"Why do these things keep happening to me?" Mitra was furious. It was the third time her notebook had gone missing in the classroom.
The first time, when her math notebook disappeared, some sixth-grade student brought it to her, saying he had found it in the shrubs near the school playground and had wondered if it had fallen out by mistake. The second time, her English notebook went missing. Luckily, it was a new notebook and Mitra hadn't written much in it. She was able to make a new one without much loss.
This time however, it was her Physics notebook, one that had all her class notes and questions and answers written diligently. She and Vishal had searched for it throughout their classroom yet couldn't find it. They were contemplating searching the bags of their fellow classmates when Lekha objected.
"Are you trying to say that our classmates are thieves?" she asked quite rudely.
Mitra denied, "No, I am merely suggesting that my notebook might have been displaced and ended up in someone's bag. By mistake." Mitra clarified.
"I will complain to our class teacher about this. You are humiliating us," Lekha threatened.
Mitra slammed down hard, "You know what, I should have done that before," Mitra lashed out. "This is happening so often now that it seems suspicious."
Lekha's eyes flickered.
"Vishal, you search the boys' bags while I look into the girls'," Mitra instructed without taking her eyes away from Lekha.
Deep down, somehow, Mitra felt Lekha as the top suspect of the thefts. It was a girl's instinct of knowing when a fellow girl disliked her. She didn't know the reason for Lekha's animosity, only that a certain hatred was looming between them both.
The search began. As Mitra started with the girls' bags in a serial order from the front row, amidst the commotion of the students commenting and fussing about the "scene" Mitra and Vishal were making, nobody noticed Lekha slipping a notebook into a corner at the back end of the classroom.
They were nearly done with the search when someone detected the object of the conflict in the corner. It came as a surprise to majority of the onlookers, for they had witnessed the whole room being scanned just moments before to no avail, and somehow the missing notebook had materialized out of nowhere.
"See, this is what makes it more dubious," Mitra vented out in angst. "Where did this rain down from just at the right moment, unless the person who snitched it threw it away to avoid getting caught?"
"We don't know that, do we?" Lekha questioned with a straight face. "Maybe you just overlooked it."
"Did a dozen people overlook it?" Mitra scoffed.
Lekha shrugged. She pulled up her bag with indifference and stalked out of the class.
###
It was a very uncomfortable silent war in their class. Everyone knew there was some sort of bad blood between Lekha and Mitra, but none seemed to acknowledge or talk about it.
Mitra was impassive about it while Lekha's hardened glares drove her point to everyone that they should refrain from befriending Mitra. Vishal broached the subject with Mitra, suggesting they reach a truce with Lekha for removing the frequent awkward encounters in their classroom.
Mitra explained the futility of the attempt; she had no idea why Lekha was so hostile towards her and making an effort without knowing the actual root cause would be a wasted endeavour.
Lekha was also struggling to hide her bitterness towards Mitra and act graceful in front of her classmates. For most part, she didn't have to do anything significant; her friends and classmates ostracized Mitra without any push from Lekha to "earn her approval".
After the attempt of snitching Mitra's notebook failed embarrassingly, Lekha made another impulsive go at framing Mitra for a theft. She thought if her fellow classmates found someone else's notebook in Mitra's bag, it would be scandalous enough to frame Mitra as a thief, which she "deserved".
It was lunch break and Mitra remembered midway between a game of catch with Vishal and a few others that she was yet to return a novel she borrowed from library. She excused herself from the game and rushed off to the classroom to fetch the book from her bag, so she could run to the library before the break ended.
As she entered the empty classroom, however, she spotted Lekha at the boys' end of the classroom, pacing alone with a notebook in her hand.
Mitra eyed her in confusion, given that Lekha never stayed alone anywhere, and she was looking very flustered, her eyes wide, as if she was caught doing something she shouldn't have.
"What are you doing here?" Lekha almost shouted at Mitra.
"I should be asking you the same thing," Mitra countered.
"I... I came to return a notebook," Lekha stammered, her eyes darting around.
Mitra's suspicions strengthened. "Now?"
"Yes." Lekha looked pale. She slipped the notebook she was holding into a bag to her left, which Mitra knew was Gaurav's bag. Giving Mitra a cold glance, Lekha stalked out of the classroom, mentally kicking herself for failing at implanting the notebook in Mitra's bag. It wasn't her fault; Mitra had spoiled her plan.
If Mitra felt the whole encounter to be suspicious, she didn't show it. However, by evening, the missing notebook took the class by a frustrating storm.
The victim was Abhishek, one of the class toppers, who happened to have his physics notebook stolen. Now, the memory of Mitra's fiasco was still fresh in everyone's mind and Abhishek commanded a certain respect from his fellow classmates owing to his grades. So, they ended up searching the whole room and everyone's bags.
When the notebook emerged in Gaurav's bag, everyone was surprised. Before anyone could make a comment, however, Mitra turned to stare at an unnerved Lekha with wide eyes and said out aloud, "You!"
"What happened?" Vishal asked curiously.
"It was she who put that notebook in Gaurav's bag. She said she was returning it," Mitra answered, narrating what she witnessed in the afternoon.
"That's not true!" Lekha vehemently denied. "I thought it was Abhishek's bag."
"Did you borrow the book from Abhishek?" Vishal questioned her seriously.
Lekha panicked and replied without much thought, "No, I found it on the teacher's table."
"If you wanted to give it to him, why put it in someone else's bag? We all know everyone's seating arrangement and which bag belongs to whom," Vishal reasoned.
"Well, I don't know. I got confused. Why should I know everyone's possessions?" Lekha turned pale again.
"Why didn't you tell us this before, that you had seen the book, when we started searching? You knew what we were looking for," Vishal continued his questioning.
"Oh, please! Stop interrogating me! What are you, a policeman?" Lekha screamed at Vishal and stormed out of the classroom heaving in anger and embarrassment.
That was the evening she last saw Vishal.
Lekha was murdered that night.