For about two weeks, Natalie had sat alone at a metal lunch table on the patio. She wasn't particularly withdrawn, in fact, one could classify her as a borderline extrovert. She had a good amount of friends in eighth grade. But over the summer, as the beginning of freshman year loomed ahead, Natalie's friend group drifted apart. She started to notice it in late July. On Facebook, there were albums of photos documenting a big sleepover, the existence of which she had been entirely unaware. Her sleeping bag gathered dust in the closet.
On the first day of high school, the schedule was cut in half to give the students time to adjust. Each classroom she visited was full of nervous freshmen, and the tense silence was like being packed into a box with Styrofoam peanuts. She found herself, uncomfortable in the quiet, tempted to yell and reanimate the once lively children. But it was just too heavy of a weight to bear.
Looking through the metal grate of her lunch table, she evaluated her own outfit from an unacquainted perspective. Normal enough, she concluded. Baggy cargo pants and a t-shirt. The one thing that might isolate her in a crowd was her hat. It was a bright blue toboggan with flaps that outlined the red, full shape of her cheeks and two feline ears sewed to the top. Her sister had made it for her at the birthday party that nobody came to. She also had some big fuzzy paw slippers and a tail in the same shade of blue, but she didn't dare muster the confidence to wear those things to school.
She had finished her lunch a while ago, and now she was picking at the keratosis pilaris on the backs of her arms. It was hard to hook the little spiky plugs because her fingernails were chewed down to the quick, but it was something she could do to look halfway occupied. She didn't have a phone to deftly twiddle her thumbs over, but she doubted she would be any more entertained if she had one. She was not one to be content in alienation. She craved the warmth of company, but now her goosebumps were almost as persistent across her skin as the freckles that doused her cheeks and forehead.
She looked up to check the time on the analog clock next to the door. She had ten more minutes to endure. As her eyes skimmed the other tables on their way back to her feet, a boy caught her eye. He was someone she had seen in her gym class. He was easy to spot because of how starkly his pale skin contrasted with his black hair and his black sunglasses. He looked almost like he had been drawn in a sunny photograph with an ink pen. He was reading a thick book with small font, and he wasn't eating anything.
Natalie allowed herself too much time to study the boy, and he looked up from his book. She blinked and looked back at her feet in a millisecond whirlwind. She checked the clock again, and it said five minutes. She looked back at the boy. She noticed that the white cords of earbuds were threaded through his hair. He was listening to something that Natalie expected was very loud and very dark, like the kind of death metal that teenage boys in all black pump into their heads to feel alive.
The bell rang. Natalie had become so engrossed in watching the boy that she hadn't been watching the clock. The boy heard the bell, despite how loud his music probably was, and closed his book with conviction. He didn't mark the page. When he stood up, Natalie realized that he was wearing a Rainbow Dash shirt. She covered her mouth.
Later, in gym class, she sat on the bleachers. It was a free day, which meant you could either choose to sit down or lift weights. Most people in that class had drifted into continents of subgroups across the gymnasium. One of her former friends was in that class. Her name was Aradia. She was sitting, mute, in a group of people, staring ahead. Natalie became irritated. If she was going to choose someone else to be friends with besides her, wasn't she at least going to talk to them? She had a niche, she belonged, and yet she took it for granted by totally ignoring the people who sat with her.
Natalie felt her fiery temper starting to flare up. It was one that crept up on her and then possessed her very suddenly. She supposed she had picked it up from her mother. But, she often reminded herself, she wasn't nearly as batshit crazy as her mother. She sprung up from where she was and left her bookbag in a crook between two seats. Someone might have tampered with it, but Natalie didn't care. She couldn't stand another second of being in that gym.
She wandered the halls for a while. Skipping gym was something new she had taken to. It seemed harmless enough, and as long as she was present at the beginning of the period, she got a participation grade. The PE teachers were very lax in their positions.
She passed the weight room, which had a very big window. It looked like the room was there to showcase rippling muscles and glistening foreheads. The window was cross-hatched with wire and mottled with oily handprints. Natalie stopped when she noticed that the boy from lunch was in there. His hands were wrapped in bandages and he had traded his Rainbow Dash shirt for a different sleeveless shirt. It looked like he was preparing to attack the punching bag in front of him, the way he twitched his head to the side and opened and closed his fists.
