Wander Boy

"Eat your dinner," her mother barked. The girl just sighed and continued to push and pull her food around her plate with her fork. She didn't feel like eating. She didn't feel like doing much of anything. She'd failed herself. She hadn't even tried to get noticed today but rather hung in the shadows and avoided the rest of her peers.

I'm a failure, she thought, her mouth in a hard line as she examined her own mother. Her mother, in her eyes at least, was the epitome of everything she yearned to be- beautiful, brave, kind, and of course, visible to the eyes of the world. Her mother looked like her, in a way. Her red her was a shade or two lighter, but just as wavy and just as long. Her skin was pale and had far less freckles than her daugter. She didn't have any worry lines or wrinkles as most older parents did, and she was always smiling. While they shared similarity in appearance, it was only their eyes that the girl truly felt she and her mother shared.

Eventually, she ate a little, but not as much as either of her parents would have liked. She liked to think that they cared that she hadn't been eating enough. She knew that wasn't the case, though. They were concerned about wasted food and wasted food meant wasted money. Her parents were good people, really, they were, but they seemed to overlook their own daughter and treat her as if she hardly existed at all.

Moments later, she found herself drifting up the stairs and into her bedroom. She sat on the edge of her bed for a few seconds and scanned the room for something -anything, really- to occupy her time but nothing seemed to do the trick. She had homework she could work on, but she decided to push that aside for now and take a shower first. She could do her school work when she finished.

The girl stalked across the hall and into the bathroom. She shut and locked the door, turning the water on quickly. As she waited for the water to heat up, she shed her closes and examined her naked body in the mirror- an actions he found herself doing a lot more frequently as of late. As she looked over every inch of her pale, freckled skin she wondered what being beautiful and if she was indeed the definition of the very word. She pondered if she were thin enough to be considered pretty, but she shook that away. She was so skinny as it was. Her body was all sharp angles and she lacked curves or wide hips that men seemed to desire. Perhaps it was her distinct lack of these things that made her feel ugly but she tried not to base beauty off of these things. To her, beauty was not body parts that got men to drool over you but rather the unique appearance you had that made others peer at you with mild curiousity.

The girl washed her body and dried herself off afterwards. Clad only in her towel, she scampered back to her room, leaving her day clothes on the bathroom floor. In the back of her mind she knew she did it on purpose. She left them there to anger her mother, all in the hopes that her mother would notice her long enough to yell at her for it. She dried of fully before dressing herself in pajama shorts and a t-shirt and climbing onto her bed. She roughly wiggled her towel against her hair to dry it, not really in the mood to do anything with the hair dryer. She then ran a brush through it, pulling out all the tangles and knots.

She then started in on her homework, pulling her math textbook onto her lap and occassionally scribbling answers into a notebook. She wasn't entirely focus on her math however, nor was she ever completely focus on anything she did. She often found herself staring at the wall or doodling small flowers and stars onto the page. It'd be safe to say that her lack of attention to her math was probably the only reason she knew something big was just about to happen before it actually happened.

The air in her room shot from warm and toasty to frigid and frosty. She glanced up instantly and just watched her room. Dust had begun to collect in the air just above the end of her bed. The girl pulled her knees to her chest as she watched, her eyes full and wide. The dust swirled around as it collected more and more and it soon began to take on a new shape. The paritcles strecthed and pulled, dropped and rised until the form could become clear and distinct- a human form sitting on the edge of her bed.

But what happened next changed how she felt about the whole situation. The girl knew that she should feel scared or be in disbelief but in all honesty, she felt neither of those. She was excited, fully ready to accept whatever was about to happen to her. The dust particles now had clumped together to take a more solid form. They then shifted in color- a bright white and then crystal clear. It was fascinating to her. It was almost as if a glass human had formed, but soon, features and color began to fill the clear form. When the clearness melted away, an actual human boy took its place.

He was tall, but not as tall as the girl. He had shaggy black hair and tanned skin. His thin frame supported a ratty old blue sweat shirt, a pair of old, hole-ridden jeans, and no shoes. The boy scanned the room infront of him before turning around and resting his soft pewter colored eyes on the girl.

She focused on him for a moment. She couldn't help but feel her brain telling her that she needed to scream, to run, to get away, but she had the strength to ignore her impulses. She was not frightened at all, not in the slightest. Any fear at all had been replaced by her undying curiousity. She didn't break her gaze with the Wander Boy as she spoke.

"What's your name?"