Side by Side by John Ramsey Miller Page B

she couldn’t gather the nerve to speak to them, without the fear of letting them see her clearly? She studied the ones around her over the weeks, and she wondered what sorts of thoughts were contained in their heads, what kind of world each saw through their eyes. She resorted to clues like the way hair was kept, the styles and amount of wear of clothes, the way fingernails were kept, and from that she imagined their lives. Most of them looked like they came from places that had always been soft, and made warm by those who had borne them.
When one of them looked at her, she closed herself up in a coil, and usually their eyes kept moving because there was nothing here to waste time on. She was always angry with herself for being different, an alien walking among them, a creature of the shadows. She knew that not one of them could ever imagine what her life was like, how empty it was, how deeply she wanted just a little of what those around her experienced. . . .
How many of them had slept with one eye open, worried if someone would come to the bed uninvited, bringing with him the scent of whiskey and an appetite she couldn’t understand and was defenseless against? She was a child who wanted only to be loved and cherished and have value, and even a loathsome creature’s prodding her and dampening her skin with his sweat was somehow preferable to being ignored—being branded as a being without worth. . . .
    Winter’s heart felt squeezed by the anguish, which wasn’t merely insecurity, the adolescent angst he and his pals suffered. Each paragraph was a spotlight illuminating another chasm of alienation, some emptiness greater than a teenager is supposed to feel. Who was this girl? How would he find her without knowing her name? The journal had no signature, just a star applied with a permanent marker. He had never met anyone in school who talked the way this girl wrote. Such a lonely soul, such a hunger reflected in those lines. He had to find her. Nothing else mattered.
    The next day, Winter had taken the notebook out of his backpack when he arrived at school, and he carried it in his hand all morning, like a fisherman trolling for the author. He knew the diary was too precious for anyone to let go of; surely no one would want someone else to have access to their innermost feelings. He met the eyes of everyone he caught looking at him, but nothing. He studied the crowds like a predator.
    He went home carrying the journal. In the silence of his room he read it again, and it filled him with emotion, with a longing to know this girl, maybe to put his hands on her cheeks and share her pain. I feel this! I know your pain of aloneness. The riotous world is revolving around your utter stillness. He understood it, felt something of it himself. He too was an emotional outcast, a stranger in a strange land, a peg that had no proper hole. He had suffered to a lesser degree. He had never been physically abused, was never without someone who loved and protected him.
    It was after five and his mother wasn’t yet home. When there was a knock on the door, he figured Lydia had arms loaded with groceries, so he opened the back door to a stranger. He knew her—sort of. The skinny girl in a baggy sweater and loose-fitting jeans who stood there on the other side of the screen door, scowling, with her fists clenched, was in his school, had been in classes with him. Her eyes were on fire, and they burned into him. Angela, or Amelia or something, he thought. She was biracial, and, at first look, she wasn’t a beautiful girl, because she worked as hard to camouflage her physical attractiveness as other girls her age labored to enhance theirs. This girl wore outdated clothes to hide her shape. She kept her hair as short as possible and she avoided makeup like it was poison. If that weren’t enough to discourage approaches, she was aggressively unpleasant, sullen, and acid tongued.
    “You read it?” she demanded.
    “What?” Winter had