by some women, like those in the alley where her grandmother lived and where she spent most afternoons after school she was admired, by her classmates she was envied and criticized: too tall, too thin or her butt too protruding.
The truth was that Marta had always been a beautiful girl and certainly did not go unnoticed among teenage girls.
The latter, humiliated by a sense of impotence to beauty, had such feelings that she was paradoxically inadequate and unworthy compared to the others.
Except for Alessandra, she was a faithful friend.
They met in kindergarten and since then they have grown up together: the same elementary school, then in middle school and high school, even in the gym.
Alessandra's house was four, maybe five kilometres away, but with a long uphill stretch heavy to do on foot.
When they were little, they often rode their bikes. The bus suddenly nailed to the bus stop.
-Damn the brakes! - exclaimed the driver.
Finally, after a long time, she saw her friend again, visibly excited about that ride together at the mall.
Between the two girls there was affection, constant and industrious, and he was happy to see her standing up and feeling good.
She pulled out of her closet a black miniskirt that she wore with a turquoise t-shirt with little glitter that made her glow in her clumsiness as an overweight girl.
- Do you think I've lost weight? How do I look in skirts? You, on the other hand, well... you're damn skinny as a button! Are you eating? –
Alessandra, among her schoolmates, was famous for her exaggeratedly worn-out speech: she could speak for more than an hour without being interrupted.
Her need to speak was so great that, in the absence of interlocutors, she was able to speak to herself in the third person.
She was that high school student who was always expected to speak.
The one the school headmaster couldn't stand and who, in school meetings, was not afraid to take the microphone and leave it until the school administration was challenged and demolished, point by point.
Marta was one of the rare people to whom, if Alessandra asked something, she would even listen to the answer. Because despite all her problems, she felt she was tied to her, for a reason unknown to her, with an invisible red thread.
She loved pass her temperas when she painted a canvas, to hear those ramblings that even her mother didn't waste any more time listening to.
She went to the kitchen and in the bowl she emptied pockets on a cabinet, took the keys to her mother's Fiesta. In Marta's company she felt more beautiful.
On the other hand, it is known that at school boys look for the alpha, the leader of the pack to feel stronger and girls the prettiest to feel more beautiful.
Their friendship was beautiful, the kind that everyone in life should remember they had in time. They always shared everything, when they had to vent, talk about a problem, do their homework or have fun, the first contact was just the best friend. And yet, because of one boy, Alessandra was put aside for a while.
He was a guy everyone knew how to use drugs, a junkie.
As a good friend, she advised her to stay away from him, but she didn't want to understand until the boy was taken away from his father. Not even the judgment of the people was able to affect the purity of such a natural and innocent feeling, that first love, even if on the other side so violent.
They headed for the mall, visited the shoe store, then a clothing store.
Finally, they went shopping at Arca, a pet shop, where Alessandra bought a pink leather collar with fake glitter for Goga, her beagle.
The girl was not used to make judgements about past events and Marta liked this: she was simply a person who could listen to another one in trouble.
They drove through the underground parking lot to get to the car when, suddenly, Marta felt a strange sensation, a sort of déjà-vu.
The round, red and green lamps above each parking space, the ones that indicate whether it is free or not, had suddenly turned all red. The light reflected intermittently on the white border strip below had become similar to the slow motion effect of American films.
- Ale, we hadn't parked here, our parking was S3 not F8. -
Even Alessandra's steps had become slower, less fluid.
A dry leaf fluttered very slowly, completely asynchronically with the wind that had pushed it upwards, a fraction of the time sequence certainly altered.
Time seemed to have stopped, but she seemed to be the only one who felt it. She turned left, saw the two shadows passing in front of her, unconsciously brushing against Alessandra and vanishing into thin air. Once dissolved, Marta breathed again, saw the leaf hanging in the air falling on the leaden concrete at the usual speed.
Her friend turned around and asked her something she did not understand, still dazed by the vision. It was the first time she saw them clearly outside her home, and this was enough to convince her that something horrible was about to happen.
Alessandra started the engine with a keystroke after sitting in the Audi.
- This is all wrong, something is wrong. -
- What's wrong? - Asked Alessandra intrigued as they surfaced from the underground garages.
- The car was in the wrong place. First something happened in the garages and now we're in an Audi.
- Of course we're in an Audi, it's my car, don't you remember? I don't understand, what's going on?
- Your mother's car is a Fiesta, not an Audi. Pull over. We have to stop now!
- I can't pull over now, I'm cornering. Calm down and tell me what's wrong with you!
The weather was beautiful, the road was strangely lonely, the one that was always the same, travelled thousands of times in traffic was no longer so.
The car slid smoothly from corner to corner where there was supposed to be a straight.
- Stop now please, something's happening. How can you not see that? –
Marta took off her seatbelt, tried to open the door but Alessandra locked it through the central controls.
- I'm sorry, I can't let you get off, I love you very much, but it's better this way. Trust me one more time. –
- What's better like this? Ale...-
At that exact moment, the perception of time and space was altered again.
Marta saw dazzling headlamps aimed at her friend and realized that her time was over.
In a split second, she remembered the relative definition of time and space that her philosophy professor made one day during a lecture.
"The unit of measurement of time, among the people of the ancient Near East,