With a startling abruptness, the boy dove into the bag in front of him. His arms became two white blurs, and the punching bag stayed a constant foot away from where it had idlely hung. It was almost as if he were levitating it. The people around him—girls with rubber headbands doing chin-ups, boys in muscle shirts who lacked muscles, and even the teacher—stopped exercising to watch him. He was entirely in his own world. Even through the thick glass, Natalie could hear the muffled sound of his fists pummeling the bag. Then, as suddenly as he had started, he stopped. The bag swung back to its original position. He grabbed a towel and made his way through the crowd. A boy tried to high-five him, but he ducked out of his way.
The door near Natalie opened and she saw the boy more clearly. He was covered in sweat, and when he used his arm to lean against the wall, a fan of dark armpit hair unfolded from underneath it. He mopped his face and his neck while holding the branch of his glasses between two fingers. Natalie hurried her way back to the gym before he opened his eyes.
It was one in the afternoon when Natalie got home. Her house was almost the last stop, right before an Indian girl named Kanan. Kanan always smiled to Natalie, but in a very reserved, maternal way. She lived on a diverging street from Natalie's, but they weren't well-acquainted.
When she stepped off the bus, Natalie traveled toward her door using nothing but the inertia gathered from using her bookbag as a weight. The numerous cat keychains jingled as she stomped toward her porch and into the door. The house key was on a lanyard that also hung from the zipper on her bag. Their house was sized a little ill-suited for two sisters and their mother who wasn't home much. It was too big. The carpet in the house was all white, the furniture was a little too nice, the second story had more rooms than they knew what to do with.
Natalie opened the door. Her sister was sitting on the couch, watching the TV with the volume turned almost painfully loud. She turned her head and waved to Natalie. Natalie pointed to the TV and covered her ears.
"Marie, it's loud!" Natalie shouted, even though the volume at which she spoke didn't matter. Marie scrambled for the remote and muted the TV. As she whipped her head to replace the remote, a bloody cottonball tumbled out of her ear and onto the glass coffee table.
Natalie picked the cottonball up and looked at it. There was more blood on it than usually drained out of Marie's ears. Marie got frequent ear infections and had lost her hearing to it when she was a baby.
"Oh, I guess I need to replace them," said Marie. The way she talked sounded like her tongue was swollen all the time. She got up from the couch and went into the bathroom. The subtitles on the TV were late, Natalie noticed. That was one of the things that got on her nerves—when people failed to properly accommodate her sister's disability. She had heard people talk about Marie on the bus right behind her. Marie had once had to pull her sister off of a kid with blonde highlights who had cooed the words 'deaf bitch' into the back of Marie's head. Ever since then, it was apparent to everyone at their school that Marie and Natalie were The Leijon Sisters. It wasn't hard to tell, either. Despite the difference between Natalie's bristly orange hair and Marie's bushy black, the resemblance between their faces was uncanny. Both had wide, catlike eyes and a nose identical to the tiny red ones you'd see in a Puffs tissue commercial. And although not as aggressive, Marie had freckles on her face just like Natalie.
"Kurt is coming over for dinner tonight," Marie said, entering the room again. Natalie exhaled shakily.
"Again?" asked Natalie.
"He's not that bad, once you get to know him."
"I don't want to get to know him." Natalie climbed the carpeted steps to the second floor. Her room was upstairs, and so was her mother's. The door to her mother's room was almost always left ajar, as if inviting anyone to come inside. This time, Natalie did.
Her mother's walls were covered in illegible handwriting. All of it looked like it had been written with a black ballpoint pen, save for a few words outlined in red. There were illustrations of malformed faces with text wrapped around them, as if constricting them. The floor was covered in clothes and books. A pair of worn-out gray leggings was nailed to the wall, its leathery fabric stretched out like a pelt. Natalie had tried to touch the leggings once, when she was small, and her mother had seized her wrist and yanked her out of her room. Marie had to comfort her crying sister downstairs over the sound of loud opera music, which their mother started playing immediately after slamming her door closed.
Being in the room unnerved Natalie. She started to turn in the direction of the door when she saw something familiar in her peripheral vision, on the dresser.