a class. I sat in the back, closest to the door and with at least two seats in between me and anyone else, and I thought I was set until a girl rushed in and sat with one seat between us.
“Am I late?” she said, not even looking at me and frantically searching through her bag. All I saw was a huge quantity of very blond, very curly hair that she had tried to shove into an elastic band without much success.
I looked around, but there was no one else to respond to her, so it was up to me.
“Um, there’s still a few minutes.” She was up to her elbows in her bag, and she finally emerged, holding a bag of Skittles. I opened and closed my mouth a few times as she ripped the bag open with her teeth and then held the bag in my direction.
“Want some?” I finally looked at her face and then wished I hadn’t. One half was perfect white skin, and the other was mangled with what looked like a severe burn. “Do I have something on my face?” she said, her eyes getting wide as her hand flew to her face. “Oh, yeah, I do. Duh.”
She dropped her hand and grinned at me. Somehow her eyes had remained unharmed, but the side of her mouth and the rest of her face going all the way to her ear were shiny and had a weird pattern on them. It extended down her neck, and though her arm was covered, I could see it on the back of her hand, as well.
“So I’m going to tell you my name and also tell you that you can stare if you want. I’m Hannah, and it’s okay to stare.” She flicked some of her hair back, and I tried my best to look into her eyes, which were a deep brown, in contrast with her pale hair and skin.
“Jos. I’m Jos,” I said, because what else was I going to do?
“Nice to meet you. And if you choose to sit on the other side of the room next class, I won’t, like, hate you or anything. I’m a people repeller. It’s kind of my thing. For obvious reasons.” She giggled a little, and I turned to the front of the class, where an extremely tall woman in a charcoal skirt and jacket was writing things down on the numerous whiteboards. She looked like she just stepped out of a Senate meeting. When she was done writing what looked like half of a novel, she turned around and clapped her hands. Everyone shut up.
“Okay, I see you all made it here for another week of mind-broadening. Congratulations on being sober enough to drag yourselves here.” Everyone else laughed, and I sort of joined in. She picked up a clipboard and read our names off. Of course, since my last name began with the first letter of the alphabet, I was the second person called.
“Joscelyn Archer?”
“Here,” I said, listening to my voice echo in the large room.
She looked up from the clipboard and searched me out. “You’re new to us, yes? Transfer?”
“Uh, yeah.” I could feel the blood rushing to my face and ears.
“Do you go by Joscelyn, or is there a nickname you’d prefer?”
“Um, Jos is fine.”
She smiled, showing the most perfect set of probably real teeth I’d ever seen.
“Jos. Lovely. Nice to have you with us.”
She moved on to the next name, and I slumped down in my seat.
“I hope you’re not going to do that all the time. She’ll call on you more if she knows how much you hate it,” Hannah whispered as someone else said, “here!”
“Great. Just fantastic.”
Hannah was right. Since I was new, the teacher, who went by Pam, didn’t call on me, but everyone else was fair game. She fired questions out like bullets, and if you answered too slowly, she’d move on to someone else. There was a lot of stuttering, a lot of red faces and a lot of people shooting their hands in the air to be called on so they could show everyone just how freaking smart they were.
And then there were some, including Hannah, who gave the answers when called and didn’t elaborate unless Pam asked them to. Everyone sort of turned to look at Hannah when she talked, and I could see that more than a few people’s gazes skittered away from the burned side of her face, but she didn’t seem to notice or care.
I didn’t get out my headphones the entire class. It was just too interesting. How she could make something as potentially boring as Colonial government riveting was beyond me.
When the class was over, we all sort of walked out like we were in a trance.
“Is it always like that?” I couldn’t help myself from asking Hannah as she crumpled up the empty Skittles bag.
“Pretty much. Awesome, huh?”
“It probably will be less awesome when she starts calling on me.”
“Just do the reading. You seem like the kind of person who doesn’t have her head up her ass, so you should be fine. So, where did you transfer from?”
“UNH.”
“Boo, hiss. Don’t say that too close to anyone connected with hockey, or else you might get your ass handed to you.” So I’d heard. The hockey rivalry between the University of Maine and the University of New Hampshire had been going on for as long as they’d been playing hockey. I’d never gone to a game, but campus pretty much shut down so everyone could go to the games, and I bet UMaine wasn’t any different.
I had some time before my next class, and I was already starving, so I headed toward the Union.
“Do you have another class right now?” Hannah said as we got to the doors. “Because, although that bag of Skittles was totally satisfying, I could go for something else. Why does this sound like I’m asking you out? I’m totally not.” She shook her head.
“Um, no. I’m available. For eating. Not the dating.”
Her dark eyes went wide. “Because I like boys. I swear.”
“Yeah, me, too.”
We shared one of those nervous giggles that turns into full-on laughter, and by the time we got to the Union, I was wiping tears away.
“I swear, I’m not normally this weird,” she said as we joined the lunchtime throng and descended into the food court. Only a second later she said, “Okay, that’s a complete lie. I am normally this weird.”
“I won’t tell anyone,” I whispered as we scoped out what was available. The longest lines were for pizza and burgers and the pseudo “Taco Bell,” so we headed to get wraps since those were the quickest. I happened to be on Hannah’s “good” side, but I was more than aware of the stares she got. It was one of those things. You saw her, realized there was something different about her, did a look again to check and then couldn’t look away.
She just smiled and giggled and acted like a normal girl. She got a hummus wrap and I ordered the special, known as the “Winslow,” which was basically a chicken caesar wrap with the addition of crushed croutons, which was such a brilliant idea that I couldn’t believe someone hadn’t thought of it sooner.
Finding a seat turned out to be a challenge, but we found a table for the two of us in a corner. I was about to say something, but Hannah beat me to it.
“So, in light of wanting to get things out in the open, yes, it’s a burn. It happened when I was a kid and it’s a long story and I’d rather not go into it because it’s a bit of a downer and a bit of a conversation killer and usually after I tell it I never see whoever I told it to again. Which is my weird way of saying that I don’t want to make you uncomfortable this early in our relationship. Wow, why do I keep doing that? I am so sorry.”
“No big,” I said, unable to stop laughing. “How about you tell me something else? Where are you from?”
She chewed and swallowed before she spoke. “Up north. The boondocks. The sticks. The butthole of Maine. Whatever you want to call it. I couldn’t afford to go out of state and this was the biggest school in Maine. Great place to get lost in, you know?”