She sits in that corner every day. It seems that she never leaves, though she has to. She has a nice frame, not one of a starved teenager. It’s funny, watching her. My friends and I love to make fun of her. She just sits there, staring out the window, a funny, faraway look on her face. It feels like she’s not even there. If she’s not there, she can’t hear us, and she can’t get angry. She’s an easy target.

“Where did she get her clothes? A dumpster?” Angela asks, flipping her hair over her shoulder and snickering. Angela loves to attack the girl about her clothes. She’s right, though. The girl wears an oversized flannel shirt and overalls every day. She looks awful. Her hair is Katie’s favorite subject.

“And her hair! God, does she even bother to look in the mirror? That frizz could only come from a lightening strike!”

Katie has spoken her words. She’s right, though. The girl has light brown hair that sticks out in almost every direction. It’s tangled, and in ugly knots, weaving heavily over her face and obscuring most of her expression from our view. It’s probably a good thing. If she had zits, Sarah would be all over her. Sarah likes to talk about the state of people’s faces.

“Why does she even bother to come here? This is our place,” Livia says. We’re in the library. It isn’t our place, but she has a point. We had started hanging out at the library almost a month ago, the only teenagers in the place other than the girl. The librarian knew us by heart. Not her. She didn’t belong here.

“Where are her parents, anyway? You’d think they’d keep a rodent like that in the house, where she couldn’t embarrass them,” Angela finishes, smirking lightly at her ingenious insult.

My friends lapse into silence, reading their books on science and psychology and whatever else they like to read. I don’t pay much attention to them anymore. I focus on the girl. She never has a book in her lap. She just sits there and stares out the window, watching the clouds and birds fly away in front of her, watching the trees age and decay, watching people come and go, making fun of her and her strangeness.

She IS strange. She sits so still, she’s like a statue. And she just sits. My friends don’t lower their voices. She can hear every single word we say, everyday. Today we were kind and stopped early. Usually, we discuss how mental patients do the same thing and look up famous cases in books and read them in loud, mocking voices. Sometimes we mimic her. We once went as far as sitting in front of her and mimicking her. She never reacts. She’s strange. Weird. She doesn’t fit in.

As the evening recedes, my friends say their good-byes and leave. Finally, I am the only one left with the strange girl. The librarian walks around us, her low heeled shoes from K-Mart not making a sound on the speckled and stained carpet. I watch the girl as the girl watches the sky. I wonder what she’s thinking.

Slowly, the girl turns around and stands. She is crying, I can see from where I am sitting. With slow, awkward hands she wipes her faces, her fingers twitching, nearly poking her in gray, absent-looking eyes. She shuffles towards the door, holding herself with the same awkward arms that look too long for her thin body. She exits, hunched over her stomach, covered by fading overalls that are too large for her. We never knew they were too big when she was sitting.

The librarian comes to stand next to me and sighs. I look up at her, and she shakes her head, her long blond hair creating a halo around her tan skin in the florescent light.

“Shame about that girl,” she says softly, in a very librarian voice. I inquire as to what she means, and the librarian looks at me in surprise. “You mean you don’t know? That’s Abby Summers. Her parents used to run this place, and she helped them out every afternoon, until they were killed in that train accident two months ago. She has no place to go. No one wants her. So she spends her days here and sleeps on the steps during the night. Tragic girl, really. Tragic story, and I’m afraid that it won’t have a very good ending. I doubt she’ll survive much longer.” The librarian shakes her head and then shrugs. “I best get to work.”

She walks away, her feet sounding louder than they did before as a buzz of sadness fills my head. I feel bad for her. It really is a shame that she won’t survive for much longer. Sighing, I pick up my book bag and leave.

The girl is sitting outside on a bench, looking up at the newly risen moon, which she couldn’t see from her window. I ignore her as I walk past, but snicker a little at her shoes. They’re obviously from Wal-Mart. How cheap.