The Outsiders

I was a normal girl, with a normal life, living in a normal town. Well, mostly normal; if you count being goth and emo as normal, and living in a town of...well, you’ll find out later. After I met him, though, everything changed. I was in my room at about three in the morning...and I was having a sweet dream. The moon was red-a lunar eclipse. It had always been my dream to see a lunar eclipse, but nothing ever happened in the stupid town. Then, right in the middle of my dream of dreams, I heard a loud beeping noise. My eyes flew open, and I was staring up at the ceiling. I really loved my own style, and my parents let me go along with it. My whole room was painted black, with iridescent red in swirling patterns-everywhere where there weren't posters. I had a minimum amount of posters on my walls, if you compared it to any of the preps' rooms that go to my school.
Mostly Evanescence, Three Day's Grace, and many other bands that I loved. I preferred not to use electric lights, so there were candelabras scattered around the room, including several medieval-looking ones mounted to the wall on either side of my bed. I usually got up in the morning to read, one of my favorite things to do. My bookshelf-black, of course-had all of my favorite books, Ink Exchange, the Twilight series, Vampire Kisses, Kissing Coffins, Vampireville, Dance with a Vampire, the Coffin Club, and many others; but Naruto manga filled up half the shelf (hey, I'll admit it; I can be a bit of a Narutard sometimes).
From memory, I remembered where the part in the black curtains was, when they were closed, they blocked all light from coming in. To many, it would still be pitch black, but for my night vision, perfected by hanging out in the woods behind my house at midnight, it was rather bright outside. Just another day...don't get over excited about it too soon...eventually, I fell asleep again, and this time, it was my mom yelling at me to get up or I'd miss the bus for school. I put on some black pants with a Evanescence t-shirt, with fishnet gloves. Today, I would just being going casual. When I got downstairs, I saw my best friend, Jamie, sitting there, waiting for me, as usual. She always got up at one in the morning to go hang out in the cemetery. Everybody thought the thick black lines under her eyes were just eyeliner, but they were actually from deprivation of sleep, by her own choice. She preferred not to sleep, because it was 'a waste of time'.
"You slept in late, Gabriela." she remarked.
"You don't look like you were awake the whole night, either, Jay." I shot back, referring to the fact that she was still brushing out her snow white hair, something she rarely did.
"Well, my little sis was begging me to put streaks in her hair this morning, so I wanted to be the nice sister and do it for her."
"What color?"
"Pink. Ugh, I wanted to barf."
"So understandable."
"Well, did you hear about the new kid?"
"Huh?" I asked, occupied with trying not to barf when I thought about bright, neon pink...
"I heard he moved into the Forest Haunt."
"You mean that place we used to hang out in?"
"Yeah."
"I bet he's just another one of those preps that swarm our school..."
"Actually, I heard he's one of the Outsiders."
"What?! How could he be an Outsider? We're the leaders of that group. And it's exclusive to this town only!"
"But there was one person we let in without them giving where they lived."
"You mean...the one who called themselves existing~to~exist?"
"Yeah. And I heard they’re going to out school."
"Well, if they really are an Outsider, they'll know the password."
When we got to school, I hurried to my locker to make sure I hadn't forgotten my algebra notes. I had gotten enough after school detentions for forgetting them that I was bored of them; so I preferred to not land myself in detention again. I opened a small box at the bottom of my locker and took out some of my accessories; fortunately, I always kept a small amount of my jewelry in my locker in case I had to hurry to school.When I got to the classroom, I had three spikes on the upper part of my right ear, and four silver loops on the side of my left; that was as much as I had had time for. I took my usual seat in the back, where the deeper shadow concealed me and my friends from the glares of the rest of the class. For the most part.
"Did you hear about the new kid coming to school?" I heard my friends whispering to each other,
" Yeah. I heard he skipped a grade."
"Oh, perfect. Another nerd on our hands.” Another hissed irritably.
“You guys talk too much.” I said.
“Yeah, but what if we have to keep another one of them in check? That would screw up our whole routine…and it would suck, anyway.” Jesse retorted.
“Yeah. But the new kids an Outsider.” You replied bluntly. Jesse stayed quiet at this comment, knowing how important the Outsiders were, not that any of the world other than ourselves knew how important we were to the world’s survival. A bunch of Goths and emos didn’t really catch the public’s eye in a positive way, but we were the only ones who could understand what was going on.
Then, Jesse stared right behind me, and I turned around to come face-to face with another person. But I didn’t know this guy. He was most presumably a goth, owing to the fact that he was wearing nothing but red and black, with about six piercings in each ear. Or he could just be an impersonator.
How did I not sense him there? You asked yourself.
“Who are you?”
“existing~to~exist.”
I exchanged a glance with Jay, Jesse, and the rest of my nocturnal group.
“What’s this month’s password?”
“Never ending time.”
“Who the heck are you, anyway?” Jay asked the new guy.
“Zane.”
For the rest of the period, I had my MP3 headphones jammed in my ears, on the highest sound setting.
And totally out of the blue, I heard soft singing coming from right beside me. I turned to see Zane still watching the teacher, Mr. Martinez, but singing along with the music that I was playing.
“♪Now I can’t let go of this dream…♫” he trailed off when he saw me staring at him, “What?”
“I didn’t think Good Enough was that loud.” I muttered, and changed it to Sweet Sacrifice, which was even louder. But in truth, I was just mesmerized by how talented he was at singing; it’s not exactly what you’d call ‘easy’ to find a guy who could sing in softer tones and melodies at this age, it was usually rock music. At the end of the period, my friends and I split off to go to our electives. Somehow, Zane ended up in both of them. I was in choir, and Mrs. Jones asked me to share my music with Zane because she needed to make more copies. He sight-read everything perfectly, as if he already knew the songs.
And in band-we had a new addition to the flute section. Zane was the only the second guy flute player EVER in the history of my flute playing since Juan left in sixth grade. Zane thought the flute sounded expressive, and he loved playing sad melodies. While Mrs. Rain was instructing the trumpets to put their mutes in the bells of their trumpets (just look it up, people, if you don’t know what a mute is), when a girl sitting next to me accidentally kicked my stand, sending all of my concert music, new and old, to the ground. Zane helped me pick everything up, and in the midst of it all, he found one of my favorites, Creepy Crawlies. The name had always sounded a bit childish, but if you played it correctly, it sounded like the perfect Halloween song. Okay, the thing about the flute is, if you put just a whisper of breath into it, it’ll make a sound exactly like a raspy note, except much quieter, and even though it wasn’t at full volume, I could tell he really loved it.
“Hey, Gabriela.”
I turned around at the sound of name, spoken in familiar tones. Zane was standing there, with his usual phlegmatic (monotone, for the peeps that don’t have very many words in their repertoire!) expression. With one exception. He was slightly smiling. “Thanks for helping me around today. I would have never found half of my classes.”
“You’re welcome? Why wouldn’t I’ve? You’re an Outsider, and only about .9% of the whole town are in our group. I’d always be happy to help one.”

He looked at me strangely. Oh, crap, did I say something?! I thought wildly, but I kept my facial expressions blank.
“You’re turning pink.” He said
It was true. I could feel my usually pale complexion heating up. To hide this, I turned around, and pretended to be getting one of my numerous textbooks out of my locker. Later after school, Jay came over because she had forgotten her house key in her room, along with the spare one.
“Y’know, Zane likes you, right?” Jay asked me.
“I kinda noticed a while ago…”
“So, what do you intend to do about it?”
“Huh? Whadddo you mean?”
“I mean, do you like him, like him.”
“Maybe. But I hardly know him.”
“You should have seen how much he was blushing all day…...”
~*~