Love Comes In Purple

I sat in the passenger seat of my dad's car. I grasped the leather on the seats and stared out the window. The sun managed to shine in between a few very large storm clouds. I looked out on to the grounds of Burnt Ember High School.

It was my first day in a public school, I was just starting out grade 10. I'd been home schooled all my life by my mom. After a lot of begging and a failed attempt at bribery, my mom finally led me enrol in a real high school.

I only know what the TV and movies taught me about it. From what I knew, there were groups. One group was the popular bitches, who all had big boobs and wore tiny clothes, and for some reason, wore pink on Wednesdays. Another group were athletic jocks who beat on the nerds and spent their free time playing sports and going to the gym. Another, was a group of guys who were 'virgins' and would all agree to lose it before their graduation. But this was only what I thought I knew. To be honest, I was clueless about the while thing. I didn't bother researching any further than the TV remote or some teen magazines, because I thought I'd just pick up on it, sort of like English people pick up French by hanging around French people.

It's not like I lived my life under a rock. I knew about makeup, and hairstyles, and fashion and spots, things a normal teenage girl should know about. So I didn't think I'd be that different. It would be easy to just blend in with the crowd, right?

Wrong.

Turns out, 'fitting in' in high school wasn't exactly my talent. I don't know if it was the long, white, curly hair, while other girls bleached and straightened and dyed, or the lack of that Snooki vibe that all the other girls have off, but I had never felt so out of place in my life. I didn't know what was wrong-

Okay, that was a lie. I knew exactly what put me so out of place. It was the same reason I began being homeschooled in the first place.

Alexandria's Genesis. Otherwise known as the miracle mutation. I don't know why they call it that, whoever 'they' are. It seemed horrible to me. There are some good and some bad things about having AG. The mutation gives me violet eyes, and I like having violet eyes. But the stares people give me... Well, they really bothered me.

AG also gives me pale skin and no body hair, except for the hair on my head, nose, eyebrows and eyelashes. So no shaving or waxing for me.

I usually fix the pale skin problem by tanning, or going to a tanning salon. The farthest I've ever gone to giving my skin pigment is a few trips to the spray-tan salon.

On top of that, AG doesn't give me something called a 'period'. My mom never taught me about 'periods' because she said if never get them so there was no point. I only know about them from what I've seen on TV.

Apparently, I can still have a baby and get pregnant, how ever that works. Again, all I know about things in the outside world is what I learned from TV, and there's not much on this subject since my dad cancelled MTV.

Having AG is definitely a challenge. Only 1 in 4.5 million people get it, or so it seems. The Internet refers to it as a "super human species", so as you can tell, it's easy for me to get singled out as a different species. Purple eyes, pale skin, white hair and no body hair can do that to a person. I've never met another one of my kind before.

That's why I wear contacts, and go to the tanning salon.

I used to walk around the neighbourhood without a care in the world, completely oblivious to the dangers and judgements the outside world had for me. I was just a kid back then, with my Snow White hair flowing in the wind and pale skin glistening in the sun.

But that was only until that horrible day.

It was a Sunday, I think. About 8 years ago, when I was 7 or 8 years old, in the summer. I was walking to the corner store, with money in my pocket and craving a vanilla lime slushy. I'd never been out on my own before without one of my parents. I entered the small store, where the clerks were too busy reading magazines or stacking Cokes to see me. I filled up the cup with vanilla lime and rushed to the checkout. I set the cup on the counter and bowed my head down to pull the money out of my pocket. When I looked back up, the clerk had been caught off guard by my stinging bright purple eyes. He let out a quick yelp and screamed "Holy crap! Your eyes! Your skin! Who are you?! Where did you come from?"

I was alarmed by his screaming and dropped the slushy, backed up and knocked over a shelf of candy. The rest of the shelves fell like dominos across the small gas station corner store.

Both clerks were them aware of my unnatural white skin and white hair, and vivid purple eyes. I screamed a high pitch scream and they yelled a feminine yell. They both bolted out of the store. I was utterly confused, but decided to make lemons into lemonade and pick up some free candy, and a replacement jumbo sized vanilla lime slushy.

After that day, I usually didn't like to be put in public situations where there would be people surrounding me and staring at me, judging me and questioning me, stereotyping me and bothering me. Yet here I was, entering the huge white doors of the most judgemental, stereotypical, bothering place in the world, high school.