The search

"Very much different." I replied to Ulrich

"It does not rain much there, does it?"

"Only three or four times a year."

"Wow, what must that be like?" he pondered.

"Its Sunny," I told him.

"You do not look very tan."

"Yeah! that is because My mother is half albino."

He examined my face apprehensively, and I sighed. It looked like clouds and a sense of humor did not mix.

A few months of this and I had forget how to use sarcasm.

We strolled back around the cafeteria, to the south buildings by the gym. Ulrich walked me right in front of the door, though it was visibly marked.

"Well, good luck," he said as I grabbed the door handle.

"Perharps we will have some other classes together." He sounded hopeful.

I vaguely smiled at him and sharply went inside.

The rest of the morning passed in about the same style. Mr. Varner was my Trigonometry teacher, so if there is anyone I would have hated, it should be him just because of the subject he taught.

But he was the only one who made me stand in front of the class and had me introduce myself to the class.

I sputtered, flickered, and plunged over my own boots on the way to my seat.

After two classes, I began to recognize several of the faces in each class. There was always someone smarter and braver than the others who would have themselves introduced and ask me questions about how I was liking Barbourville.

I tried to be prudent, but mostly I just lied a lot. At least I no longer needed the map.

One girl sat next to me in both Trig and Spanish, and she strolled with me to the cafeteria for lunch. She was tiny and several inches shorter than my six feet four inches, but her wildly curled dark hair made up a lot of the distinction between our heights.

I could not remember her name, so I smiled and bobbed as she babled about teachers and

classes. But I did not try to keep up.

We sat at the end of a full table with many of her friends who she introduced to me. I forgot all their names as soon as she spoke them to me.

They seemed impressed by her bravery in talking to me.

Ulrich, the boy from English waved at me from across the room. He was there sitting in the lunchroom, trying to make

conversation with seven curious strangers.

They were relaxing in the corner of the cafeteria, as far away from where I sat as possible in the long room. There were five of them, they were not talking, and they were not eating either, though they each had a tray of untouched food in front of them.

They were not gawking at me, unlike most of the other students, so it was safe to gaze at them without fear of meeting an excessively prying pair of eyes. But it was none of these things that caught and held my attention.

The three boys did not look anything alike. One had a big muscle like a serious weight lifter with curly and dark hair. Another was leaner and taller but was still muscular and honey blond. And the last among them was lanky, less bulky and with bronze colored hair that looks untidy.

He was more boyish than the others, who looked more like they could be in college or even teachers here instead of students.

The girls sat opposite them. The tall one was statuesque, she had a beautiful figure like the kind you saw on the cover of the sports swimsuit issue.

The kind that made every girl around her take a hit on her self value just by being in the same room with her. Her hair was light golden, calmly flapping to the middle of her back.

The short girl was pixie-like, thin and with small features. Her hair was intensively black, trimmed short and was pointing in every direction.

And yet, they were all really alike. Every one of them was chalky pale, the palest anong all the students living in this sunless town. Even Paler than an albino like me.

They all had very dark eyes despite the range in hair tones. They also had dark shadows under those eyes that looks purplish in color and bruiselike shadows.

As if they were all in agony a sleepless night or almost done recovering from a broken nose.

Though the features of all their noses were straight, excellent and angular.

But all this is not why I could not look away.

I stared because their faces were so different and similar at same time. Most importantly was that they were all devastatingly and inhumanly adorable.

They were faces you would never expect to see except maybe on the air-brushed pages of a fashion magazine. Or sketched by an old master as the face of an angel.

It was hard to decide who was the most beautiful among them, perhaps the perfect blond girl or the bronze haired boy.

They were all looking away, away from each other. Away from the rest of the students, away from anything in particular as far as I could tell.

As I stared, the small girl stood up with her tray that had an unopened soda and an unbitten apple inside it and walked away with a sharp, graceful lope that belonged on a runway.

I stared, and I was astonished at her supple dancer's step, till she dumped her tray and drifted through the back door, faster than I would have thought feasible.

Immediately my eyes glanced back to the others, who still sat unchanging.

"Who are they?" I enquired from the girl that I saw in my Spanish class, whose name I had already forgotten.

As she looked up to see who I meant, though she already knew, possibly from my tone. Suddenly he looked at her, the thinner one, the boyish one, perhaps the youngest among them.