A tune played in Vanessa's head, and her shoes slapped the broken sidewalk to it's light rhythm. After a few steps, she added words to the melody under her breath. Walking home from school she had gotten enough strange looks for singing aloud or talking to herself that she knew not to make it too painfully obvious she was less than normal. Normal, in fact, was a word that could be used in the same sentence as her name only if the word isn't was between them.
She dressed normally enough, and her family was anything but extraordinary. It was Vanessa's peculiar outlook on life which made her peers uncomfortable around her. She didn't mind much- either people liked her the way she was, or they didn't, and there was nothing she could do about it without changing herself. And she liked the way she was, even if it brought her trouble.
She liked doing things that made her heart race, although adrenaline was hard to come by in this small town, within walking distance of neither an urban nor a rural area for her to reek havoc. She like thinking: spending hours alone with the air and the time and her thoughts. In her thoughts, she sometimes lost hold of herself and felt as though it wasn't her in the world, but rather that she was the world. She found folds of her consciousness that didn't fully belong to her, half-in, half-out. She told nobody these secret thoughts— she could imagine how a conversation like that would go: full of peculiar looks and patronizing questions and false excuses to leave her to her questionable sanity. After many futile attempts to get others to talk with her about things she felt or saw or heard in the confines of her thoughts, Vanessa decided that she just paid more attention than others, and if they didn't bother to see the mystery of the world they lived in, well, who was she to burst the plain, safe little bubble people made for themselves. After all, ignorance is bliss.
Vanessa also had a secret. She had power, a way with things unusual. Strange incidents seemed to surround her like an aura, and she planned on finding out why. Today she intended on taking all her strength and pouring it into that piece of her mind that was only partly her own. She would find out what that power was and how to use it, the moment she got home