The New Girl

The new girl was pale.

That was the first thing I noticed about her when she walked through the door. “That girl is pale,” I told myself. “Almost vampiric.”

The thought passed my mind that, perhaps, she actually was a vampire.

“Nah,” I decided. “It’s sunny out. And besides, that hair makes her look paler than she actually is; she’d be almost human if it wasn’t so black.”

“Psst, Nina!” I turned in my desk to see Eric Waters, a tall, scrawny, pimply kid who sat next to me.

“What is it?” I hissed back at him.

“You’re talking to yourself.”

“Am not.”

“Are too. You said something about a black-haired vampires.”

I wasn’t sure what to say. I settled with, “Oh.”

Eric continued, “You might want to see someone about that habit of yours. Talking to oneself can be a sign of serious...”

I blocked him out and turned toward the front of the classroom, just in time to hear Mr. Benchley say, “Welcome to our class, young lady. You can take Eric’s seat, next to Miss Brown. Eric can move to the empty seat in the front of the classroom. That is, if the two lovebirds don’t mind being separated?”

I glared at Mr. Benchley as Eliza and her bunch erupted into mad gigges.

“He thinks he’s so funny, but...”

“Remember what I said about the talking to yourself thing.” Eric clapped me on the shoulder in a good-natured sort of way. “Professional help can do wonders.”

I stuck my tongue out at his back as he moved with his books to the front row and the new girl slipped into his seat.

“Hi there,” she whispered to me. Mr Benchley had already turned toward the board and was scribbling some nonsense on it in yellow chalk.

“Hi yourself,” I said. “My name’s Nina. I believe yours escaped me.”

“Oh, it’s Sn-” She paused, almost as if she had trouble remembering her own name. “Snailey. I’m Snailey White.”

Snailey. Some parents just have horrible taste in names.

“Okay, Snailey. Uh, you got a nickname?”

“No,” she said defensively, “I like Snailey.

“Of course,” I stammered. “You can like Snailey if you want to; I mean, it’s a perfectly fine name, and... and who wouldn’t like Snailey!”

My ramblings were interrupted by Mr. Benchley’s sharp voice. “Miss Brown, Miss White, would you care to tell me what topic is so fascinating that you simply had to discuss it in my class!”

I sat there, dumbfounded. Luckily, Snailey was not as speechless as I was.

“Mr. Benchley, sir.” Her voice was all sweetness and honey, and I noticed for the first time that, despite being deathly pale, she was quite pretty. “It’s really all my fault, sir.” His face softened with ever word she spoke. It was amazing, and sort of disgusting. “You see, it’s just so confusing, being in a new school and all, and I asked Nina to explain the school rules to me. I realize that I should have waited until after class, but I was terrified of messing up, and I so wanted to make a good impression on my new teacher.”

I couldn’t believe it! Something actually resembling a goofy smile had spread across my sarcastic, sour, history teacher’s face.

“That’s all right, Miss White. Just try to pay more attention in the future.” The smile disappeared abruptly. “That goes double for you, Miss Brown,” he said, his voice sharp again.

After the bell rang and we were released, I stopped Snailey on the way to her next class.

“What did you do to Mr. Benchley in there?” I asked, my eyes filled with awe.

“Oh, that?” She stifled a giggle. “I’ve always been good at being sweet. Wanna hear a story?”

I nodded.

“Well, after Dad died, I left my stepmother’s house to live with my uncles. There’s quite a few of them, and they all live together. They’re sort of like a surly old bachelor’s club. Needless to say, they weren’t too pleased about a teenaged girl coming to live with them without any prior notice.

“But, then, I sort of turned on my own particular brand of charm, and pretty soon...”

“They worship at your feet, huh?”

“Yep.”

At that point we both burst out laughing.

A few days later, Snailey and I were walking home together.

“There’s something I’ve been dying to ask you.”

Snailey had a skip to her walk, and it made her long, black braid-tied with a white ribbon the same shade as her skin-swing back and forth. “So ask me,” she said.

