She wondered what death looked like. A wrinkled old man so skinny and brittle; his hands were mistaken for bones. His face was something to behold, magnificent in a hideous kind of way, with his big nose, hairy ears, and beady red rimmed eyes, made that way from sleepless nights, staring out at his victims from behind his two inch thick bifocals. Or perhaps it wasn’t a man at all. Perhaps she was a woman, a skinny type woman with lustrous blonde hair and big red lips. Perhaps the black robe was a trench coat, remarkably in fashion, made sinister by novelists and TV writers craving a better story. Suppose she wore a red satin gown that billowed to the floor from beneath her long black trench coat, as if waiting for a rain that would never come. Suppose she was a messenger of mercy, come to take you away to a place of halcyon fields and warm dreamful nights. Suppose that after you stopped living, you were done, finished, ceased to exist. Suppose none of it mattered. Suppose none of it mattered at all.

Perhaps it was the darkness of the room that brought about such thoughts, stretching and consuming until it gained a life of its own, no longer the absence of light, but the midnight creature it was known to be. Sometimes, the darkness would play tricks on you, summoning faces you thought you’d never see again, voiced whispers that made your soul jump from your skin, and forgotten memories you’d locked away in a wooden box in the back of the mind, where your monstrous demons lay dormant, waiting to be released.

It was always in the darkness that she found herself again, as if she were one of night’s many shadows, dancing in the dark rays of the moon. In the dark, things became so clear. Lying was good, it kept you honest. You were only happy when you were sad. And it’s only when the world is asleep that you can truly come to life. The dark brought with it an askew sense of order and stability. The darkness was the only thing she ever counted on.

On the nights when sleep betrayed her, depriving her, pointless dreams of abstract images, the darkness was her only friend. But it had been a while since she had seen the darkness, spending sleepless nights with a boy, a book, and life in mind. She supposed the darkness was jealous, angry from neglect, childishly refusing to play with her. So she stared and waited until night became day, hoping for the world only she knew existed.

“Kiran,” a voice called in what to her seemed few minutes later, “are you okay?” the innocent voice of a young boy called to her. Somewhere in the back of her mind, gears clicked in recognition but she was too dazed to understand what the sound meant.

“Kiran…Kiran did you hear me?” the voice asked again anxiously, dread and worry woven tightly in between those words. Small childlike fingers held her face delicately and the distant smell of mud pies and chocolate cookies filled her.

She hadn’t always been this way. There was a time when she was much younger, her mind much simpler, more innocent, living in a world of monkey bars, sandboxes, and never-perfect mud pies, where Emily Winters was the cornerstone of childhood. She was the slayer of under-the-bed monsters, the chef of Nesquick milkshakes, and the queen of Europia, a fortress that lay hidden in the unknown room behind the staircase. In Europia, she was a princess of unknown fairytales and her brothers, the proud warriors of an even prouder city.

She came from a childhood of on-the-bed dances and clean-your-room raids, a childhood of tickle-my-tummy and race-you-to-the-door. She came from Timothy Turtle and brother shaped clouds. She was from absolute childhood bliss. It was true. She hadn’t always been that way.

“Kiran I’m scared. Please wake up.”

Sometimes she wondered if she ever really woke up at all; sleep walking through life in a daze, completely indifferent. What was the point of caring about anything anymore? Eventually everything ended, everything left, everything died. There was no point to living. Not when you grew up anyways. When you grew up nothing was ever the same. You couldn’t run like you used to, laugh like you used to, sing like you used to. She missed singing. It was Emily who taught her how to sing, sing songs about lost love and things that were too far out of reach and touch if you didn’t believe. .

It was down by the Sally Gardens, my love and I did meet.

She crossed by the Sally Gardens, with little snow-white feet.

She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree,

But I was young and foolish, and with her did not agree.

In a field down by the river, my love and I did stand

And on my leaning shoulder, she laid her snow-white hand.

She bid me take life easy, as the grass goes on the weirs

But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.

Down by the Sally Gardens, my love and I did meet.

She crossed by the Sally Gardens, with little snow-white feet.

She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree,

But I was young and foolish, and with her did not agree.

She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree,

But I was young and foolish, and with her did not agree.

Sometimes she wished she could go back. Sometimes, she wished she hadn’t grown up at all.

“KIIIIRRRRAAAAANNN!!” it pierced through her monotonous thoughts.

