I just don’t care. I stand at my locker this fine October morning and stare down the hallway. A homecoming banner decorates the mouth of the hallway, reminding students to buy tickets for the football game this Friday night. Someone put that banner up there. God, someone made that banner. Someone painted it and everything. Students pass me wearing outfits for this particular day of homecoming spirit week, which happens to be hippie day. Lots of peace signs and tie-dye floating around. So much school spirit.
I barely finish my homework every night; how does anyone else have the willpower to care like this? The people having the most fun, dressed in the most ridiculous costumes, are seniors like me. How? Why? These are legitimate questions: I feel like someone told a joke and I missed the punchline, and now everyone’s laughing without me.
I stand by my locker in stretched-out jeans and a baggy sweatshirt, counting the minutes until I have to give up and go to homeroom. A group of boys wearing tie-dye headbands and rose-colored glasses crowd up to the locker beside mine; one of them throws it open so hard it smacks me between the shoulder blades. The boy who did it starts to apologize, then sees that it’s me and loses his voice to a badly concealed snort. I turn away and ignore them until they leave again, when one of the others pulls his hood up and acts like a cave creature, his back hunched and his hands held out in gnarled claws. The other boys laugh, as if they aren’t still within my sight. I yank my own hood down.
I don’t understand this place, but I only have to survive it for seven more months—seven months until graduation, until college. And college, as I have heard it from several respectable sources in the Monstrous Sea fandom, is so much better than high school it’s laughable.
I want to be there. I want to be in the place where high school is the joke, and I don’t have to be near people if I don’t want to, and nobody cares what I wear or look like or do.
When the boys disappear around the corner and all attention fades away from me, I turn back to my locker. Freshman year, I festooned it in graphics and fanmade art for Children of Hypnos, my favorite book series. A few early Monstrous Sea sketches hid in the corners, but that was before Monstrous Sea was even a thing. Now my locker is empty aside from my school stuff. I stuff my stats and history books in my backpack. Wedge my sketchbook under my arm. The backpack gets slung over my shoulders, and my dignity tucked safely away.
On to homeroom.
“Eliza. I need to borrow you for a little while.” Mrs. Grier has a bad habit of grabbing the first student who walks through her door when she needs something, and today I’m the unlucky plebe she gets her happy teacher hands on. She beams at me, looking the picture of joy in an unseasonal yellow sundress and earrings shaped like bananas.
I ease my arm out of her hand so it doesn’t seem like I don’t want her to touch me. I don’t mind Mrs. Grier. Most days I like her. I wish I had her for an actual class instead of just homeroom, because she doesn’t make me talk if I don’t want to, and she counts showing up to class as your entire participation grade.
“We have a transfer student new to the school today,” she says, smiling, and steps sideways. Behind her is a boy a little taller than me, football-player big, wearing jeans and a Westcliff High T-shirt. He hasn’t even been here a day, and he’s already got the school spirit. He scrubs a hand through his short dark hair and glances at me, expression blank, like he doesn’t quite see me there. My stomach turns. He is exactly the kind of person I try to avoid—I like being invisible, not having someone look at me like I should be.
“This is Wallace,” Mrs. Grier says. “I thought you could give him a few tips about the school and help him with his schedule before we leave homeroom.”
I shrug. I’m not going to say no to her. “No” usually makes more problems than it solves. Mrs. Grier smiles.
“Great! Wallace, this is Eliza. You can go ahead and sit next to her.”
Wallace follows me to my seat in the back of the room. He moves slow, sits slow, and looks around like he’s still asleep. He glances at me again, and when I don’t say anything, he pulls his phone out of his pocket and starts going through texts.
I didn’t want to say anything to him, anyway. The school isn’t that confusing—I’m sure he’s smart enough to figure it out on his own.
I curl up my legs in the desk chair, set my sketchbook against them so no one can see the inside, and begin work on the next Monstrous Sea page. I forget Wallace. I forget Mrs. Grier. I forget this whole school.
I’m gone.
I get through the day the way I always do: by disappearing so well the teachers never see me, and by resisting the temptation to check the Monstrous Sea forums on my phone. I’ve heard it’s much easier to get through school when you have friends to talk to, but all my friends are online. I used to have offline friends. Or at least I thought I did. Growing up, I had friends in school and in my neighborhood, but never good friends. Never friends who invited me to sleepovers or movies. I got invited to a couple of birthday parties, but sometimes I think that was because my mom badgered other moms. I was a weird kid then, and I’m weird now. Except now neither I nor any of my classmates is under the delusion that we have to interact with each other on a more than superficial basis.
Dad likes to say thinking I’m weird is normal. “Well, Eggs, you’re just going to have to trust me when I say that’s a thing a lot of kids your age think.” Maybe he’s right. All I know is, last year Casey Miller saw me walking behind her in the hallway and actually squealed in fear before she skipped away. She halfheartedly apologized a second later, of course, but it was a packed hallway during passing period—who gets scared by another student behind them? I know a week before that, I walked into gym late because of particularly nasty period cramps and scored my entire class ten minutes of stair laps that to this day have earned me the sort of looks that should be reserved for murderers. I know a few months before that, Manny Rodriguez invited some of his swimmer friends to cut me in the lunch line, only to have them refuse because they were afraid I’d call down a demon on them.
Is that the kind of person I seem like? A cultist? A religious fanatic? Am I so weird I should be the bad guy of the week on a prime-time television crime show?
My parents wonder why I don’t have more friends, and this is why: because I don’t want to be friends with these people. Even the nice ones think I’m weird; I can see it in their faces when they get paired with me for projects. I’m the person you pray the teacher doesn’t call for your group. Not because I’m a terrible student, or because I make you do all the work, but because I dress like a homeless person and I never talk. When I was really little, it was endearing. Now it’s strange.
I should have grown out of it.
I should want to be social.