Vignette 2: Kate

When she sits in class, during the middle of an awful lecture about history or philosophy, Kate likes to set her chin on the desk in from of her and open her mouth until her jaw locks in place, and then wait for a few seconds and let it shut again so that her back molars hit with a dull click. She does it over and over. She flexes her toes in her socks in her sneakers, which are dirty and the left one has a rip in the side from the day when she thought she could walk on a thin wall and slid off, her shoe scraping along the jagged stone (it’s called conchina, a wall made of sharp hardened shells and sand in St. Augustine, where she lived as a child). she hit the wall with the inside of her left thigh, she had a bruise there for weeks that was yellow and made her afraid to wear a bathing suit (as if she needed another reason. There is not a single sixteen-year-old girl who has actual emotions that wants to wear a bathing suit), and she would forget it whenever she crossed her legs at dinner, knee over knee, and she winced but kept sitting that way anyway. She always liked looking like the martyr, like those men who walked away from duels victorious and approached their lady love with bloodstains growing under their waistcoats but a proud, pained smile. Physically, Kate looks like neither the Hero or the Lady Love. Her hair is limp and could be gold if she cared enough to let it glitter, and she keeps going between keeping it skull short and letting it fall across her back, so right now it looks very much like unplanned and indecisive hair that sits in choppy lengths between he chin and her shoulders. Her face is a pouting sort of face, and her eyes are tired, her ears are uninteresting. Sometimes she wears makeup and it’s a terrible mistake where her sea foam green eyes don’t match up and her lips look fat and out of place, like they were scotch taped on, and she resembles, mostly, a porcelain doll that was painting in the dark by a slightly drunk artist. When she does not wear makeup, she is likable, almost pretty, though when she smiles she tends to look more exhausted than excited. She wears the same pair of jeans that she’s worn for three or four years, and unstimulating but flattering tops that are comfortable enough for slumping, which is what she does when she’s around people who make her feel very small, which is almost everyone. The people who make her feel like herself, who is not small at all but moderately tall for her age, are the ones that make her want to walk atop walls, and go swimming in her clothes, or swing her legs in her chair and smile like she means it, and she goes running when she’s all alone, and she doesn’t bother to buy “running shoes” or “jogging pants” but goes in her school clothes with wrinkles from slumping still in her shirt. Right now, though, Kate isn’t thinking of running, because her legs feel like those big stalks of kelp that she saw in the aquarium in Monterray, where she lives now, because she is currently noticing for the seventh time this semester how handsome the back of The Boy Who Sits Three Rows And Two Seats To The Left’s neck is, because it curves like a hill in an Ansel Adams picture, and his hair is always trimmed so neatly. He’s the sort of attractive man that she’s sure she should fall in love with, the sort of man who should save her from getting hit by a bus or from falling off a balcony. Right now, Kate’s eyebrows are cringing with the realization that, if she were to swoon dramatically in class, then she would not be able to see the definitely devastated look of concern on The Boy Who Sits Three Rows And Two Seats To The Left’s face as she lay, her mismatched hair making an straw-colored halo around her suddenly much prettier and dramatic visage, one hand cradling her head and one arm back, her legs crumpled under her, all the room paying attention to the girl who, around Other People was quiet, but still proudly bore the shadow of a bruise on her inner thigh and had countless other scars from when she had dared to vault the small but frightening mountains of her life.