Alicia kim's blog

I anxiously shut the door of my car. I could hear the chatter of the high school students outside on the benches and grass, basically everywhere. I walked towards the building with my hoodie on my head, trying to cover myself. I could see groups of students like a swarm of bees. I put my head down and walked through the crowd until I reached the end of the hall where my locker was.
I didn’t expect to make friends right away. For as long as I could remember, I was an introvert, and because of that, I was made fun of, too. In the previous schools I went to, I didn’t have any friends, except one, my best friend, Julia. She and I got along as soon as we saw each other. We were like soulmates. However, now, she and I live practically on the other side of the country. Ever since I left Julia, I stopped trying to make new friends. One was enough.
I avoided larger groups for the first week I’d been going to the school. When my parents asked how my day was, I just mumbled “fine.” I went to my room to do homework and that was practically my life for several days in school.
One day, I was walking down the hall alone with my textbooks and notes. A girl who looked like a popular girl came up to me and she took my arm and dragged me around the school. The first thing I noticed about her was that she was very pretty. She had flawless skin and the perfect body ratio like every girl could dream of. She was lean and had an aesthetic outfit with an adult-like vibe and different jewelry. Also, I could tell that every boy had at least a little crush on her. The boys would look at her with hearts in their eyes every time she passed them. She introduced herself. Her name was Leah.
Weirdly, she was wearing an old necklace that didn’t really fit her style. It was a navy amulet with silver wavy lining surrounding it. It glittered mysteriously. She was wearing it with a small silver chain surrounding her neck. I wanted to ask her about it, but I ignored my curiosity since we weren’t that close to ask something personal.
She was friendlier than I expected. She took me around the school like she thought it was my first day. She also invited me to eat with her during lunch. I was surprised that people were like this.
I felt weird for the next couple of days now that I had friends who weren’t Julia. I texted Julia about this and she was surprised at what I was doing. She knew I was reluctant to make any friends besides her. Every day, Leah would drag her other two friends, Gwen and Jessica. They also dressed similar to Leah, with fancy bags and high school sweetheart makeup. I doubted their true identity at first. They look like they should be in Mean Girls, but they were oddly friendly to me. They took care of me whenever Julia wasn’t around me and complimented me many times. They saved seats for me in both class and cafeteria and offered to buy me food and drinks.
I was so focused on studying, concentrating on getting good grades and doing well in academics. But for some reason, after I met Leah and her friends, my attention went to the beauty, rather than what I have been focusing on. I didn’t pay a lot of attention to it since I enjoyed their company so much. We hung out many times, but I still had time to study for the upcoming tests and projects.
I kept forgetting to call and text Julia. Three days passed, and she’d been jamming me with her questions. Finally, I texted her and told her about my experiences with my best friends. She cautioned me, though, instead of being happy for me. I felt a bit of bitterness towards her and I abruptly ended our conversation.
The next day, I saw a boy in my class. He was not the best-looking guy, but he sure had a sense of humor and he was friendly. I daydreamed in class about him and how he was going to talk to me one day. But I didn’t even try to be friendly to him since I knew I am bad with people. I knew I had no choice but to like him from far away.
I was at home that night and I saw a story on Instagram. It was Leah who had the same story with him. I was burning with jealousy. She had probably gotten his attention, and she’d betrayed me. I thought to myself that I need to stop and keep a distance away from her. I kept thinking about it and being frustrated with myself that I forgot to finish studying for my test tomorrow.
The next day, Leah came up to me and I finally got up the courage to ask her about two things: her relationship with the boy and the necklace. I thought after a week of eating with her it would be fine enough to talk about it.
As soon as I brought it up to her, her face turned blue. She stuttered, with her whole face shaking, almost like a big secret, unable to answer me properly. It was awkward for both of us to stand there, so I just told her to ignore it since her face was so pale. I knew that something was up with the necklace. Something mysterious about it.
I went back home and I started drawing the possibilities of what the necklace can be to her. Is it something that her dead family members passed on to her? Did it make her pretty? Did it hide her true identity? Was it just a memorable accessory or did it hold more value? I desperately wanted to find out what the necklace was for her.
Next week, Leah invited me and the other girls to her house. This was the only chance I had to figure out what was up with the necklace. It had been the focus of my mind. Although I have been focusing on academics, I paid attention to Leah and her necklace more than what I should have been focusing on. Even though I knew where my location should be, I ignored it, thinking it was okay.
I waited impatiently until the day when I got to go to her house. I was thinking of all sorts of crazy ideas: setting up a secret hidden camera, putting a voice recorder, and tricking her friends to figure it out by themselves. But each had risks and disadvantages, so I only brought a voice recorder that looked like a pen. I’d got this voice recorder from years ago when my dream was to become a detective after getting obsessed with Sherlock Holmes movies.