“Cody, it’s okay. I heard you. I’m sorry for not answering sooner.” She replied quietly, afraid that if she spoke any louder she would scare the boy even further. “Shhh, Cody come here, I’m sorry.” She repeated, taking the small boy into her arms and rocking him back and forth like Emily had done to her when she was his age and scared out of her wits. She’d never meant to scare him. She just wasn’t ready to let go. The darkness hadn’t come. This was the fifth night in a row.

“Kiran you were dead. I walked in here and you were just lying there! I called your name but you didn’t answer. You didn’t even look at me. You just stared. You didn’t even see me, Kiran. You didn’t see me,” he rapidly divulged between sobs in utter hysteria. She’d never seen him this way. What had he seen when he walked in through her door? He was probably looking for help with his school uniform, running to the only person he knew wouldn’t make fun of him for being so small, for being so young, and instead of finding the safeness he looked for in her, he was faced with this. He’d interfered with thoughts that her mind wouldn’t stop producing; thought’s she hadn’t had since before the summer, thoughts that were usual sometimes scared even her.

“I was just sleep Cody…really. Everything is all right. See, I’m fine. Now, why don’t you go find out what Dylan’s doing and ask him for help with your uniform? I’m sure he wouldn’t mind just this once.” She replied, nudging the small boy lightly with her elbow, producing the fake smile she was always prepared to give.

When she was younger, she remembered practicing that smile in front of the mirror every day when she woke up and every night when she went to bed. If you were smiling, no one suspected that everything wasn’t okay. If you were smiling everything was all right. If you were smiling no on even gave you a second glance.

“Okay.” Cody replied with a small smile, wiping away at his tears with the ends of his sleeves before running his sleeved wrist under his nose and jumping off the bed running off to find his two older brothers.

Tuesday. Sometimes she wondered what it would be like to have something she liked to do on the weekends. Teenagers looked forward to weekends; she didn’t need to watch teen movies and read books to under stand that rule of adolescence, it was just a simply fact. But to her it was all the same, just another day to live through, school made little difference. At the times where it did matter, she felt as if she were drowning.

Her arms kept reaching, her legs kept kicking not wanting the wind to see her struggle but she flailed against the tide. She tried to keep swimming, but she couldn’t. She was too tired, arms locked at her sides, legs limp from exertion – and then the waves would come. So sometimes she was drowning. Sometimes, she even saw herself go down.

She was different from her friends, from her brothers, from most everybody she knew. She couldn’t explain how but she knew it every time she looked into their eyes. They didn’t see the way she saw. They didn’t understand the way she understood. She was weird and different and if she smiled hard enough, the world would ever notice.

Her mind was a tidal wave of colliding thoughts and analyses, buzzing through her brain in an endless cacophony of voices, all screaming to be heard at the exact same time. So she ignored them, opting to dress for school rather than to let them take over again.

The Elizabeth Beacon Preparatory School was a haven of rules and regulations; perhaps what her father enjoyed most about the school. Specific sides of the hall were assigned for which direction one would go in, all students sported the same green and white uniform, simple yet presentable, and all students were expected to strived for complete scholastic excellence. It came as no surprise that girls were required to wear knee length green skirts, that were often rolled up in order to maintain some sort of fashion, white button up dress shirts, and a green vest proudly advertising the school’s proud name on a shield-shaped patch above the heart. Specific socks and shoes were also part of Elizabeth Beacon’s school regulation dress code, partly present to show students that any form of individuality was unwelcome and only caused room for error, but also to add to the already ridiculous sum parents already paid the school.

Slowly taking her time to fasten every buckle, do every button, and tie her shoes in the exact same way she did every day, she wondered what the day would bring her. Tuesday… the week days practically ran away from her, a blur of white and green, late night homework sessions, and in-the-parlor cheerleading practices. The week would pass by only too quickly, losing a fraction of a minute with every new day, making the days shorter and the night longer…. All of the time that was misplaced throughout the day could always be found in the darkness where time seemed to come to near halt. Even when she slept she would sometimes wake to find that the numbers on the clock of her dresser would refuse to change, the darkness watching her in cruel amusement, silently hiding and waiting for her to crack and beg for forgiveness… the nights were almost unbearable in all of its loneliness.

