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5

  A Thousand Different Ways

  Friday, January 13th

  · Patrick ·

  The rest of the week was—awesome. Connor stopped getting on my case for staring at Nualla, and when I saw Michael in the hall I was pretty sure he loathed me, which just made my grin like an idiot. Best of all, Nualla talked to me in class as if we had always talked; like we had always been friends. I was so thrilled I didn’t even think to ask about her complete obliviousness to my existence for the last three years.

  The more I talked to her, the less nervous about the whole thing I felt. It was like just being near her was putting me at ease. I could almost feel the calmness radiating out from her. I found myself answering all kinds of things about myself but still learning very little about her.

  Though I had spent hours looking online, I hadn’t learned a whole lot from her Facebook page. Sure, there were photos but not a whole lot, and nothing that really revealed that much about her that I didn’t already know. I couldn’t believe that she didn’t lead an interesting life, so why didn’t she post any of it? It almost seemed like the bits that were online were just for show. Maybe her parents checked up on her and she didn’t want them to see what she was up to or something.

  So all I had to go on was what I had learned from just observing her in class. A lot of little things that added up to a very interesting picture; well at least to me anyways. Her favorite color was blue, she adored cats and she had a fondness for big black boots. She hated having to pull her hair back for Chem class. She drank coffee to an almost obsessive level.

  She would play with her necklace unconsciously when she was nervous or bored. Which now that I was sitting close to her, I could actually see clearly. It was a weird sort of pendant. It looked Egyptian with a gazelle horned deity with a cartouche above. But the letters on the cartouche didn’t look Egyptian; they looked like something else, something I could almost remember.

  But mostly I had learned that there was something different about her, something hiding behind those eyes. She gave herself away in a thousand different ways each day; I just didn’t know yet what all the pieces meant.