Her name was Winona, and deep beneath the earth in the vault where she lived she was considered to be polite and unassuming, although Butch didn't know why.
She had deep, fiery colored hair and eyebrows that arched high at the ends, making it look like she was constantly frowning. As soon as he learned to speak he made fun of her weird eyebrows, snickering and chiding her whenever she walked into the bright blue light of the vaults classroom.
She would look the other way and pick at her nails when he teased her, never giving him the reaction that one would expect after being personally insulted. Whenever he'd yell things at her the other kids would stare at Winona, leaning forward and awaiting her anger with a baited breath. They would always be disappointed when she gazed at him quietly with a slightly raised brow, and then turned back to whatever unimportant thing she was doing.
Every time she entered a room he tried to ignore the feeling he had, but somewhere Butch knew that her odd appearance wasn't his true problem with her. It was that absence of something behind her eyes.
Winona always wore a strong look of disinterest, no matter who she looked at that or what someone said. Butch would have though it was annoyance if she had ever cared enough to be annoyed.
Her eyes stared right through everything. She didn't look through things in a way that meant she understood them, but in a way that simply meant nothing mattered to her.
The more Butch watched her the more he realized that nothing ever seemed to reach her. When he sat in the back of the classroom during detention he could see Winona standing outside with her father, and he watched him pull her into a hug. Butch had leaned back in his chair and craned his neck to see her eyes, and he saw her watching the clock on the wall, counting the ticking seconds and waiting until she could let him go.
When Butch sat with his friends in the diner in the booth they always claimed for themselves, he saw her sitting with her friend on the worn red bar stools. Winona would sit with her hands folded limply in her lap and every few minutes she would pretend to laugh at something Amata said. She would pry her mouth open to expose her small rows of white teeth and stretch her lips wide, holding up the ends of her mouth in an inhuman and unnatural way that looked like it was taking her a considerable amount of effort to do. She'd sit there posed like that as if she was part of a display. Then a sharp forced laugh rasped from her small lungs, and Butch shifted uncomfortably in his booth as he saw her watching Amata closely while she held up that jaunty smile, and the second Amata glanced away her face relaxed back to its placid state and remained there.
Butch would call her names, kick the back of her chair, and even pull her hair on occasion. It didn't do anything. She would just stare at him with a neutral face and turn away just as quickly.
He tried so hard to get her attention, but Winona was just another person who didn't care and it drove him crazy.
No one else seemed to notice. Amata thought they were friends, their teacher thought she was an outstanding citizen, but Butch knew differently and everyone else would too if anyone ever listened to him.
He saw it in the small polite nods, the tight close-lipped smiles she gave when her father nudged her because she wasn't paying attention to the person talking to her. Butch knew she had never meant a thing she said all her life.
He continued to bully her relentlessly, and at first he did it because he was angry. He hated her and he hated how much her father loved her and he hated her good grades and how beautiful he thought she was. Butch had never acknowledged this, but the motivation behind his torment slowly began wither and change, and then it morphed into something new and unknown to him.
His anger was still there, but as Winona continued to be a mystery he kept teasing her just to try and prove to himself that she had the ability to cry at all.
She didn't laugh and chat like everyone else, she never joked around or did anything that the overseer didn't allow. Winona just existed like a machine carrying out a daily routine, and Butch didn't like it. She seemed so desolate, but she didn't seem to care, which confused and intrigued Butch just as much as it frightened and intimidated him. His mother had said as much when she caught her son watching her.
"Don't go chasing her," she murmured behind the lip of a vodka bottle, "there's nothing to catch."
Butch had taken this as a challenge, and since then he had begun to chase her even more. He couldn't stop and he wouldn't stop until he had her figured out.
Years passed and she still put him on edge just as much as ever. Once they hit puberty Butch came up with a new theory. She was pretty, so maybe she looked through other people because she was so in love with herself that she didn't care about anyone else. He happily accepted this idea, as he thought it meant he could finally get her off his mind. Yet, Butch was proven wrong when he caught a glimpse of her standing in front of a mirror one day after school.
She was applying lipstick with the other girls halfheartedly, standing still as they scurried around in their bright blue vault jumpsuits. As she eased the bright red stick of color across her thin lips her eyes were unfocused and small. Even standing at the mirror they were dead and colorless, just as disinterested as they ever were. Butch squinted hard at her and leaned forward from the column he stood behind. He was searching for something, anything, but he jerked back in fear when Winona flicked the tube closed with a loud snap of her fingers and a quickness that made him step away and slink to his room.
When his mother noticed him watching her from across the dining room she shook her head and furrowed her thin brows at Butch. She reached out to touch him, but he pulled his arm away with a huff and raised his heavy shoulders high around his head.
No matter how hard he tried he couldn't tear his eyes away from her. He had tried to wriggle away, but he was stuck tight on her bright red lips, the sound of her sharp short laughter that she forced out before going silent again. He couldn't even bring himself away from the void and vacant look of her eyes.
"That girl," His mother began with her mouth drawn into a tight line. She reached out and grasped Butch's arm hard and squeezed him so that he'd know she was serious. "That girl has never loved a single thing all her life."
Butch had no idea where his mother got all these ideas about someone she had never even spoken to, but there was a twinge in his stomach that warned him what she said was true.
At the age of sixteen his patience broke, she couldn't get away with this, she couldn't keep pretending like Butch didn't exist.
He had been leaning against the wall with his friends. They had organized themselves into an unruly, makeshift gang, and it made them feel powerful. His friends were confident now, and they had already started yelling things at Winona as she passed, but Butch felt his heart bubble with anger and his right leg moved before he had time to even consider stopping himself.
Do something. He thought to himself as he stuck out his foot and tripped her. Cry, laugh, yell, do something, anything!
Winona fell forward and onto the floor, her pale cheek hit the cold metal floor beneath her with a thump. Butch's friends laughed as she lay there and blinked for a second. Amata scrambled beside her and yelled something at Butch, but he couldn't tear his eyes away from Winona.
For that second she was on the ground she just stared at the wall, any reaction gone from her face like someone had switched her off. Then Butch witnessed her switch herself back on, and she got up and gathered her things as if nothing had happened at all. Winona gave him a simple glance that revealed nothing, but then she continued on her way.
Butch felt his blood stop and then surge forward fast. His emotions whirled around him furiously, wriggling in tight circles in his brain until he couldn't produce a single coherent thought. He wanted her to look at him. No one ever looked at him and to have her so blatantly ignore him made him furious.
"Hey!" He screamed at her retreating form before he could keep the words from coming.
Butch stood there with his hands clenched into fists, his heart pounding in his ears and his eyes burning. Amata stopped shot and turned around with wide and shocked eyes, but Winona kept walking.
She continued a few feet before she noticed Amata wasn't following, and Butch heard her sigh before she stopped as well. She turned around slowly and her eyes stopped on him.
"What?" She asked. Her voice was sharp and it pierced through the silence with such force that every person in the hall flinched instinctively.
Her eyes flitted from him, to Amata, then back to him. She was looking right at him, but her eyes were so chillingly blank that Butch suddenly didn't want her to look at him anymore. For a few moments they stood there, staring at each other as he tried to force words from his mouth, but he couldn't manage anything but a strange strangled sound.
He couldn't take this anymore. He couldn't stomach the embarrassment. Butch turned and ran down the hall, away from her. His boots slammed against the floor with loud thumps as he tore down the tunnels with no planned destination.
A closet door stood partly open, beckoning him, and Butch flung himself inside and slammed against the wall. He beat his fists against his knees and swore angrily. He huffed and heaved angry air in and out of his lungs. To his relief no one came after him, especially not her.