It's the weekend after Valentine's Day, and a little girl sits quietly in her bedroom, going through the valentines she received, earlier in the week.
Everyone in the class had made a mailbox, and everyone in the class was supposed to give valentines to everyone else. Maybe it was silly. Maybe it was calendar-driven nonsense, but for this little girl, it was special.
Valentine's Day wasn't like the days in gym class where the teachers let students choose teams. She would often hear the kids that were chosen before her, whisper to the team captain not to pick her, until she was the last one standing. And Valentine's Day wasn't like when the teacher made everyone pair up for projects, and she'd find herself working alone, or third-wheeling a pair of best friends that she was assigned to when no one would choose her. Valentine's Day was the one day of the school year that everyone had to be included. The one day of the year when all of the cliches about friendship and getting along, suddenly seemed real.
And, while maybe deep down she knew she could never truly be "part of the gang", it was fun to pretend, for a little while.
Within her little paper mailbox was a card from the most popular girl in her class. It featured a character from one of her favorite tv shows, and a saying that implied that maybe, this popular girl actually secretly thought she was 'cool'. There was a card from the boy she secretly thought was cute, but whom she'd never really spoken to, that maybe looked like he might feel the same, if she read between the lines of the generic 'Happy Valentine's Day' message. There was a card from the boy everyone thought she had a crush on, because they sometimes played together at recess. In reality they both just really enjoyed the swings, hated the slide, and liked to collect acorns around the playground, but once the rumors started, and that damned song about 'sitting in a tree', he didn't speak to her as much. The card, though, gave her some hope that he may still want to be her friend after all. There was even a card from the girl that was meanest to her, with such a happy, warm, smiling teddy bear on it that you'd never guess it came from someone who seemingly didn't like her.
Valentine's almost seemed like a backward kind of day. A day when her outcast status, whatever it was that made her so different that the other kids wanted so little to do with her, didn't matter.
Valentine's wasn't her favorite holiday, though. For all her love of the cute and colorful during this time of the year, the holiday that truly owned her heart was, and always had been, Halloween.
Halloween was the day when the outcasts became beloved. The day the whole world finally saw the beauty in things they might normally find horrifying or off-putting. She watched in awe every year as the people who were afraid of spiders, adorned their doorways with webs, or spiders several times the size of even the largest real ones. She curiously watched her classmates, as they dressed up as the characters from movies they normally said were 'weird' or 'too scary'. Cemeteries, which she'd always been fascinated by, suddenly appeared in yards as decor. And pumpkins, she thought, as she glanced to her right at the shocked looking orange pail she'd gotten the year before from a local fast food place, were treated like absolute royalty.
Halloween was the day when the strange and unusual, the feared ones, the hated ones, were accepted, loved, even. Celebrated.
And the little girl thought to herself, maybe that's why Valentine's Day was her second favorite holiday.
It was the only day of the year when that feeling came anywhere close to coming back.
Even if maybe she truly didn't belong, on both of those holidays, for a little while, she felt like she did.
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