Ruled by Fate

Harry doesn't really like remembering when he first saw her. Her wavy, light brown hair ('Just like Liam's' he had thought) was quite a mess, having not looked like it was brushed for a few days and just thrown up in a weak bun, the ends falling down and around her neutral face. Her mouth looked like it held no smile for weeks, and her hands shook, he could tell. Always shaking, they were. He used to stare at them (yes, it was a bit creepy, he knew, but he didn't care) and count how long they were shaking before they finally calmed down a little, and then started back up again. Sometimes they would shake for the whole class period through.

Her uniform was a bit wrinkly, looking like they were shoved at the bottom of some bag for a few days, maybe even a week. But Harry could tell the "jumper," as everyone in Britain liked to call it, was hiding something. Harry would trace with his eyes the few patterns of tattoo he could see that were peaking out of the sleeve and wrapping around the bottoms of her fingers of her left hand. 

She had plugs. Or, well, holes for plugs. She hadn't worn plugs or tunnels or even spirals for the first week or two of school. She stretched her ears to a size that could probably shove a pencil through and no bigger. She always just wore solid ones, never tunnels, or spirals. One time, though, Harry saw a design in them. And well, that was a step up at least.

The way she presented herself bugged Harry a bit. She never showed any emotion. Not even a small smile when the teacher had fallen because his chair rolled out from under him. The whole class had went into hysterics, but Nahla Sparrow? Didn't even smirk.  Her eyes, dark as the night sky, were always staring forward, holding a wall in front of her mind that Hrry knew was near impossible to break, if not completely impossible. She never talked, never volunteered to answer questions in class for participation points. And when the teacher called on her answer, she had this weird monotone voice that Harry knew she was struggling to keep even (he had noticed!), and then she went quite again.

Nahla was hiding something, something quite large. And that's what bugged Harry the most about her. 

Harry wanted to know what she was keeping from everyone; wanted to know the reason why she had moved all the way from Chicago, Illinois to Cheshire, England, in the middle of the school year. 

That's why Harry never liked remembering when he first saw her. Because when he first laid eyes on Nahla Sparrow, he had been immediately drawn in, locked away forever in the cage of wanting to know who she really was.