Saving Sutton [ radish ]

[ 01 ]

C H A P T E R    O N E

NOLAN COULDN'T STAND looking at Sutton Miller. Yet he couldn't seem to find the urge to look away.

She was new in town, and looked like an enigmatic story in her own right. The kind of book that was weathered and worn from unabated reading: the kind you'd look forward to reading on a rainy Sunday morning, sipping black coffee in the wicker chair next to a window. Maybe curled up with a kitten.

Nolan despised black coffee. And cats. (He thought they were too fat and lazy. The cats, not the coffee).

But his hatred of that particular species of domestic animal was rendered moot. In fact, whenever Nolan looked at Sutton, everything else seemed to have been rendered moot. He couldn't help staring at Sutton. It wasn't like he felt attracted to her, because he definitely didn't. Sutton wasn't the type of girl guys like Nolan fell for. There was just something, something he didn't understand, that kept his eyes glued to her.

He really just couldn't help it.

And he wasn't the only one thinking about the tall black-haired enigma that had arrived a few weeks into junior year. There were rumors going around, (as Ellsworth was a small town, and there were hardly any new kids), that she was of mixed race, half Asian and half white, and Nolan supposed she did look the part. But when he turned away and looked back a second later, he couldn't quite fathom it.

Because all the (few) mixed race children in Ellsworth were pretty and out there, and to put it bluntly, Sutton wasn't.

Nolan would know. Angela Hamilton, one of the most popular girls in school, was a quarter Japanese, and had all the other guys falling to their knees. Nolan couldn't quite understand the appeal, to be honest. Angela was gorgeous, but in a way that was too alluring, too obvious, with pale skin, luscious chocolate brown locks, deep chestnut colored eyes, and an athletic figure.

But Sutton wasn't. Sutton couldn't be described as anything other than pure, unadulterated Sutton, a patented mix of fragile skin and thin bones. She was tall, really tall, like two or three inches shorter than Nolan, who was just over six feet. She was skinny, too, bordering on lanky, (which normally wasn't used to describe girls but suited Sutton, who was, again, just Sutton in her own right). Her hair, straight and halfway down her back, was a bland dark brown, which Nolan had earlier heard the boys refer to as "shit-colored."

Her eyes were the color of the sky when you woke up in the middle of the night, when melancholy and cafard hit you; they were the moment after dusk, when the darkness of the night enveloped the world.

If her looks were strange, then her eyes were something out of this world; a hue found in a distant galaxy, darker than an onyx black, like the depths of a black hole.

Nolan hated her eyes.

He knew Sutton wasn't beautiful. She wasn't even on the pretty spectrum. She looked nothing like the girls on the magazines, or even like the other girls at Ellsworth High.

But she definitely wasn't plain. Sutton Miller was beguiling. She was the sunset after a storm, one with colors bizarrely streaking out of the sky, outlining and highlighting clouds that lurked above. Not beautiful, but imposing. Arresting.

She was pretty in the way paintings are, strokes and brushes making up something whole and unforgiving. Not beautiful in the typical sense, but captivating and enticing in an effortless manner.

You're not supposed to touch museum art.

For a couple days now she had sat next to him in English, and in Chem. And World History. After quitting the lacrosse team the first practice, Nolan had single-handedly lost all his friends without even trying. So he had no one to sit with.