Daemons in the Mist

Chapter 5 - A Thousand Different Ways

5

A Thousand Different Ways

Friday, January 13th

PATRICK

                       

The rest of the week was—awesome. Connor stopped getting on my case for staring at Nualla, and when I saw Michael in the hall I was pretty sure he loathed me, which just made me grin like an idiot. Best of all, Nualla talked to me in class as if we had always talked; like we had always been friends. I was so thrilled I didn’t even think to ask about her complete obliviousness to my existence for the last three years.

The more I talked to her, the less nervous about the whole thing I felt. It was like just being near her was putting me at ease. And this just made me stare at her all the more, which was how I finally got a good look at the pendant she always wore. It was a weird sort of silver circular pendant a little bigger than a quarter. It looked Egyptian with a gazelle horned deity, her hands held outstretched at her sides, a small crescent moon resting between her horns. A deep lapis blue enameled background covered with tiny silver stars, filled the space behind her, and a larger crescent encircled the whole design. An inscription ran across the outer crescent, but the symbols didn’t look Egyptian; they looked like something else—something I could almost remember.

“That’s a cool pendant,” I said as we worked on the day’s assignment in Mr. Lucas’ class.

“Thanks,” Nualla answered with a nervous smile.

“Where’d you get it?”

“My…my dad gave it to me when I was little,” she answered, a flicker of unease crossing her face.

“My mom gave me a pendant too.”

“Really?” Nualla asked, looking at my bare neck.

“But I seem to have lost it this week.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, and now it feels a little weird since I’ve been wearing it as long as I can remember. And I still haven’t told—” I cut off mid sentence when Mr. Lucas’ gaze drifted in our direction.

We studiously went back to work on the assignment, but I couldn’t help but notice how Nualla kept unconsciously rubbing her fingers over the surface of her pendant. And I realized with a start that I had done it again. This whole week I had found myself answering all kinds of things about myself, but still learning very little about her. And even though I had spent hours looking online, I hadn’t learned a whole lot from her Facebook page.

Sure, there were photos, but not a whole lot, and nothing that really revealed that much about her that I didn’t already know. I couldn’t believe that she didn’t lead an interesting life, so why didn’t she post any of it? It almost seemed like the bits that were online were just for show. Maybe her parents checked up on her, and she didn’t want them to see what she was up to or something.

So all I had to go on was what I had learned from just observing her in class. A lot of little things that added up to a very interesting picture—well at least to me anyways. Her favorite color was blue, she adored cats, and she had a fondness for big black boots. She hated having to pull her hair back for Chem class, and she drank coffee to an almost obsessive level. And a thousand other little quirks that made me adore her just that much more. But mostly I had learned that there was something different about her, something hiding behind those eyes. She gave herself away in a thousand different ways each day; I just didn’t know yet what all the pieces meant.