The smile somehow etched on her face is so obviously faked its scary. The laughter echoing all over is so obviously forced it's a scream. The song tumbling from her tongue is so obviously pained it hurts us all. The nighttime tears that dry her out are so obviously wasted we all cry along. The gashes she thinks she hides well with a sleeve are so obviously watching us we can't help but stare. The hands we discreetly offer to her daily are so painfully ignored we wait, we wait, we wait.

Hermione.

All legs, curves, smiles, hair, and eyes, every boy follows her, including me. I, however, follow her in secret, watching along with everyone else, following, waiting for disaster to arrive. We only follow because we all have some fantasy that we will be the one to save her. But we all feel that this summer will be the last summer for everybody.

I hop on my bike with my Nikon camera on my shoulder and pedal down to the park where she sits and plays guitar and sings for any few people who will stop and listen. She has her guitar case is opened next to her, a small sign propped up inside with a rock with the words, "Spare happiness?" People stop and scrunch their eyebrows up at the sign as she sings, but I sit nearby leaning against my bike watching her fingers and mouth, entranced.

Her fingers strum and hold down strings, each nail a different color. Green-blue-red-orange-purple. I smile at her hands bittersweetly, knowing what the colors attempt to hide. Her oh-so-sad sadness is embedded. The unexplained melancholy pain trying to smile at us, trying to stay deep down and away from prying eyes. Her veins becoming filled with lies instead of blood as she drains them every night. The white scars still puckered on her exposed ankles and thighs, the shorts unable to cover them.

I pull my eyes away from her and scoot down the grass to lie on my back, facing the sky, watching clouds move lazily to the right, her voice hitching rides on the wind and floating to everybody's ears. People stop to listen, stop their conversations, freeze in place, just to hear for a few seconds. The don't understand the sign, but they understand what real beauty is.

And then it's over. The song has ended, the frozen park slowly rotates back into life, continue their noisy conversations about swimming next week and about who did who last night. I sit up and she's standing there, guitar case strapped to her back, the ends of her long sleeves held in her fists.

"Back again, oh dearest Luke?" her sweet voice filling my ears, a song in itself.

I pull my eyes away from her sleeves and up to her eyes, a brown so dark it's black, ringed with puffy red skin covered with a layer of thin black makeup. "But of course."
"A normal girl would think that you're very creepy for knowing exactly when I'm at the park every day, you know."

"You aren't a normal girl though, now are you?" She raises her eyebrows at me for a moment before looking away and adjusting her guitar case strap. "Anyway, might I be able to take a picture of you on this oh-so-lovely day?"

"You will even if I say no."

"You know me so well." I pull myself off the grass and turn my camera on, pointing the lens at her smiling face and adjusting the zoom before snapping the single daily shot. I pull it away from my face, looking at the screen and flipping through the pictures of the past, and each is the same; red ringed black eyes with black makeup, wavy brown hair flying around her face, riding on the wind.

And when I look up, she's gone.

Just like every day.