Sighing, she picked up her leather school backpack, white for girls, green for boys, and trudged slowly downstairs where her family sat ready at the breakfast table in the kitchen, a table so large that it allowed the family to thoroughly ignore each other; father at one end, mother at the other, and kids scattered around somewhere in between. Kiran knew what each of them were doing without even looking up from her large silver notebook. Dylan, her eldest brother was revising the homework he had done from the night before, sweeping the pages for spelling corrections, math errors, and stupid word choice. Caleb, the second eldest, listened to his ipod at the breakfast table, if only to make sure to block out anyone who dared talk to him that early in the morning and yet, Kiran knew that had anyone said anything to him, he would be able to hear it whether or not he chose to respond. Caleb was as rebellious as one could be when living under a Winters roof. Rebecca her older sister was text messaging BFF Penny under the table, still keeping an open ear in case someone thought of asking her something about herself that she might be able to answer while Cody, the youngest tried to be quiet while playing his Nintendo Ds, something that usually got him frustrated and angry enough to smack his leg so hard that it left red hand prints on his thighs.

Just then Cody smacked his leg so hard that the sound could be heard throughout the room and yet no one looked up. No one made any move to ask the young boy if he was already. No one turned to look at him or even acknowledge him. No one dared look up from their activity. It just wasn’t the way things worked.

But as awkward and silent as the family was, spending time together was an obligation, a necessity, and to not conform to that, one of the more sacred rules of the house, was to become practically disowned. For all intensive purposes, the Winters family seemed to any onlooker to be the typical suburban household.

“Dylan how was your game?” Dylan looked up from his chemistry in a controlled look of surprised towards the head of the house, the man who sat to his left, a newspaper covering everything from his head to his waist.

Marcus Winters never the sort of man to put down his newspaper for anyone or anything, continued to read the business section, ignorant that this was the first time he had addressed his eldest son in almost two weeks.

“Well sir, the Mud Dogs won 56 to 43.”

“That’s barely a ten point lead… how much did you say you scored?”

“Twenty five sir.”

“Hm… maybe we should set up a basketball hoop outside. It’ll help you practice so you can do better next game. You can never be too good at anything you hear?” And with that, he folded up his newspaper, tucked it under his arm and walked out of the kitchen, briefcase in hand. No goodbyes were given, no kissing his wife before he left… nothing. Had it been any other family, Kiran was certain that the people at the table would have been somewhat distraught by the man’s behavior, but she and her family were so used to his indifference that it was hardly alarming at all.

“You guys better get your things and go wait for the car. You don’t want to be the last kids getting to class. No one who’s respectable goes somewhere late,” mother muttered from the other end of the table while sipping at a respectable glass of wine.

Sure that they were dismissed, the children rose from their seats and picked up their matching leather bags, Dylan first and Caleb last, pretending not to know what their mother had said if only to bug her with his presence a little while longer before he followed Dylan and the rest of the kids out.

Standing in the courtyard waiting for the car service vehicle that picked them up on the days when they had school, the children finally looked at each other. It was only 6:45. It would be another fifteen minutes until the car came to pick them up and drop them off at school.

The weather had been awfully cheerful for a Tuesday, bright sun, clear skies, and a low breeze. It was enough to make Kiran miss the blissful shadows of the night, shades of dark that hide her every imperfection. Standing in the sun, she couldn’t but feel naked and exposed.

“ – shouldn’t listen to him. He doesn’t know squat about how well you played or how hard a game it was. The other team was good. You shouldn’t be ashamed of winning against a good team just because he wants to be an ass,” Caleb said in what was his version of exploding in anger, a low even (bored) tone that although wasn’t as on edge and demanding as most people his age but still showed as deep or maybe even deeper anger for the cause of it.

“It’ll be fine Caleb. I’ll put the hoop up today after school and do a couple of free throws. Besides a little more practice couldn’t hurt.”

It had been too long since she had visited Dylan’s room to say hello to him, even longer since they spent any time together outside of the group that consisted of her and her mismatched siblings. The last time she had been into Dylan’s room though she stood at awe of the trophy cases that stripped this room of the space it had first held: free style swimming, Basketball MVP, spelling bee ribbons and trophies. The levels of his accomplishments were almost unobtainable and yet Dylan Winters had mastered every hurdle and curve ball that had come his way with a calm and smiling face. No one could have asked for anything more of him… except Marcus…

Caleb who preferred to be a bigger nuisance to his family as he could be, refused to join in group activities of the acutest kind and spent most of his time listening to music on his own and making fun of the baseball team who would often ask him to join and always get turned down.

