Inklings 4 - Shadow Girl

Shadow Girl

I first see her when I am in the cafeteria, Tuesday morning.  Unlike usual I'm not sitting at a table doodling.  Jake stole my notebook, and I am attempting to pry it out of his fingers when I see a teenage girl, probably my age, walking.  She drifts down the aisle between crowded tables, with no backpack or anything else in her hands as a matter of fact.  She isn't going anywhere, and that's what strikes me as odd.  On a Tuesday morning, in the seventh grade, just before school starts, 

you are always going somewhere.

Jake yanks my notebook out of my hands just as the girl passed behind me, and laughs - loudly.  So does his whole table.  He shoves the notebook back at me, scowling and smiling at the same time.  He turns away.  My daily torture session is over.

The girl is long gone - probably sitting laughing in this sea of kids, surrounded by friends.  I stalk off, grumbling about wasted sketching time.  Jake does this every day, whether it be at lunch or in the morning, or even in class, and somehow never gets caught by the "scouting" teachers.  My fist clenches.  Bullying alert indeed.

I plop down in a chair at the empty table where I always sit.  My pencil and bag are still where I left them thank goodness - only my notebook got stolen today.  I don't feel much like drawing though.  That's when I see her again, standing in the breakfast line.  There's something different about her floaty hair, her misty eyes, her -

The bell rings, and instantly the whole cafeteria is thrown into chaos.  The girl quickly vanishes into the crowd.  I shoulder a backpack and walk dejectedly to my first class.  Jake and his buddies come up behind me in the crowd, jeering insults.  I ignore them and trudge on.  Glancing behind me, I see her again.  She must be new - no bag and no direction. I remember being new.  Jake wasn't around, and I followed the faces I recognized.  Maybe she recognizes me.  Maybe there is someone else she is following.  Maybe I am wrong and I was just noticing her now.

I have math class next, and the girl gets buried under pre-Algebra.  Social studies passes without event also.  I only have one class left till lunch.  Jake rules this class though.  It's his territory.

I groan and get ready for English.  The little old lady talks to us about semicolons and the use of said punctuation blah blah blah; I drift into a doze from boredom.  Jake reaches out and flicks me, hard, on the back of the head.  I'm wide-awake again.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see someone.  A girl.  The new girl I think, because there's no backpack clinging like a leech to her shoulders and she's late - well, she must be because I didn't see her when I came in.  She meanders around the desks while I try to figure out how she came in silently through the creaky door.

I look at her.  Even at first glance, there is something uniquely different about her.  Plain brown hair that half-floats behind her as she walks.  Serene, blue eyes - curious eyes I think.  Pale skin, like she's been kept inside to long.  High cheekbones with rosy patches, arching over Qupid-worthy lips.  On closer inspection I notice something else about this new girl.  Sometimes, especially in darker areas in the already dingy classroom, she glows.

Not a lot.  Just a glimmer here.  A sparkle there.  It must be my imagination.  But could I also be imagining that no one else seems to see her?  She practically is breathing down the neck of Elena Miller and not a peep out of any of the students.  I can't help it.  I'm staring at this total stranger.

Jake smacks me on the back of the head again.  Snickering, he mutters in my ear - something about daydreamers.  He doesn't seem to notice the almost ghostly girl hovering behind him, expression of...sadness?...on her face.  I can't exactly pin her serene expressions.  So Jake can't see my shocked face, I turn back to my worksheet.  By the time I can dare to lookup again, the girl has vanished, without a hint of a creak from the door hinges.

The door definitely creaks when the class leaves for lunch.  Most of the kids around me are groaning about homework.  A few curse semicolons and who ever invented them.  I think about the mysterious new girl. I realize that I have never heard her speak to anyone.  I wonder...can she?

At lunch, I barely touch my stale macaroni.  Jake hasn't bothered to visit my lowly corner of the seventh grade world today, so I am left alone to draw.  I try to draw the girl's face, but all attempts fail.  Then I see her once more.  She's standing at the end of the cafeteria, opposite of the wandering lunch line.The girl is already heading my way, slowly, but like she wants to meet me.  No one's face turns when she passes.  No one smiles at her somber expression.  No one seems to hear the clicking of her shoes against the floor.  She stops at each table and examines each person when she walks by.  Nobody notices.

At last she arrives at my table.  I stare wide eyed at her, then open my sketchbook, trying to nonchalantly draw.  For a moment, I forget how to.  I'm really watching her blue eyes over the edge of my notebook though.  After a time, she stands, and without so much as a word or a backwards glance, she walks off.  I stand, then run after her.  I want to ask her is she knows where's she's going.  Somehow though, I think I know that she does.  I think that that girl knows a lot of things that I don't.

I catch her in the hall.  She's walking slowly, the same way she walked to my table a moment before, down the center of the hallway.  Her dress sways behind her, and even though I run as fast as a I can, I can't catch up to her steady, snail-pace walk.  "Wait!"  I yell in desperation, half-hoping for an answer.  "Wait up!  I need to ask you something!"

She turns, a slight frown forming on her pink lips.  Her eyes burn into me, and we stand there for a long time, just staring at eachother.  My labored pants eventually fade, and her eyebrows crease even more, almost like she's worried.  She looks at me reproachfully, and she takes a step toward me, slower than any step she had taken before now.  There is another pause as the echo of her heeled shoes disappears.  She takes another step.  Then another.  And another.  And another.

Finally we are nose-to-nose, my eyes staring directly into those vague blue ones.  A tear rolls down her cheek and she says, in a small, quiet voice, worn out from disuse, "You can see me?"

Noelle