You’ve finally figured out what bothers you about that girl, the middle-schooler with the flat gray eyes. She’s either a grade above or below your son, you’re not sure; but she’s at all the soccer games and school functions; always with her younger brother and sometimes with their gray-eyed mother but usually not.
What bothers you isn’t her expression, so oddly detached and distant that for a long time you’d just assumed she was autistic (you’ve decided this can’t be the case…who would send an autistic child to bike to the school’s Open House alone?) or the simple gray or ash-brown shifts she wears – so far out of fashion they might have come from another century, if not for the exceedingly fine weave (is that silk?).
No, what bothers you is the way she carries herself, moving and walking with an odd gait which is awkward and lumbering one moment, incongruously buoyant the next. It’s as if she were accommodating some shifting weight, something excessively heavy, which continually slid about her frame as she walked.
She’s sitting in the row ahead of you in the bleachers, head cocked in the direction of the soccer field. Since she sat down, she hasn’t moved – doesn’t seem to be following the game at all. You look at the odd cut of her shift in the back. She’s turned at an angle, and you can see the shape of her strangely prominent collarbone; it juts out too far and seems to go too far down, a small shelf of bone where there should be only a slim rod, and you think: wings. She walks like that, sits at odd angles and a careful distance from everyone, because she has wings.
A whistle blows; the game is over. Your son comes running in from the field, alongside a lank-haired, pale boy – the gray-eyed girl’s brother. The girl stands and waits for the bleachers ahead of her to clear before starting down.
She glances at you for the tiniest moment: just a shy middle-school girl, never be a beauty but prettier than she probably thinks, a little too young to be carry so much responsibility for her little brother, and in her own world. You laugh at yourself and begin to gather your things.
You rummage in your purse. From the corner of your eye you see her turn to leave; as your fingers wrap around your keys, you feel soft feathers graze your cheek.