“It’s good that you’re playing. Penny and I are having the rest of the squad over after school anyways so if you can bring the rest of the team over then we’ll make a huge thing out of it. It might even be fun. It’ll be like a small pep rally” Becca enthused as she hit send on her phone.

Dylan smiled at his younger sister and then placed the book he held in his hand back into his back as he saw the car pull up in front of them. Caleb placed his headphones back into his ears and they drove off to school. A ten minute car ride that would amount to about twenty minutes of walking had their father allowed them to walk to school.

There was an unspoken rule amongst the Winters children regarding their school lives…. That they not interfere with each other while in the public eye. They were much too different, their social groups to uniform to tolerate someone outside of their own kind and thus was the school divided; into a hierarchy of athletics jocks, badasses (who listened to a lot of music but were not to be confused with the I live for music people), I live for music teens, artists (including but not exclusive to people who dealt with art, acting, music and so on and so forth), political activists, nerds, and the invisibles. Much like the caste systems in long ago India, these groups did not mix and had no business polluting with others.

As soon as they walked out of that car everything changed. They were different people than they knew themselves to be, for the most part that was. They could be and do anything they wanted as long as it conformed to the laws of the school hierarchy. To step outside those boundaries was to become an untouchable.

With a look they all bade each other farewell and made their way into the school with their assigned clicks. Dylan was miraculously both a jock and a nerd was able to float in between the two groups with ease, granted he spent more time with the jock than with the nerds, who understood their place in the grand scheme of things. Caleb who was undoubtedly a badass would sit with his friends, most of whom smoked cigarettes during their gym times behind the school near the cafeteria, claiming the smell of smoke was of course due to the over cooked food they would have to endure once lunch time came and Becca who was the oldest between herself and Kiran would cheer during lunch break in front of the whole school, becoming the envy of every girl in the school when she rhythmically danced, did splits and yelled about team spirit. Kiran… well, that was another story. People knew she was different, knew she was weird and instead of trying to deal with her, she became an untouchable. Easier to ignore what you don’t like than to try to fix it, she supposed. Until, that was, the day that Morgan Fairchild got transferred from her public school to Elizabeth Beacon.

Kiran had been sitting on a bench outside of the school during her lunch period, writing in her silver notebook as she did every lunch period, Becca’s cheers being chanted somewhere to her left when she felt a shadow fall over her.

“Hey. Why is everyone here so… retarded?” Morgan demanded before plopping down on the open space next to her on the bench. Kiran just looked at her, unsure of whether or not to respond to the girl’s question. Maybe she didn’t know yet but she wasn’t supposed to be talking to her. None of the kids talked to her. Even the teachers found her irritating and quiet.

“Those are the rules.”

“It’s a rule that people are retarded?” she asked amused. Kiran shook her head and then nodded towards the tables to her left, where anyone who mattered sat.

“It’s a rule that you stay where they put you. Hopefully you’ll end up over there.”

“Well… how do you know if they put you somewhere?”

“You’ll know.” Kiran answered in absolute certainty. She remembered the day that she had been named an untouchable. She had always been strange throughout elementary school, talking to things that weren’t there, drawing dark shapes that stalked her family in her drawing. But no one thought to question it. She had been best friends with Abby Kalgan, the prettiest girl in class, though no one knew why Abby put up with her, and was deemed okay until Abby said otherwise. Unfortunately, during seventh grade, Abby’s parents who were chemical engineers got offered a better job far far away and since then, she had never been able to connect with anyone else… except for Morgan. Who would have been a badass had she not spoken to the worst of the untouchables.

Since then, Morgan had decided that if they were both to be invisible that the should be invisible together. Morgan had been her godsend. The only thing that kept her from completely giving into the darkness, which seemed to watch her throughout the day, waiting for her to slip so that they could lock her away in a world where everything she knew finally made sense. It felt so right to be in the darkness… so good… it was the only thing that kept her from going there; its seductive pull. She knew that once she was lost in the darkness she was lost forever… and she hoped that day would never come.

“Hey Kiran, do you have the calculus homework? I uh…. Didn’t understand it…” Morgan said with a smile that meant she hadn’t done it because something more interesting had been on the night before.

Kiran nodded and handed over her homework without a second thought. She knew her problems had been done correctly, that she had caught all of her mistakes before rewriting it from her yellow note pad to her clean sheet of homework paper. She was after all an A student.

