Just a Little Luck
4
It became very apparent that Amanda didn't fit in at school, once it started. Nobody else wore shorts and t-shirts, letting the skin touch them; nobody else wore their hair up either.
With her tan skin and stringy hair, she didn't fit in with the pale skinned, voluminous-haired doll girls that paraded in skirts and blouses that covered them up from the sun. Even the teachers had the same pale skin and gaped at her during the first day.
Crossing her legs, she felt her face turn red under the gawking stares, splotchy with red patches all over.
The guy next to her stabbed the pink eraser of her pencil into the red blush on her forearm. The kid's hair was so short, it was like a shadow over his skull, and he had the palest, thinnest eyebrows Amanda had ever seen. The entire class, he just kept nudging her with the flat end of his eraser, digging it into her skin, over and over, an awed expression on his face.
"Stop," she said to him after scooting her desk away from his.
He looked up once, vacancy written all over his face as though he was as high as the clouds, and the continued to dig the eraser into her skin.
The blush darkened into a red irritation, flaky and patchy.
"Hey, buddy," said a voice and she looked over to find Ray scowling at the kid. "Knock it off before I knock your head off." There was a hard biting edge in his velvet voice that she hadn't been there before, when they spoke months ago, in the summer heat, her skin peeling, Petey snarling and dripping saliva everywhere.
This was the first she'd seen him since then and his hair was short now, not quite shoulder-length but ear-length, curls at the nape of his neck. He looked sickly, pasty pale instead of porcelain, and the spiderweb of veins underneath his skin, translucent, was painfully blue, ultrablue, like the ocean in the Caribbean. His eyes were paler, more like the color of lilacs and lacecap hydrangeas and less like robin eggs.
The eraser kid took one glance and his entire face went chalk-white as he scooted away, chair scraping the linoleum floor, all noise and heavy breathing. In short, the kid looked ready to pee himself.
Ray's lips peeled back in a satisfied smile, no teeth, as he leaned into Amanda's personal space.
When she breathed, it smelled like deodorant and mint gum and boy sweat. It was overwhelming and distracting. His arm touched hers, icy through the fabric of his sweatshirt, and she jumped at the shock of his cool skin.
He laughed in her face.
"I'm sorry," he apologized once his laughter subsided. He looked painfully handsome, head cocked to one side, eyes half-lidded.
A dimple carved a hole into his cheek. "You're just so easily frightened. It's like having a little rabbit." He shifted and his knee bumped her hip. His skin was far too chilly, even through jeans, to be considered normal.
"Quite the complexion you've got there," he said, tugging on a piece of her hair gently and inhaled deeply, as though he was trying to breathe her in, all at once, marveling at her with his eyes closed.
She tried to lean away as inconspicuously as she could, but unfortunately she wasn't doing a very good job. When he opened his eyes, she found herself pinned to her seat. He had this hungry, desperate look plastered on his face.
A cold panic rolled through her, bitter and icy, and she hugged herself around the waist. She crossed and re-crossed her legs and pinched the baby fat on her hip. The pain didn't loosen her panic and she pinch, pinch, pinched hard, until the skin turned pink, brighter than the tip of the Eyebrowless Kid's eraser. Heat swelled to the pinched area and she rubbed it away, soothing the sharp little cramp from pinching it hard enough to break the skin. A pocket of hysteria opened up in her chest, wide and gaping and little black spiders with the words hysteria for legs crawled out, swarming her thighs and legs.
Beside her, Eyebrowless Kid was talking in hushed whispers to the other freakishly pale kids and froze when they saw her looking.
"You okay?" Ray's voice was too close, right against her ear, and she nodded. Clenched her jaw against the chattering teeth that would follow because his hand was on her leg—her bare leg—and goosebumps were popping all over her body, her arms and her neck and her legs, little hairs sticking on end.
Kids were walking around, going back and forth to grab supplies from the project area at the far wall and with every pass, a gust of artic air rushed at Amanda.
She wrapped her arms around herself and gave an extra-sneaky pinch as she jotted down a couple of quick ideas. They had to write or draw something related to Edgar Allen Poe's The Pit and the Pendulum.
Amanda stole a glance to her left to see the familiar blonde-haired boy getting up, headed for the supply table.
Stacks of neat poster paper with alternating stacks of magazines covered the table; a huge cardboard box of Crayola markers and sharpies sat right next to them. Glue sticks and scissors, the sharp, teacher-only kind that your parents tell you no to run with, stuck out of a little, plastic blue cup emblazoned with "Night Light's Poetry Slam."
The brunette let her eyes follow Ray's smooth, almost effortless gait across the room, his hair barely shifting even when some frilly-clothed girl bumped into him and made a big show of laughing about it, full teeth on display, twirling her hair, the whole shebang.
Amanda stared down at her paper, where her pen tip sat, drilling a hole into the sheet, and tries to think. Him falling. Good. One arm—no, bend it more. Ragged clothes. Okay. Good. Another arm, maybe, outstretched towards him?
"Wow, you're really good at drawing," said Eyebrowless Kid beside her.
Amanda blinked and looked down at her faint, messy sketch. A gaunt-faced boy was falling backwards towards an open door, reaching out for the arm on the other side of the paper, panic clear on his face. The only thing wrong with it, per say, was the boy falling look a lot like Ray.
She lifted her eyes to find those lacecap hydrangea eyes staring at her.