Those Things Beautiful.

“Hey, kiddo,” Dad called from the dining room as I walked in through the front door of the house. “How was the old first day?”

I couldn’t even think of an accurate response to describe my first day. It wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t awful. It was flawed and imperfect, but I knew how much worse it could have been. In fact, I was half-expecting to be ignored entirely.

Dad must have just gotten home because he busied himself with the laces on his shoes, untying them before slipping the shoes off his feet and placing them on the floor near the sliding glass door just behind him. He looked up at me expectantly after doing this, and, with a blank stare, I shrugged.

“Good.”

“That’s good, honey.”

My feet took me upstairs and down the hall, past Dana’s room and through the door of my small, nearly windowless bedroom. I shut the door behind me quietly and, kicking my shoes off before falling flat on my face against the cushioned bedspread. The springs in the mattress bounced, retracting and springing outward to meet my body’s impact. The bed shook for a moment, stopping in time for me to take a deep breath inward.

Downstairs, I heard Dana talking to Dad about how her first day went, how many friends she made as well as how nice all of the kids were to her. I felt like throwing something.

Dana was cute though. For a kid, she was cute. Her short brown hair was trimmed around her face perfectly, complementing the small, tan freckles that dotted out along her nose. She was thin and her face was sweet and she had a pretty laugh.

I wasn’t desirable at all. I had boring, brown eyes, a big nose, thin lips, no hips, no boobs, and no butt. There wasn’t a thing I liked about my body. I was different from everyone in Huntington Beach. I would never fit in with anyone.

From outside the window, I heard cars driving by, blasting their stereos loudly and laughing. Oh, the irony. I sniffed and wiped my eyes. I was starting to feel bad for myself and I wasn’t going to take it, especially when I knew I was going to have to face my body’s fault lines and go back to school the very next day. So I sat up from the bed, ran my hands across my face, and took a deep breath.

I thought about Zack. He was that kid who had walked me to my first class. He skipped the first few minutes of his to show me how to get to mine. He was the only person who had spoken to me that day. I’d gotten plenty of looks, but he was the only one to vocalize anything toward me.

He hadn’t said much, though. He’d introduced himself, taken my schedule from me, and walked me all the way up to the second floor of the building, even though his class was outside and halfway across the school’s campus.

That was kind of nice.

The sky outside was still a milky blue, dotted with white clouds. I wished it was wintertime in Detroit. I just wanted tomorrow to be a snow day so I didn’t have to go back to the beehive.