Chapter 4

“Ouch,” a guy said with a hiss when he passed by me, waving his hand in the air as if he’d been burned. “Keep down the coldness, babe.” His other friends smirked and smacked hands with him in manly approval.

See? Pure love.

“Baboons,” Linda muttered, glaring at them.

I glanced at her with a frown. “Baboons? Is that an insult?”

“Baboons are vile.”

I rolled my eyes. So much for having a saint-cursing friend. “Don’t waste your anger on them—which is obviously limited. Keep it for Brad instead.”

“How can you put up with this?” she asked. “You’re not an ice queen, Dafne. Maybe you can be a little cold-blooded sometimes, but you’re not heartless like everybody thinks. I know you and…”

“Linda,” I stopped her, holding up my hand. “I don’t care about what they think of me. They can call me whatever they want. And I don’t mind being an ice queen. It’s way better than being a tramp or a dumb cheerleader with two pompoms as a brain.”

“Thanks a lot.”

What? I hadn’t mentioned her name, and then, “no,” I shook my head, realizing the major slip up I’d done. “I didn’t mean you, Linda. You ended with that cheering business a long time ago—thank God.” I added with a sigh, and then came back to my original train of thought. “Anyway, you’re not that type of girl. You’re light years away from dumbland.”

Still, she didn’t seem convinced.

“Come on, Linda. You know I wasn’t talking about you.”

“Well…there’s only one way to know.”

“Tell me, then.” I said, hooking my right thumb on the belt loop of my low jeans.

She crossed her arms over her chest and said, “If you tell me which mascara you normally use, I’ll believe you.”

“Not again,” I said annoyed, snagging my shoulders in a gesture of absolute weariness. “I already told you I don’t use any of that stuff. And what does it have to do with any of this?”

“Nothing, I'm just using this weak moment of yours to convince you to share with your best friend your beauty secrets—because I don’t believe you. You can’t have those big, feathery eyelashes just like that. It’s not normal.”

I sighed. “Okay, you found me. I'm an alien from the fourth district of Venus.”

“Stop it.” She tilted her head, looking at me with exasperation. “You’re so selfish.”

I didn’t understand why it was so hard to believe I didn’t use makeup to come to school. My eyelashes were big enough and curled already. The only thing I allowed myself to pick up in the morning was a dusting of pink blush to spread across my high cheekbones and chin—my skin was almost two shades below ghostly white, and the long dark hair on top didn’t help. The contrast only deepened the pallor, thus a little help was always welcome. But beyond that, everything on me was honest-to-God natural-born. All made in Mom’s belly.

My throat clogged. It was the second time in the day I’d thought about my parents. Normally, the piercing memories were only acknowledged at night, when I was on my own and not in the public eye. Thinking about them during the day put me in a black hole, blocking my way to a free and easy road. And let’s just say that the road during the day was a lot longer than during the night, so doing this for a second time today meant sinking myself deeper into that shady hole while I still had a big piece of road ahead. I was breaking the rules. My rules to survive the day.

“It’s not selfishness,” I said, trying to ignore the thorn in the back of my throat while putting up a poised stance. “It’s being beautiful as hell.”

“Arrogant much?”

“Hey, I'm just telling the truth. Is being straightforward a crime?”

“Not for an alien from the fourth district of Venus, I guess.”

We laughed and moved on to our next class.

The school here wasn’t that different from the one I used to attend back in Chicago. There were the same rows of blue lockers bracing the hallways, the polished floor scratched by students’ frantic soles, the classroom doors with lab-like windows, the long lights trailing after one another on the ceiling—maybe there was a slight difference on the size—okay, maybe it wasn’t slight. The one in Chicago was at least two times bigger. But this was a very small city after all.

Actually, I could hardly call it a “city,” but together with West Berryford, on the other side of the Wabash River (where Ian’s preppy university was), this town-like place spurted to life, giving it a somewhat city vibe. A lame one, at that.

The atmosphere in this school, though, felt entirely different. And it wasn’t because I’d changed from the time I used to wander hallways with more than one friend at my side, cheery and careless, with no care in the world but parties and hookups. It was because almost half of the people here could only think about reading or writing, which was kind of odd. There were always those who favored the library or some small spot under a tree shadow outside, but the cafeteria? The bathrooms? The hallways? The stairs? They were everywhere with a book sprawled open in their hands, or with an open notebook lying in their laps as if somehow they couldn’t unlock their eyes from the pages.

It hadn’t been always like this, of course. But I couldn’t tell when it’d begin. It was, in fact, a wonder I’d noticed any of this. Usually, I was in my own world, surfing in the waves of my thoughts. Every now and then I stepped out onto the shore of reality to make small talk with Linda, but a few seconds later my mind was back on the surfboard, far away from those who surrounded me.