Disclaimer: Never Mine

Never the Strange One

Once, for just a moment, Alisha tried thinking about things deeply, tried rubbing the finer points of ideas between her fingers, tried getting at the grit of the things that happen in the course of a life. That moment lived somewhere in the neighborhood of the day she woke up and everyone was looking at her differently.

(We're trained to see flashes here and people drawn in simplest form. But this isn't about a storm.)

It wasn't just one day, of course, that she passed from a pretty childhood through gawky change. She didn't just wake up with breasts and hips that dipped to beckon palms or lips that looked sculpted by the blade of a thumb. She didn't. But it seemed that way. Like she just woke up and the world noticed.

So she thought about it for moment, about how she looked, suddenly, like a certain kind of person. She looked like someone with an exciting life, an easy life. She thought and wondered if that was who she was. But then there were pretty boys and loud parties, fancy dresses, longing stares …. And she realized, if she could be anything at all, why should she be anything but this?

She'd flit from boy to boy, friend to friend; a bruise at the collarbone and a chirping mobile to prove she was never alone. It wasn't that she was untouchable. That was Curtis: too fast to catch, too loyal to stray. That was Kelly: too fierce to approach, too quick to wound. That was Nathan: too sharp, too crass, too utterly self-assured. And that was Simon: too strange to bother.

People say beautiful girls are untouchable, that they're on pedestals where they're safe and perfect and lonely. But that was never Alisha. High and mighty, sure, but she stepped down whenever she pleased and she stepped as low as she pleased. She was a beautiful girl hungry for contact, game for a drink and a dance and a fuck.

What she always wanted was for them to want her long after she was gone.

One day she woke up and her face decided who she was, the clarity of her eyes and the curves of her body and the perfection of her skin. A beautiful girl. What the storm changed was, well, nothing. If she thinks on it hard, lets things run in circles and make her head ache ….

Something she notices is Simon deals best. Kelly gets angry and Curtis defensive and Alisha, herself, well, it's the first time she's been anything like depressed. But Simon gets stronger on the secrets between them. They've all become strange and for him it's familiar ground. He knows what it is to give people the creeps. He knows what it's like to make people angry and nervous. He knows what it's like to be alone.

He's the sort of person no one can help picking on. He's too easily wounded, too eager to please. He strange in the way that makes people want distance, makes people fear association, fear that the same strangeness might live in them too. He's scary because he makes you wonder why he doesn't just choose to fit in.

When he comes back from the future, tell her she loves him, she knows it's true. She knows, if she thinks hard on it, by the way she sees so much of herself in this future him.

If she thinks on it hard, the storm didn't change anything. That she can't be touched now doesn't matter much when she's never let herself be held.

It's not until he's gone and only his old, strange self left in the world that she thinks about how much he's like her in the future. It's not until then that she wonders how much she'll become like him.