Disclaimer: I do not own Twilight.
Chapter Four: Waiting
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Charles asked, "Why do people always mistrust people who are different? Am I really that different?"
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Kim spent the rest of the two weeks, three days that Jared missed of school silently waiting. And watching.
She moved swiftly every day through the throng of students to get to her locker, hoping – and praying – that Jared would be there, laughing with his friends over some prank they had pulled the previous day.
The frustrating thing was that there was no one she could ask about where Jared was. She knew no one. No one knew her.
Although Kim tended to be very private about her feelings, Joey had noticed the first day that all wasn't right. Usually, she came in from school and drew with Joey after his art class before she started on her homework. That first day that Jared was gone, she didn't feel like it.
"Why don't you draw something special without me today, Joey. I feel kind of …. tired," said Kim, her head low.
Joey had looked at Kim in confusion. A growing horror surfaced in his little-boy mind as the certainty grew that Kim looked like she was about to cry.
He hurriedly assured her, "It's okay, Kim. Today was a pottery day, not a drawing day anyway. I'll just get some clay out." He patted her arm awkwardly and then dashed to the art cabinet to rummage his clay out from underneath jumbled boxes of paper, paint, and colored pencils.
It had taken her mother until the next Saturday to notice that something was not right when Kim showed no interest in looking at a new rug Mrs. Donoma had unearthed at a garage sale earlier that morning. Knowing that Kim would talk when she was ready (and would not if someone tried to pry the truth from her), she had given her daughter a hug – which made Kim blush – and gone back to her own business.
So, two weeks and three days later Kim sat at her lunch table in the corner of the cafeteria. No one else sat there because it was shadowed and gloomy. The big florescent light above her table had busted years ago and the administration had never taken the time to replace it. She didn't even think anyone knew the table was back there.
She got to her seat early because she didn't come to help Mrs. Sokw with the food today. Mrs. Sokw had stared at Kim reproachfully when she stepped in line to buy her lunch, but she couldn't bring herself to care. However, even though she got through the lunch line early, it didn't matter. No one ever saw her walk to her seat if she was late or early. Kim, with her fluid walk and small stature, was able to just vanish. No one noticed her at all.
From her little corner, she could read or watch the students trooping in from fifth period classes. Although she always had a book with her (usually Measure for Measure – her favorite Shakespeare play or The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene), she rarely read, preferring to watch the people around her. She confessed to herself that she liked trying to figure people out….which was usually a subterfuge for saying that she liked to figure Jared out – something that she only admitted to herself on good days. It was usually he she watched in the cafeteria.
She couldn't help but cherish a small little hope every day that he was gone that she had just missed him at his locker – come in too late from dropping her little brothers off at school – and that she would see him at lunch. She could see it so clearly in her mind's eye. He would be laughing at the table, regaling his friends with tall tales of how sick he was, after which everyone would settle to gossiping about the school and its inhabitants like they normally did.
But he wasn't here today.
Kim sighed as the bell rang. She carefully threw away her lunch and walked to her English class.
Kim would have liked English even if Jared had not been in the class. There was something about reading that entranced her…. Maybe it was because she could walk just one step behind the characters she read about – share to some small degree the completely different experiences of their world. She wasn't sure if any of her classmates realized just how alien the characters in the books they read were from them … how liberating and yet how terrifying it was to feel – even if just for a little while – the consciousness of someone completely Other.
She sometimes wondered if adopting someone else's way of seeing things could almost become a transcendental experience … because even as she saw things the way the character saw them, she never left her own consciousness away completely – and the tension between the two created a special kind of exhilaration.
She also imagined that the sensation of reading a book was similar to mind-reading. Except, of course, that book characters don't talk back.
On this day, however, Kim was not interested in the lives of Ophelia or Prospero or David Copperfield. She barely listened to Mrs. Chosovi, unconsciously scribbling and writing on her notebook paper. It was a nervous habit that she picked up when she was in elementary school – sixth grade, to be exact. When the bell rang and she looked down to see what she had written, she scowled, and her cheeks turned a dark red. She crumpled up the paper, thrusting it into a pocket of her backpack.
Over and over she had written Mrs. Tala-Hania.
