If he was forced to be honest, the first time he had seen her, he hadn't really noticed her. She'd been tense, shifting her weight from her heels to her toes, over and over. She was nervous, scared of the people around her, even if the (obviously new) clothes she was wearing made her look like part of the pack. Even then, her outfit a clone of theirs, her makeup painstakingly drawn on, she looked like she was afraid that one of them would wake up, snap out of it and lash out at her. Destroy her. But then again, it was high school. Everyone looked like that.
He'd looked like that before. Maybe not the makeup, but definitely the rest. He'd worn jeans, like everyone else in his grade had done. He'd worn shirts for bands that everyone talked about and he'd never listened to. But still, he'd stood out. Constantly being the new kid, changing high schools every couple of months or so, had definitely not helped, and being the kid without a mom and with the sociopathic semi-famous father hadn't either, but there was something else that made him unable to blend into the chaos around him. He'd stared at himself in the mirror and been unable to pinpoint exactly what it was, or at least, he hadn't been able to admit it to himself.
Still, eventually he'd given up trying, both to figure it out and to hide it, and he'd done the opposite instead. Worn what he liked, clothes he knew would make him stand out, but that he was comfortable in. He'd started wearing his dad's old trench coat, the one he'd worn before they'd started moving so often. His dad didn't like him wearing it but didn't say much about it, so he kept doing it. He learned how to sew by fixing up the holes he sometimes tore in it by accident, or that other people sometimes tore on purpose.
He took a gun to school once. Didn't get it out or anything. There weren't even any bullets in it. But he liked having it with him, even if nobody else knew. It made him feel vulnerable. He didn't feel vulnerable very often, at least not since his mother had died. He felt watched, with was normal for him, but it had taken him until the end of the day to accidentally show it to someone. It was a mistake, he turned in the hallway and crashed into someone, a guy around his age, and his backpack had fallen out of his hand and onto the ground, the gun and some binders sliding out before he could do anything about it. He'd ducked down, grabbed his stuff and gotten out of there fast, and never looked up the see the other person's face. He'd changed schools a couple of days later, but as far as he knew, the boy hadn't told any of the teachers what he'd seen.