My Monster

Chapter Four: I Hate School

Chapter 4: I Hate School

I'm the only person I know who is fine in the early morning. My mom says I've been like this since I was a baby. I get the impression she says that with a bit of bitterness.

On the school bus, I sit looking out the window, when a ball of flowing flowery skirts, skinny brown-skinned limbs, and jangling bracelets cannons into me.

"It's too early," Esmeralda groans as she nestles her curly head in my lap. "Sophie, kill the sun."

I extend my finger and poke her cheek, making her squirm. "Did you spend the night talking to the moon?" I ask, because that's exactly the type of thing Esmeralda would do.

She giggles and then sits up, her halo of dark-brown curls lopsided from squishing it in my lap. Raising her eyes heavenward, she sighs, her face growing serious. "The moon," she says dreamily, "or maybe a star."

"Has this star got a name? Does she go to our school?"

She flashes me with a bright smile and presses the palms of her hands together before lifting her bare feet onto the vinyl-covered seat, crossing them beneath her skirt.

"Maybe, and maybe not," she announces in a cryptic whisper.

Esmeralda Reynolds has always been a wild child. When I was five, she and her mom moved into the house next door. I didn't know what to make of her at first.

She was just so strange, but that very strangeness was something I found fascinating, even mesmerizing.

She was almost always barefoot. In my world, shoes were something obligatory. Unless at the pool, one was never, ever to step outside without some kind of footwear.

The first time I saw her, she was wearing a tie-dye T-shirt, a bright green tutu, no shoes, and she had four thick braids on her head, each pointing in a different direction and with a differently colored hair tie.

She was so colorful that I thought she was some kind of fairy.

The next day, I asked my mom to make me similar braids. But we had hair ties only in two colors: pink and purple, and no matter what, my braids wouldn't stick up like Esmeralda's.

Then there was Esmeralda's mom, Tina, who came over with chocolate-chip cookies she had baked. She had a turquoise scarf wrapped around her head and matching turquoise eyeshadow. Her fingernails were a vibrant yellow, and she wore a pastel-pink dress that hugged her amble hips and emphasized the deep mahogany of her skin. I didn't know moms could look like that.

Had I not been five, and had Esmeralda not been as weird as she was, we would never have become friends. As it was, the impossible happened, and I successfully created a lasting relationship with another human being. We're stuck with each other.

Maybe that means I'm not as much of a sociopath as I think I am.

We talk very little on the school bus—talking isn't one of Esmeralda's morning functions. Eventually, she falls asleep as she always does. She sleeps everywhere, like a cat.

Then we arrive at school. We're just two girls among hundreds of others. The familiar disgust creeps over my skin as I see them in the corridors. So much insecurity in one place. It's painful to watch.

It's the first day of school; therefore, people are still excited to see each other. The social rot of the year has not yet risen to the surface. All the familiar faces of my classmates are basking in the feeling that they've grown and matured and are ultimately better versions of the people they were two months ago.