“Where do you get your lipstick?” It was a lovely shade, I had noticed, and I wanted to get some for myself.

“I don’t wear lipstick,” she replied brightly.

“What?” I stopped walking, letting her skip ahead of me. “You can’t tell me that’s your lips are naturally that color!”

She turned around to face me and started walking backwards. “But they are.”

“But, they’re, like, blood-red.”

Snailey blushed. The soft tinge of pink created an odd effect against her paper-white skin. “Some people are just born with lips as red as blood.”

“Red lips are nothing to be ashamed about,” I assured as I caught up with her. “It’s a nice color, really.”

She turned back around to face the front, and we walked and chatted for a few minutes. Then, I saw something out of the corner of my eye. Though it was only a brief glimpse, I was sure that it had been a man. And not only that, I was certain that I had glimpsed the same man several times earlier since we had left the school.

I grabbed Snailey’s arm.

“Nina! What are you...”

“Shhh,” I hissed. “Keep your voice down. I think someone’s following us.”

She glanced over her shoulder.

“Don’t look, Sn-”

“Oh know,” she groaned, covering her face with a lily-white hand.

“Did you see him?”

“Yeah, I saw him.” Her voice was muffled by her hand. “It’s Charming.”

“I don’t think it’s very charming at all. The guy’s stalking us!”

“No, that’s his name.”

“Charming?”

“Yes.”

“Odd name.”

“But no odder than Snailey, right?”

“Actually, your name might be a little bit odder.”

“Thanks.”

I shook my head. “Back to the point. Who is the Charming guy and why is he following us. Ex-boyfriend”

“You could say that.”

Glancing over my shoulder, I saw the man run from behind a post box one side of the street to a tree on the other.

“Is he dangerous?” I asked. “Should we call the police or something?”

“No, Charm’s not dangerous to anyone but himself.”

“So we just let him follow us?”

Snailey sighed. “No. I guess I’ll have to take care of him.” We stopped walking and, following her lead, turned around.

“Charming you idiot!” she called. “We know you’re following us, so just come out into the open already.”

There was silence.

“Charm!”

The man came slinking out from behind the tree, his back bent and head bowed. Now that I could see him up close, I realized that he was not a man, but a boy no more than a few years older than the two of us. Quite a cute one too. In fact, he was downright handsome.

“My darling!” he exclaimed pathetically.

“No. No ‘my darling’; I am not your darling,” Snailey said in her least sweet voice.

“But Sn-” She cut him off with a gesture before he could finish saying her name.

“I ran away for a reason, Charm, and that reason was you.”

I was just beginning to think that Snailey was being unnecessarily harsh, when the boy, Charming, said, “But I was prepared to marry you.”

That startled me. “Marry her! She’s only fifteen; she’s too young to marry anyone!”

“Exactly. See, Charm, Nina understands.”

Looking him up and down, I continued, “And you don’t look that old yourself.”

“But age shouldn’t matter when there is such love as there is between the two of us!”

“Such love?” Snailey gave him a look of utter disbelief. “I met you, what, a month ago, and already it’s ‘such love’?”

Charming bit his lip. “I know that you are denying it now, probably because you feel as if you are not ready for such feelings. To be honest, neither am I. But we can work together to make each other ready. After all, I did save your life.”

She snorted. “Anyone who’d taken a CPR class could have done it.”

“What’s CPR?” he said, looking puzzled.

“Just one thing that makes this place better than home. No one here is shut up in a box for days on end and wakes up to find some bozo she’s never met before proposing to her!” She sighed and slumped her shoulders. “Ugh. Who helped you find me, anyway?”

He stood up straight. “It’s not like I can’t do anything on my own!”

Snailey just looked at him. At last charming blushed and shuffled his feet. “I suppose your uncles helped a bit.”

She flinched and closed her eyes. “Did any of them come with you?”

“Two. They’ve gone to ‘rent a car’, whatever that means.”