We rode her car after school. Even at first sight, I was amazed at how her house looked grandiose. Her house was like a mansion, with chandeliers and staircases that looked like a wealthy businessman’s. I carefully asked if her parents were at her house, but she said they were at work.
She led us to her room, which was the size of the living room with her king-sized bed and makeup booth, as well as her closet and ensuite bathroom. I scanned the splendid room. Remembering my plan, I searched for a place in a room where I could hide a camera or the pen. Because there were a lot of objects that were distracting and bright. I needed a natural place where it wouldn’t stick out.
After gossiping for a long long time, Leah and the others went downstairs to get snacks together. I stayed back with an excuse to go to the bathroom and to look around her room more since they knew how much I was mesmerized by her room.
I zipped around the room to install the voice recorder pen. Put her pen in a container with all her other pens and pencils. I made sure it looked as natural as possible. I even took a picture to make sure that I can refer it back to the location.
Just as I was finishing with taking the picture, they came like thunder, opening the door loudly. I flinched where I was standing. They stood and eyed me with a confused look that asked me what I was doing. I replied swiftly that I was just looking at her pictures of when she was younger. She shrugged it off and sat down the snack on the table and continued our talk about literally everything.
After that day, I became anxious if I had even pushed the button on the necklace. I hoped that I did. I focused more on work and gradually stopped putting my focus on her necklace. I did a lot better academically. It helped that I wasn’t gossiping so much. I didn’t care about it until she again called all of us over to her house. This was the only opportunity to find out the truth.
I again went towards the same routine. When they left the room, I stayed back and tried to look for the pen, thinking Leah probably hadn’t touched it. Suddenly, my jaw dropped. I became more anxious as I realized the pen disappeared. I thought for a second that she might have thrown it away. I started to search her backpack, her pencil case, and everywhere it could have been. My heart was pounding heavily and I was so worried that I lost it. Just then, there was something underneath her desk. It was the pen.
I took a breath. I tucked it in my pocket and made sure it was all the way in so that she wouldn’t be able to find it. Just like last time, they came into the room right after I took it. I acted like nothing had happened and was just looking at her wall full of pictures and photos.
We gossiped again in her room until dinner when we all separated to go to our homes. I quickly made my way home so that I could properly sit down and hear what was happening at Leah’s home. I sat down in front of my desk and pushed the button on top of the pen. The helpful part about this recorder is that it records the time of when it was recording. It started to replay the recording but I forwarded toward the time we left her house the day I left the recorder at her house.
I started to listen to the audio. After about ten minutes into the audio, there was some weird sound that lasted for about two seconds. I replayed it over and over again to find out what it was, but in the end, I couldn’t. Although I could hear it clearly, I never heard this sound in my life. I gave up that night on trying to determine what the sound meant. It obviously was from the necklace, but it doesn’t tell me what was happening to her.
I took my mind off of the necklace. I knew something was up with it, but really, I couldn’t do anything to figure it out. Again, I was back to the starting line. I was suspicious but I couldn’t take any steps further since I didn’t have evidence nor confidence. I soon realized as my thoughts were going back to my normal life. I was losing my original self, my identity.
Over the weekend, I reset. I started to take my mind off of school problems and transferred my interest and concentration to studying. I started to make achievable goals for myself. I needed a break from the gossip, so I decided to distance myself from them.
At school, I didn’t talk to them, sit with them, and even interact with them. They were puzzled at first. They had questioning looks on their faces. Although I was aware of them, I quickly ignored them and went on with my normal days.
It had been around one month of normal school days without interruption of gossip and talks. Now that I got far away from them, I could see their true identity. They were not the nice girls they pretended to be. I could see their internal sides and I was relieved that I wasn’t part of that anymore.
It was another normal day. After lunch, I went to the bathroom to wash my dirty hands. I stood alone in front of the sink with a hazy mirror. There were only flowing sounds from the water until I heard shoes clicking the floor. The clicks were confident, as if they were wearing high heels. I tilted my head slightly up to see the reflection of the person who was coming in. I made eye contact with Leah who was coming in nonchalantly for a brief second. She passed by me and came to the sink that was next to mine.
It was awkward with Leah and me. I couldn’t properly go past her and be nonchalant about it. I could feel her eyes glancing at me through the mirror. She went over to the tissue box and wiped her hands. She touched her necklace while looking at me straight in the eyes through the mirror. Just then, for a split second, I saw her face swirling into a different and unrecognizable face, plain and dull from what Leah looked like. The face she had was gone by so quickly that the face wasn’t something I could describe, but it was definitely not the face of our highschool sweetheart Leah. She also had small eyes and a big nose. She also had makeup that looked like she had just put on without effort. Her face was a mess. Her hair was the same but more tangled. I was in shock, but she didn’t seem to notice and went her own way. She walked away from me, out of the bathroom.
