Greta
Greta Hanson never had a lot of friends growing up. By high school, she had exactly one acquaintance—and the term could only be loosely applied. Everybody knew she was different on sight. When Kelly Waters told her in the first grade that she looked like an old witch, Greta knew she was going to have problems.
She thought that by the time she got to her junior year of high school, the population of Chameleon, Oklahoma would have gotten used to her. After all, Chameleon was home to only five hundred people. Five hundred and one, to be precise.
With her stark white hair and the new black dress her mother had made for her, Greta knew she looked more like an old witch than ever. It didn't help that her skin was pale, too, or that her icy blue eyes were too icy blue. From even a slight distance, they looked like they didn't have any color at all.
Greta's mother had the white hair, too. It was one of those weird genetic traits that sometimes appears in families, like webbed toes. But no one can see webbed toes. Everyone could see Greta's bright white hair. She'd tried to dye it half a dozen times over the summer that year, but nothing would stick. Everything she put in her hair washed out after just a few days.
So she was resigned to it that day in late August. She ignored the giggles and remarks that followed her as she skipped up the stairs in front of the building and pushed through the front door with her head bent down and her white hair hanging halfway down her back. She'd cut it short once, but that looked absolutely terrible. With her fair skin and the white hair, it just made her look bald. Greta added gold hoop earrings for picture day that year, and Kelly Waters called her "Mr. Clean" for the next two semesters.
It was easier to just hide behind the hair, and it had finally grown back out to a more acceptable length. Greta used it as a shield as she pushed her way through the hall toward the back staircase. She followed it all the way up to the second floor, then down another long hallway to a door at the very end.
The four fluorescents in the second-floor girls' bathroom never all worked at the same time. One was already burned out that day, the very beginning of the school year, as Greta shoved through the door into the cramped little room.
Sometime back in the '80s the home economics class was converted to a storage room. It had since deteriorated into what Greta jokingly called the desk graveyard. The rest of the back hallway was devoted to shop class and the teachers' break room, which had its own bathroom. As a result, the bathroom all the way at the back was rarely used.
Greta had turned it into hers, though she did have to infrequently share it with Jessi (her only friend) and Sabrina Pierce, who hid out in it whenever she wanted to cut class.
Jessi was already in there that morning, perched on one of the sinks in an attempt to press her face close to the mirror.
"Did you see the new tables in the cafeteria?" Jessi asked, her words carrying a stilted, wooden tone. She was carefully applying a layer of lip gloss and trying not to move her lips too much.
Greta dumped her backpack on top of the trashcan lid. She pressed the toe of her boot against the tiled wall and used it for leverage to pull herself onto the wide window ledge, which was just about stomach-high. "No, why?"
"They're yellow."
"Weren't the old ones yellow?"
"That was like a manilla yellow. These are custard yellow, and they're hideous," Jessi declared. She dropped the lip gloss into her makeup bags with a little clicking sound that punctuated the statement.
Jessi always cared about junk like that. Greta probably would never have noticed the tables. Tables didn't matter to girls like Greta because she had freaky white hair and weird blue eyes to think about. Jessi had gorgeous coal-black hair and pretty green eyes. She was golden and tan from the summer, and her lip gloss was perfectly applied.
Of course Jessi was able to think about tables.
"Who'd you get for homeroom?" Jessi asked. She'd moved on to mascara. Jessi was in the bathroom making herself up every morning; her mom didn't allow makeup.
"Sanders. You?"
"Thompson. I guess I'll meet you in here before first period. We'll compare schedules."
"Okay," Greta agreed. Her voice was drowned out by the first warning bell. She swung her legs and jumped off the ledge. The boots landed with a solid thunk on the linoleum. "You coming?"
"In a minute. I'm not quite finished."
"Okay," she repeated. "See you after homeroom."
"See you," Jessi muttered. Her eyes were trained on the mirror, and she still hadn't looked at Greta once.
That's pretty much always how it was with Jessi. Greta wasn't sure she really liked her, most of the time, but Greta couldn't afford to be choosy with her friends. All the other students just looked at her, and knew that they didn't want to be around her.
They could sense that something was different about her, something even beyond her fair skin and white hair and weird eyes. Greta Hanson looked like a witch, according to Kelly, but she was actually something much, much stranger.
Greta looked the way she did because she was a night caller, and her life was destined to end before her 20th birthday. Up until that day in August, Greta always knew that she was going to do something special one day. She knew that she was meant for something, and Greta accepted it.
Accepted it? There were days when she welcomed it...until that day in August.
That's the day Greta Hanson walked out of the second floor girls' bathroom and bumped straight into Zion Lancaster.
-------------------------------------------
A little more.
-MY