As if in response to his words, a white sport’s car came careening around the curve ahead. It rushed down the street and came to a screeching halt less than ten feet from us.

I stared at it. The windows were tinted, so it was hard to tell, but I could have sworn that there was no one in that car. Even after the strange conversation I had just witnessed, it was the sight of a driverless car that first made me wonder, where is Snailey from, anyway?

Even as I wondered this, the car door opened. An extremely short man stepped out. I sighed in relief. At least my friend’s uncle was not a ghost.

That’s not to say he wasn’t very strange.

He couldn’t have been more than four feet tall, but he was stout, and all his parts were in proper proportion. He had a neatly cropped white beard, a round, red cherry of a nose, and small, rectangular glasses over twinkling blue eyes. He would have looked like a perfect copy of Santa Clause in miniature if he weren’t wearing a pinstriped business suit with his white hair pulled back into a ponytail.

The passenger side door had opened as well, and another man walked around the car. He was a few inches taller than the other, but that was probably because of the cowboy boots. He had no beard, but he did possess a comically large and bumpy nose and grizzled grey hair beneath a large, white cowboy hat.

“Nina,” said Snailey, “meet Uncle Sallus and Uncle Ballus.”

“Which one’s Sallus and which one’s Ballus?”

“You’ll find it doesn’t matter.”

“We’re very disappointed in you,” said the one with the ponytail.

“Very disappointed,” echoed the one with the cowboy hat.

I assumed they were disappointed in Snailey, rather than me or Charming.

“We were still celebrating your return to us...”

“...And then you run away.”

“Very disappointed,” said Ponytail and Cowboy in unison.

“And now we’re here to take you home,” announced Ponytail.

Snailey’s blood-red lips quivered. “But, Uncle...”

“No but’s, young lady.”

“No charming us today.”

Charming perked up. “You called?”

“No,” I snapped at him. “Hush; I wanna hear.”

“Do I have to marry him?” Snailey pointed toward the young man still cringing away from me.

Both uncles looked Charming up and down before shaking their heads.

“He annoys us too,” said Cowboy.

Snailey sighed. “I suppose I’ll go with you then. At least I got to see the world. Or, at least, a world.”

“Come. Tallus, Fallus, Nallus, Gallus, and Wallus are waiting for us.” Ponytail opened the car door and gestured toward the backseat.

Before climbing in, Snailey turned to me. “Sorry about all this Nina.”

I stared at her, my eyes probably bulging out of their sockets. “Who are you?”

“I’m sure you can figure it out eventually,” she replied as she slid onto the leather padded car seat. “Goodbye Nina!” And with that, Ponytail shut the door behind her.

“What about me?” whined Charming.

Cowboy seemed to consider the young man. “You can come along, if you must.”

A moment, or maybe two, later, the rental car carrying Sallus, Ballus, Charming, and Snailey disappeared around the corner, leaving me standing frozen like an idiot and considering my friend’s last words to me-“I’m sure you can figure it out eventually.”

“Eventually,” turned out to be the following day in Mr. Benchley’s class.

I had stayed up all night brooding over the mysterious origin of Snailey White, and my mind was stumbling groggily about from one random subject to another. It landed on the day, almost a week before, when Snailey first walked into our class.

I remembered thinking, “That girl is pale.” Vampire white. Paper white. Snow white.

Oh my. A stepmother, a lot of really short uncles, a guy named Charming who had saved her life.

Oh my, oh my. No, it couldn’t be, but... black hair and lips as red as blood. That way she had hesitated when saying her name, as if she had first meant to say something else. “It’s Sn-”

My head fell onto the arms folded across my desk.

“Welcome to our class, young lady,” I heard Mr. Benchley say. “Take the empty seat next to Miss Brown.

I looked up from my arms to see a blonde girl smiling at me.

“Hi!” she said, still smiling brightly, “I’m Ella.”

I glared at her suspiciously.

“That wouldn’t be short for Cinderella, would it?”

The girl’s smile disappeared. “How did you know?”