“Gotta get some of these questions wrong. If Durgan finds out that I copied from you I’ll be on scholastic probation which means kissing my crappy ass car goodbye.” Morgan brushed her light brown hair out of her eyes and began to copy the other girl’s notes, her hand writing much bigger than Kiran’s small neat numbers.

As the rules of scholastic probation went, children caught plagiarizing the work of another student would go on probation and if it happened again they would be suspended. Also, children with grades below a B were also put on academic probation and would have to join an after school homework group in order to improve their scores. Much like anything else in Elizabeth Beacon, these rules were non-negotiable and those caught violating said rules would be suspended.

Elizabeth Beacon ruled with fear and precision. To the children outside of the private school district, the school seemed more like a prison then a place of education. The school grounds intimidated the quaint public school a few miles away with its size, almost three times larger, and its gothic gates which seemed not to keep people out but to lock them in, depriving the children of their freedom and as some of the public school children said… their souls.

It was rumored that the students of Elizabeth Beacon were occultists, performing crazy animal rituals in order to make their brains ten times bigger and their families wealthy and successful. This was done by all of the children in the school to maintain their family’s stability. It was public knowledge that the school was made up of legacies, families that had been going to that school for centuries and that it was too exclusive for most people to be able to apply and actually get in to.

Morgan had been more than happy to divulge all of the rumors going on about Elizabeth Beacon when she’d first gotten there, smiling and laughing and the ridiculousness of it all. “They turn out more robots than they do pagans.” Kiran agreed. Though the walls were old and heavy, the halls almost breathed and the rooms were much too bright, the sun obtruding through the large windows of the classrooms where Greek history, Piano, Calculus, South American literature and other such subjects were taught.

Sometimes it made her glad that she was an untouchable… that she could find shelter in the shade the trees provided as opposed to sitting in the warm sun where the red cafeteria tables sat soaking in the luminous light. “At least we won’t get skin cancer,” Morgan had always said though she would often complain about never getting a chance to tan like the rest of them, always hating but wanting to be like the rest of them.

Tuesday… just another day… when she was younger she would have loved that it was Tuesday. On Wednesdays she and Emily would bake cookies together; chocolate chip, sugar, oatmeal raison, anything she liked. She missed Emily and her sugary sweetness, missed the warmth she brought, a warmth she only found at night in her room if they were kind enough to visit.

“Kiran…” the sound echoed in her mind as though the inside of her skull were just hollow space. Thought must have brought them closer to her. She was fading again. Sinking back into the dark edges of her mind, her eyes closing involuntarily as she saw the figure standing by the fountain, as shadow of a person she thought she might have seen once, peering at her without concern, perhaps thinking she couldn’t return its gaze. What always struck her was the blackness of their eyes, an empty void, a black hole. Their eyes never seemed to move but she could feel it squinting as her in confusing. She was just a blur to them… something that might have been there if they looked closely, not exactly a part of their world but not a part of the one she lived in either. It approached slowly, almost swaggeringly towards her, arm outreached. If it touched… she was sure she’d disappear.

“Hey!” her head snapped back to Morgan who stood before her worried. Morgan’s bag had fallen from its seat on the bench to the ground, its inner contents spread across the floor of the outer hall, a mess of papers and a half broken pencil. “You left me again.”

“I’m sorry. You know I space out sometimes,” Kiran replied quietly and Morgan nodded absentmindedly, preferring not to ask questions when she knew they weren’t welcome. Kiran had always gotten along with Morgan, a girl who talked enough to make up for her introverted and quiet exterior. Morgan knew how to respect the privacy of others and expected to be left alone when she needed it as well. It was an unspoken bond between them that created the don’t-ask-don’t-tell code that they held so close to their hearts, protecting the thin layer of armor that sheltered their fragile interiors.

They smiled at each other, smiles that were meant to erase the previous scene and bent down to help the boy who had already begun to pick up Morgan’s things. They had been so caught up they hadn’t heard or seen him until he began shoving Morgan’s things into the leather bag.

“Thanks.” Morgan offered with a smile as the boy nodded and swung his bag over his left shoulder, walking away as quietly and sinuously fluid as he had come, obsidian black hair catching the light in red and purple hues. “I wonder who he is…” Morgan thought aloud.

Kiran shrugged, following the boy with her eyes until he reached the corner. Looking back at Morgan with her practiced smile re replied, “we’ll be late for class,” and the two hurried off to meet Durgan, the fifty something year old calculus teacher with the bushy white mustache and shiny bald head.