Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
This was the time of day when I wished I were able to sleep.
High school.
Or was purgatory the right word? If there was any way to atone for my sins, this ought to count toward the tally in some measure. The tedium was not something I grew used to; every day seemed more impossibly monotonous than the last.
Perhaps this could even be considered my form of sleep if sleep was defined as the inert state between active periods.
I stared at the cracks running through the plaster in the far corner of the cafeteria, imagining patterns into them that were not there. It was one way to tune out the voices that babbled like the gush of a river inside my head.
Several hundred of these voices I ignored out of boredom.
When it came to the human mind, I'd heard it all before and then some. Today, all thoughts were consumed with the trivial drama of a new addition to the small student body here. It took so little to work them all up. I'd seen the new face repeated in thought after thought from every angle.
Just an ordinary human boy. The excitement over his arrival was tiresomely predictable-like flashing a shiny object at a child. Half the females and even some males were already imagining themselves in love with him, just because he was something new to look at. I tried harder to tune them out.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Only four voices did I block out of courtesy rather than distaste: my family, my three brothers and one sister, who were so used to the lack of privacy in my presence that they rarely gave it a thought. I gave them what privacy I could. I tried not to listen if I could help it.
Try as I may, still...I knew.
Rosé was thinking, as usual, about herself—her mind was a stagnant pool with few surprises. She'd caught sight of her profile in the reflection off someone's glasses, and she was mulling over her own perfection. No one else's hair was closer to true gold, no one else's shape was quite so perfectly an hourglass, no one else's face was such a flawless, symmetrical oval. She didn't compare herself to the humans here; that juxtaposition would have been laughable, absurd. She thought of others like us, none of them her equal.
