I have something of a taste for the obscure. To most people, this just means that I'm pretentious.

Which is not an ill-founded accusation; actually, a rather fitting one for a bookishly sarcastic high school junior known to most as Selene Eloisa Douglass. Improbably enough, I am not the only person bearing that particular first name at Pine Hills, though the other is named after the woman who sang that saccharine movie ballad a decade and a half ago, and spells it accordingly. She is a bubbly sophomore basketball player and thus is the first person that comes to mind when my helpfully distinguishing surname is not mentioned.

But that is fine with me. My deliberate self-obfuscation is yet another pretension, attaching lofty intent to the fact that I'm just not terribly popular. There's no particular reason for it besides my utter ignorance and ineptitude in all things adolescent--even my physical features can't seem to align though various male associates of trusted opinion (and varying degrees of intimacy) have termed me "goddess-like", "striking" and quite simply "lovely". Nevertheless, flattery cannot make my voluminous brown curls (probably the fault of some Moor or Sephardic Jew in my mother's Spanish bloodline) trendily emo-straight and asymmetrically styled, and neither can it hide the fact that I'm neither quite anorexic-thin or bursting out of a push-up bra, but somewhere in between, with spindly arms worn to the bone with long hours of cross-country training and a body that has a good idea of where to allocate its meager fat stores, yet remains oft-hidden beneath jeans and a large sweatshirt pilfered from my brother's closet. Alas, no pretensions can save even me from the inescapable plague of vanity. Teenagers are hardly the most-affected segment of the human population; we just haven't acquired the deceptive finesse to conceal it.

Of course, though, I know it's really got little to do with physical appearance, despite what the marketers of teen-directed beauty products would like to argue. My teeth are sufficiently white and I managed to discover deodorant before the lingering smell of cooked onions discovered me (hardly just an affliction of males, as I unfortunately discovered in all-girl gym class as a freshman). I'm not what you would call 'approachable', and this is deliberate, too. Even those who find me will have to break through a wall of hard stares or just simple disinterest indicated by posture and a preoccupation with a rather formidable-looking Tolstoyan novel. Largely, I am unpopular even among the self-professed intellectuals for I have an utter lack of interest in scholastic recognition. I take the prescribed classes, quietly do better than any of them on the AP tests at the end of the year, and generally don't care much for grades or for their own styles of conceit--I much prefer my own. Really, I suppose that I much prefer myself too much to give any of my personal sovereignty over to an academic club or worse, some clique.

Not to say that I am friendless, however--with Brad, proverbial homosexual male friend whom I met long ago when 'sex' alone was a hilariously forbidden word and Margot, who is something like my long-lost twin although unlike me an atheist with ridiculously good grades, invariably at my side.

It is for them that I now search through Pine Hills' delightfully foggy open-air halls on this, the first day back from the religiously-neutral Winter Vacation, inadequately dressed in a peasant skirt and a long black top lined with somewhat worn, but formerly pretty lace; a pile of books balanced precariously in my shivering arms. In all honesty, for the first time in my life, there was nothing particularly religious nor celebratory about my Christmas. The last year has been one of crisis; strangely enough, not my own. This was the first holiday season since my father had left, and ironically enough, though he was the ill-matched agnostic to my mother's Catholic, he took with him all the religious tradition that had been the core of my and my siblings' upbringing. There wasn't much of a celebration at all; I cannot remember the last time any of us took Mass.

As I scuff my impractically thin Morrocan slippers against the gum-stained pavement, weaving in and out of the coat-wrapped crowds of students that are beginning to accumulate around the lockers, I try not to dwell on these matters too much. Religious matters haven't much weight with Margot; she will change the subject with a slight sound of sympathy and silence until the subject changes; Brad the former Episcopalian is in something of an ongoing spiritual crisis himself and though he often brings up interesting tangents, usually just further confuses the matter at hand. But, as said, I have a taste for the obscure. I suppose I manage to usually get what I want.

Though, as I stop for a movement to rearrange the hazardously awkward load of books (as a senior, would I really be caught dead with something as tasteless as a backpack? Even I have my concessions to vanity, as mentioned previously), my gaze is automatically redirected, up and to the right, about twenty feet away, standing next to another row of lockers painted an uneven forest green. It is always so; no matter the size or energy of the crowd...and it has nothing to do with his damnably magnetic green eyes. Peter Sariel; he who has inexplicably haunted me since that moment I first offered him a seat on the overcrowded bus our first day of school, three and a half years ago.

