Read Tales of Aradia The Last Witch Volume 1 for Free Online

her
butterfly.
    “My butterfly!” she
screamed and promptly started bawling.
    Jensen, seeing her
crying, was satisfied with his result, but knew she should have
fallen over. She was small for her age and he was large for his. He
took it as a challenge.
    He tried again and
again to knock her over, and never could. Aradia took it to be a
game of sorts, laughing when he failed to hurt her, which angered
him even more. That was when he began the name-calling. Soon the
other children were in on the cruelty as well. By that point,
Aradia didn’t laugh at it anymore.
    One day, Aradia pushed
back.
    They were on the
playground, because of course such a showdown would occur on a
playground. A large group of kids were playing King of the Hill, a
dodgeball variant, and Aradia wanted to play too.
    “You’re not allowed,”
Jensen had said. Recognizing the will of their leader, the other
kids backed him up.
    “I wanna play King with
you,” Aradia repeated.
    “You can’t play with
us!” Jensen yelled at her. “You have a stupid name.”
    It wasn’t even much of
an insult, but it was enough. She looked around at the circle of
kids which had formed around them. They were all laughing. She felt
like she was spinning out of control. That was when she screamed
and shoved Jensen as hard as she could.
    For a second or two he
was actually airborne, before crashing to the earth and rolling
several meters.
    The other kids stopped
laughing.
    By now the teachers
were finally involved, and they broke up the commotion. It turned
out Jensen had broken his arm in the fall, and he had a cast for
six weeks afterward. For those six weeks, that cast was a constant
reminder to everybody that Aradia was different than they were.
Jensen asked every student in class to sign it, other than
her.
    There wasn’t any
official fallout with the school. Everybody knew Jensen was a
troublemaker, but now Aradia was on the radar too. Perhaps more
devastating was the fact that Jensen was the youngest of four
siblings, and his parents were well established members of the
school community.
    Ross and Liza were
none-too-popular themselves after the skirmish.
    There were other
oddities as well, of course. Aradia never got sick; she never even
got the sniffles. The most off-putting display of her powers, to
most people, was that she often seemed to know if something was
going to happen just seconds before it actually did.
    As she grew she learned
to control and hide these abilities, but as a young girl she
couldn’t help herself.
    Needless to say, she
was familiar with being isolated from her peers.
    The bullying was hard
to deal with, and it didn’t end with kindergarten, or with Jensen.
Much worse than that, though, was that in her heart she believed
the other kids were right to be afraid of her. She really had hurt
Jensen, and as she grew, so did her powers and her strength. As a
five year old, she broke a boy’s arm. What would happen if she lost
control again when she was much more powerful? How could she be
anything but an outcast?
    Aradia’s memories fast
forwarded six years. Jensen was long gone, but she doubted there
was a shortage of Jensens in the world. She was in middle school,
and there had been another boy who had taken to calling her names.
This one, named Kasey, went the extra mile of mockery and spread
horrible rumors about Aradia.
    For more than a year,
Aradia had begrudgingly put up with his behavior. Contradicting the
rumors proved fruitless, and confronting him was not an option that
she allowed herself.
    Then he went further
than he should have.
    Aradia had been walking
down the halls, just like she always did and just like always, all
the other students were arranged in their groups of exclusivity.
Unlike normal, however, they all seemed to notice her. Most days
she doubted anybody even remembered she was there.
    And she recognized the
look in their eyes, the way their mouths curled up in malicious
smiles. Something was going on, something