Girl und Boy (Working Title)

Linden Gomez had never been considered conventional. He was the goth, the rebel, the kid your sister wasn’t allowed to date.
This suited him just fine. It wasn’t that he didn’t like people, just that he didn’t make friends easily. Those he did make tended to be mostly other goths or kids who liked the same things. The latter sort were few and far between, since Linden had a fascination with the offbeat and unusual.
He loved hunting down obscure facts and records, even collectibles. He’d never noticed it himself, but others did. It was his hobby. His friends joked around about it, commenting on how “only Linden could find a collectible in WalMart.”
Linden was happy being abnormal, but even he fit in a box. He was in the Goth box, where the teachers descend on the weak like vultures. He got tired of being with cynical people, sometimes, and of being picked on. That’s why, when he saw Ember, he felt like he’d found a flower on a barren mountaintop. She was different.
It’s perfectly normal to notice something strange, right? Like, say, if you went to school with the same girl for six years in a row. And maybe if she wore weird clothes. It’d be normal to notice that, right?
These are the thoughts that were dominating Linden’s mind at that pariticular moment. Ember Vesteway had been in his class for a long time, and she stood out. A lot. So it was fair that he paid attention to what she was wearing. And maybe her face. Hobbies. Action in the school.
He’d be the first to admit it. He might have a crush. He couldn’t help it! She was interesting.
He’d pass her in the hallway, and if she was with friends she’d be laughing and talking in a garbled mess of multiple foreign languages. Some days she’d walk alone with this empty look on her face. Linden had never figured out if that meant she was sad, or if her mind was somewhere else.
In fact, maybe Ember as a whole was somewhere else, or at least from somewhere else. It seemed like she didn’t belong here, and she knew it.
It was these things that Linden noticed and liked about her. Unfortunately, he had only one class with her (unless you count lunch). This was art. He couldn’t talk to her then, because she was always drawing, or sculpting, or welding, and she did it all with that blank look on her face.
Maybe today will be different, he thought absently. Maybe today will be a group project.
He wound his way through the halls carefully. This part of the school was home to all the arts departments, and the students and teachers who frequented them were known to be treacherously careless. Any day you might step on a stereo antenna, or a rubber duck. A student last year had gotten a large papier-måché boulder dropped on his head.
Unexpectedly the door loomed in his face. Linden couldn’t believe he’d been preoccupied enough to be startled, as it was bright pink, and incredibly eye-catching. Usually you noticed this door.
He took a breath to steady himself, and pushed the door. The door shuddered, then swung open fast enough that Linden fell forward. He heard a large thud, as though the door had hit something.
Looking up, his eyes met a deep blue gaze, which quickly turned into a glare. His heart sank. He had just knocked over Ember, and she was pissed. She must’ve been in the middle of a creativity storm, as her hair was tied up sloppily and she wore a lab coat. Probably to protect her clothes, he thought.
She stood quickly, rising up to her full four foot eight inches. The effect was supposed to be frightening, but Linden was preoccupied admiring the way the light glinted off her hair and eyes. Her hair was another strange thing; it was bleach-blonde at the top and golden at the ends. Linden figured this was natural, as it had always been this way. Her eyes were pretty normal. They were a deep sea-colored blue, a color he’d heard her call mellowed cobalt.
He realized she was saying something.
“-did you think you didn’t need to look before you opened the door? Are you seriously that arrogant? Forget it, I don’t care. Too busy.”
Linden scrambled to his feet. “Uh, listen, Ember, I- I’m really sorry-”
She cut him off. “I’m fine. Just go back to whatever you’re doing.” As she walked away, she added under her breath, “Stinking pavao, uji, piece’a merde, hurts like-”
Linden winced. Way to go, genius. She’ll remember you now.