I stared at my reflection as I pushed a strand of hair out of my face and behind my ears. I smiled slightly, and took my time looking at the little details that made up my appearance. My hair was boring and straight, but I liked it. My nose was slightly wide, but who really cares. My smile was lopsided, as one side of my lips would raise slightly more than the other side, but that was fine.
The only thing particularly extraordinary were my eyes. I could never really tell which color they were, as sometimes they looked green, and sometimes blue, and sometimes this mix between grey and silver, as though they couldn't decide what they wanted to be.
I was happy with my features, even if they could sometimes frustrate me. I looked fairly plain, and the clothing I wore did nothing to help. I was also tall, which sometimes could attract attention. I don't hate attention, but there are times when a person chooses that they don't wish to be seen.
I didn't realize how deep I had been in thought until I was snapped back to reality, as though some invisible force had pushed me forward through a door that brought me into a world that I didn't wish to be in. Unfortunately, the force wasn't invisible, and as soon as I was through the door it closed behind me, making it impossible to return to my world of dreams until the door chose to open again, where I would step through unknowingly.
"You should get going." A voice behind me said, and I felt my mother's hand on my back I stared at her through the mirror. She was quite pretty, in my own opinion. The only thing I had really inherited from her was my hair color, which was a light brown that looked nearly orange in certain lightings, but not quite. Her eyes were dark brown, and although they were maybe not considered to be the most interesting, there was warmth in them that made up for lack of color. Her skin had slightly more color than mine, as where mine gave me the possible appearance of a ghost like the ones people used to frighten each other with. They were silly things.
I nodded slowly, and turned to leave my room. My mother grabbed my arm as I was almost through the door.
"Are you sure you don't want to try some of the new clothes I picked up for you? I know you dislike them, but they might help with some of the problems you've been having with people outside..."
Outside. That was the word that my mother used for everything that wasn't part of the house in which we lived. She said it as though it was an ordinary thing that everyone did, but you could tell that she meant something by it. As though the only place of safety was within our walls. The worst part about it: if you thought long enough about it, that was probably true.
"I have to leave, mother, or else I'm going to be late." I tried to say it kindly, though it might have sounded as though I was tired of the conversation, basing off of my mother's reaction. She took a small step back that was barely noticable, and the warmth in her eyes seemed to fade slightly.
"Just trying to help." She almost whispered. I turned around quickly and ran through the narrow hallway to the front door, where I entered the outside.
It was a sunny day, and as far as un unobserving eye would be able to tell, everything was normal, and everything was almost like things were as our textbooks described times long ago. It wasn't completely peaceful, but I would take anything over the world I lived in.
I knew I was running late, but I almost couldn't help taking a little extra time on my way to school, knowing that soon I would be stuck in a building with people who not only spat on anything that may be considered "good", but were most likely outside the night before, cheering from the sidelines.
I shut my eyes, as at that point I could hear the screams all around me, that I heard every night through the wall that protected me at night. Someday they would run out of poor innocents that couldn't fight back, as people like that were growing to be few, and they would break down the front door, and march into the bedrooms and drag me and my other out into the streets, where the hard ground would scrape our skin, and we would go deaf from the cheers around us.
