Moonless Night

Chapter 6

  The next few weeks passed by without anything of particular interest happening. And I mean nothing.

  The "link" between Evan and I was still present, but rather indistinct. It felt weak and dim, nearly imperceptible. We couldn't even "communicate", though we still tried every once in a while when we got bored.

  When that became boring, we chose to hang out with Cole and some of his friends from Curoche. They were mostly older and, unfortunately, male. Cole was a Senior this year, so his friends weren't very surprising. Hanging out with them was different from what I expected though. It was actually pretty entertaining at first, especially when I found out that Cole, like Evan, had never had a girlfriend despite his attractiveness. I teased them relentlessly and ended up with a backlash.

  They found out I had never had a boyfriend, its a mystery how it came up, and they teased me as mercilessly as I did them. I resorted to hanging out with my friends from school when Cole's friends joined in too. My classmates were my friends, but I preferred Cole. Still, I liked Jesse, Jonathan, Sara, Sam, Megan, and Jackson. I enjoyed our time together, even when they made me tutor them.

  I was at the top of our Junior year. Or, to my complete and utter annoyance, second in our year. I passed every test and class, but I'm not perfect. Between my perfect scores, I got a few 90s. Nothing less, though. I happened to have inherited my "geniusness", as Jesse put it, and as Evan has, from both our mother and father. Because of them, both greatly intelligent themselves, my grades have never faltered very much.

  My friends were, apparently, thoroughly impressed by my intelligence, but I was still second. I wondered why they hadn't asked the first place ranker to tutor them. Even if he annoyed me, I had to admit, he was perfect. One day, I asked them why they chose me over him.

  They stared at me as if it were common sense.

  "Because, well, he's a Kuran." Jesse said, as if that explained it all.

  I looked at her blankly.

  "They just have this, I don't know, unapproachable aura about them," she continued. "It just feels...wrong to get close to them. I mean, it's not like we don't like them," she said, strangely defensive. "It's just that we don't get them. They're so hard to understand, not that they make it any easier."

  I nodded in understanding. The first placer, or as I called him, the Seventh, did have a kind of air around him. It felt distant and almost cold. But unlike them, I didn't actually feel repulsed or wrong in any way. I was actually quite fascinated, in a way.

  But I didn't admit this, of course.

  After this conversation, I began to grow more curious about the Kurans. Unintentionally, I noticed them more and more. I watched them more and more. I ran into them quite often and got caught watching them just as often by a certain apathetic student teacher. I was beginning to think the guy was fated to catch me staring at them in wonder and make me die of embarrassment.

  Ignoring those strange coincidences, the more I saw the Kurans, the more fascinated I became with how different they were.

  I noticed a lot in my observations. I noticed how they were all effortlessly graceful. How they never seemed to be affected by the most shocking or mundane things. How their beauty never seemed to fade. And how they were seemingly faultless.

  But these were only the firsts of my findings. After a day or two, I realized these were only facts on the surface, like icing on cake. There was much more to the Kurans than I initially thought.

  I realized some things they did were nothing but a façade. Their movements around other students were strange sometimes. It was subtle, but it seemed as if they were trying to be careful. Gentle almost, as if they were holding something back, but it was barely noticeable. People could perceive these actions as distant or considerate depending on their view.