Member-only story
The Boy With the Wicked Smile
He was one of a kind.
I noticed the boy at first because he was always a part of a pair. Wherever he went, his girlfriend wasn’t far behind. In a strict school where girls and boys weren’t encouraged to be friends — or more — they were a rarity.
It didn’t help that they were new in an environment where everyone else had grown up together.
Sometimes I’d watch them as they sat apart from everyone else in the cafeteria. They seemed like a force joined together against the world. Her sad smile became warm when she was with him. In fact, she seemed like a different person when they were next to each other, far from the glowering girl who couldn’t seem to make any friends no matter what she did.
But then she disappeared, like a firefly blinking out of being. The rumors went that she had problems at home, and I never dug past the surface because none of that was my business. I knew well enough from my own trials with the gossip train that we rarely ever had the true story about what a fellow student was going through.
As it would happen, the boy became a part of my social circle at lunch. I was the oldest of the group — I didn’t mesh well with my fellow seniors, many of whom I’d known since I was in the first grade — so I tried to be the big sister when I could.