For the next few days, I was surrounded with confusion and chaos. I didn’t know what the change in her appearance meant. Over the course of a few days, I tried to be open about all of my theories and ideas. I tried to trust what I saw, the evidence in my brain, but I couldn’t help but doubt my instincts.
After stressing over it for a couple of days, I made a decision that the necklace changed her appearance. I knew the identity of the necklace was ambiguous, but I had no choice but to trust my gut feelings.
For a few weeks, I couldn’t stop staring at her necklace. It was like I was enchanted and allured by it. Leah noticed me staring at her necklace many times, and she would either make a confused look or frown. I didn’t care about what she thought of me looking at her necklace all day long, but I couldn’t help but turn my eyes every time I felt Leah’s presence around me. But I knew something was wrong. There was a slight guilty conscience coming from my heart.
Despite the guilty conscience, I even thought about stealing the necklace from her. I wanted to actually experience it myself, the sense when you put the necklace on. Not only that, I wanted to see what she actually looked like. That was the exact moment I started to plan to take her necklace into my own possession.
I sat in front of my desk at home, thinking about what I should do to get the necklace from her. I pulled out a page from my notebook and titled the page as “How to Steal a Necklace from A Popular Girl.” I pondered the problem. I didn’t know how to approach it. I lifted my hand up for the first time, and started scribbling down my ideas. I wrote, 1. Get closer to the owner of the necklace. I stopped and crumpled the paper and threw it in the trash can. I got a new page from the notebook and I repeated the same thing over and over again, until I settled on my last plan. It was to become friends with her again. I wrote down the steps afterwards, to snatch her necklace while doing a sleepover. It seemed like a master plan, better than most of the other plans that I came up with. I made the handwriting into a very sloppy one so that no one could figure what I wrote down. I folded the plan into quarters and tucked it into my pocket.
The next day, I went up to Leah, for the first time in about one to two months. She was surprised that I approached her, but her surprise quickly went away. She cleared her throat and hesitated.
She finally asked, “Why did you come back?”
I replied, “No reason. I missed you, that’s all.”
She nodded, but had an impression of doubt.
I spent the rest of the month by her side. I always overlooked her, making sure that she was keeping her necklace. She always stared at me back, but I would always look away. She side-eyed me, but wouldn’t say anything. I was becoming less careful. As she didn’t care about me suspiciously returning to become friends with her, I let my consciousness unspool. Now, I had to just snatch that necklace in the nick of time I have left.
It was another day when Leah had called us over to her house. Today was the day, the day that I’ll be accomplishing my task. I carefully thought over the plan’s steps. I couldn’t mess up even a little bit.
I went inside the house. Leah went inside the bathroom, and Gwen and Jessica had stayed behind and went outside her room to do their own thing. This was the perfect timing to get the desire inside my clutches.
After I made sure that no one was looking at me, I went inside the bathroom. Leah was washing her hands and before she could say anything, I snatched the necklace from her neck. There was a big light that shined for a tenth of a second. I stood up and looked at Leah.
My jaw dropped. Leah’s face was covered with acne from the makeup. She also had messy eyebrows, short eyelashes, small slit eyes, big nose, and thin lips. She looked like someone else. I impulsively put on the amulet. I could see Leah’s eyes widen. There was bright white light surrounding me and I felt—I felt lighter and somehow defined. I looked in the mirror and I saw a celebrity. I couldn’t believe what I could be like! I left Leah standing in her room and I confidently walked outside.
I went home that night and registered at my school under another name: Zara. I needed to disguise myself, so that no one could know about the necklace.
The week after I got the amulet, I tucked in my necklace inside my t-shirt before I went to school. I had a feeling that someone would snatch the amulet from me. I dressed up nicely with the clothes I bought during the weekend. My parents were surprised that I bought such clothes, but I knew they wouldn’t understand.
I packed my stuff and headed to school. It was different now. I walked confidently to the big main door and walked down the hallway crowded students students. Their eyes were all on me, the new Mean Girl in town. I walked to the office and got an assigned locker. I walked out to the hallway and stood in front of my locker. Other students crowded around my locker, and I couldn’t help but to toss my hair. I could feel my self-esteem and ego rising in real time. I saw Julia passing by from the corner of my eyes. My face lit up instinctively, but as soon as I saw her face, I realized that I’d screwed up. Her face hinted at disgust towards me, and I realized that I’d changed into something I am not.