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AMARA WASN'T LIKE MOST HIGH SCHOOL GIRLS not just in the sense that her brain was wired differently, but because she never put much thought into her appearance. She didn't wear miniskirts or fishnet tights or ballet pumps. She didn't style her hair into a perm or pile makeup onto her face or perfume her body with heady sandalwood. On a given day she rolled out of bed, attired herself in jeans and a sweater, brushed the messiness out of her hair, and touched up her face with concealer and lip balm if she had enough time. She saw no reason to make an effort to look good because, unlike most high school girls, there wasn't anyone she wished to look good for.
So upon arriving at school on the 1st of November, Amara was surprised to find that even in her woodland sweater, denim jeans, and still-white converse, she looked far better than most of her fellow peers. Practically everyone in the junior and senior classes was sporting bruised nebulae beneath bloodshot eyes that were definitely not the result of studying late into the night for an upcoming exam. A cluster of girls in the class of '85 had done a good enough job of obscuring their hangovers with makeup; Tina was among them, her face set in a lovesick stupor as she recounted to her friends how great in bed Billy Hargrove was.
"How are you feeling?" Amara asked Robin as they reached their usual seats in their physics class. The movies they had watched together after the party had done a good enough job of distracting Robin for the time being, but Amara knew that the laceration was still fresh.
"Better," Robin answered, and she looked like she meant it. "It's just exhausting to live in a world where everyone's too busy judging us to see things from our perspective. You know those movies where there's a neighborhood outcast everyone picks on, who usually ends up dead for plot purposes? We're the outcasts and everyone's been so conditioned to hate us that they never think about what it's like to be us. But at least I've got you, and that's good enough for me."
Amara usually paid attention in physics, but she couldn't shake the poignancy of Robin's words from her mind. Everyone's been so conditioned to hate us that they never think about what it's like to be us. That had been true in her old neighborhood, where it wasn't uncommon for her to go on a walk without someone purposely crossing the street just to avoid being near her. It remained the truth in Hawkins, where nobody outside of Robin and her family knew that she had autism but still recoiled at the very concept of people who functioned any differently than them. And it was true in the case of people like Nancy who liked Amara but didn't know her well enough to comprehend that she meant it when she said she didn't like parties.
Now that she thought about it, Nancy wasn't in her assigned seat near the front of the room. Amara hadn't seen her all morning, in fact.
Three hours and three periods later, Robin and Amara went their separate ways; the former to the band room where she knew that after a night of pretending to be someone she wasn't that dedicating herself to one of her biggest passions was just what she needed, and the latter to the cafeteria where upon catching no sign of Nancy or Jonathan, chose to eat lunch outside. She seated herself in the alleyway near the gym, not caring that the ground was dirty. Clamping the headphones of her walkman radio around her ears, the song that came up when she pressed play was Drive by the Cars.
