable as the rest of us, but he can’t let it show. We don’t want leaders to be exactly like us. We want them to be how we wish we could be.

Someone just knocked on the door. Maggie, probably. She said that she would be over. Now, if you’ll excuse me, some cherry coke with arsenic is in order.

-Is

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