He looks at me now, deliberately, as he always does--his gaze is inescapable in its very nature, and though I would never dream of putting myself in his way (the attractive powers of his eyes are nonetheless coupled with a strong repellent effect, as if we are the same poles of two magnets...too alike to cling to one another) we run into each other often. But we speak little. Margot, despite her usual disinterest in such petty matters, is firmly convinced that there's some sort of a crush on my end, if not his--we're notorious as two of the most socially-inept students anyway, so it wouldn't be terribly surprising if some unrequited, incompetently approached 'love' were merely the problem. It isn't, but I don't have a satisfactory answer for what it is. As I return Peter's gaze, lingering without emotion, I realize as always why such an explanation would make sense to an outside observer. He is in the same class as I, and therefore just on the brink of adulthood, with a lithe frame and hands and jaws which, though elegant, are too large, too well-defined. His face is long, sharp-angled; his hair looks black in the damp and muted light, but I know that it is exactly like my own, a dark walnut. Invariably dressed in collared shirts and with wire-framed glasses--I scowl internally as I finally wrench my eyes away from his and turn resolutely in the other direction. Like me, he is in a certain high class of untouchable--impossible geeky, though regrettably attractive. But that isn't what troubles me about , it's the way that our communication with each other has no beginning, no middle, no end. Every time we somehow come close enough to talk, it is a continuation of what was said before, no matter what the seeming subject is.

He smiles at me now--slightly, almost sadly. There is a book in his hand; the cover of which I cannot read at this distance. Closing it carefully, he flicks away his dark-lashed eyes and walks with swift ease away, around a corner, out of my sight. Doubtless, I'll see him later today anyway--for whatever reason, my English teacher thoughtlessly placed his seat to the right of mine. Turning, feeling inexplicably piqued by such a superficially uneventful encounter and uncomfortably aware of how glowing warm my face feels in the misty winter air , I run right into the original goal of my wanderings--Margot with her wonderfully mismatched ironic smile and robin's egg eyes, Brad shifting along in the ill-at-ease but somehow endearing manner of most 17-year old boys.

A round of "Hi"'s. We stand about for a moment, readjusting to the several-weeks abscence. Margot's caffeine-deprived voice, issuing from somewhere beneath her voluminous coal-gray peacoat, swiftly breaks the silence.

"I need some coffee." She digs about in her messenger bag in a furious quest for loose change. "The campus espresso bar should be open--the Starbucks line this morning was absurdly long."

"Agreed." Brad's hazel eyes are strangely more bloodshot than usual, and I notice that his left leg has a noticeable twitch. He is dressed in a ridiculously orange plaid shirt barely concealed beneath an oversized olive coat. He seems a bit distant, as I'm sure I must, too. "Selene, what's going on with you? You never replied to my last email. It was something I thought you'd really enjoy."

"Hey, how much is a medium americano, anyway? I can never remember. Do you have a quarter, Brad?"For all of her brilliance, Margot is horrendously bad about money--a trait the three of us unfortunately share in common. As Brad begins to mine his pockets, I ask:

"Sorry, our internet's been down--what's up?"

"Nothing terribly important but it seemed like something you might want for one of your stories..." (Yes, I dabble in writing like the majority of unpopular teenage girls. Now, moving on...)

"And...?" A worthy subject in which to delve and forget any earlier disturbing non-encounter-brief-glance-across-the-hall.

"Ever heard of the Nephilim?"

A child's memory of the Bible: everything markedly bizarre stands out, not for lack of faith but curiosity. Behemoth. Talking donkeys. Fallen angels mating with women to produce a race of super-giants.

"I'm generally aware of their existence. And interested."

Brad smiles, his thin pales lips parting to show rather small, square teeth. "Then you'll love what I took the liberty of passing along to you--an apocryphal work, The Book of Enoch. It elaborates of bit; of anyone I know I think you'll appreciate it..and hopefully get inspired. After all the next NaNoWriMo is only...what, ten and a half months from now?"

I smile. "Thanks. I'll definitely check it out when I get home. If it's as good as you say, no guarantees I'll be able to wait until November, though."

"There. 3.19. That's right, right?" Margot starts heading in the general espresso bar, as the pitiful table set up in one corner of the cafeteria is termed. "Come on, we've only got fifteen minutes until class starts."

"OK, OK, wait up." Brad and I scurry behind her, sharply inhaling the frigid damp.

A/N: I had hoped to abandon 'school stories' forever when I stopped being a high schooler, but they're fun to write and the setting fit in well with my general idea for this. Please forgive any un-teenager like tendencies of Selene as bad memory on my part. But really, the stuff I wrote then was just this painfully wordy and self-absorbed.