The Odd One Out
I saw her as soon as she entered the café. I waved, and she came over. She wore black on black, her pale skin a stark contrast to her choice of colour. She sat in front of me and stared at me with an intensity that pierced my soul. And just like that, she looked away and signalled the waitress for a cup of Earl Grey that she silently mouthed.
“Would you mind if I record this?” I said.
“Be my guest,” she said. I placed my smartphone on the table and started recording.
“All right, well…” I said. “If you don’t mind, I’d rather have you telling me your story, like I told you, instead of me just asking questions. I’ll build a narrative later and let you see it before publishing.”
“Fine by me,” she said. I found her air of disinterest disturbingly engaging for some reason I couldn’t begin to fathom.
“All right. So, just to start the story… When did you first notice you were…” I checked the notes I had made during our previous chat. “ ‘The odd one out’, as you put it?”
Her tea arrived. She sipped at it. It was sizzling; she must have burned her lips.
“At the nursery school. I must have been three. I remember I saw these people with the other kids. Like shadows that were there, but then they weren’t. Not all kids had them, and some had two. I looked at them, and sometimes they looked right back at me. I talked to one of them once, but I remember the other kids looking at me as if I was mad. And that’s quite a feat when you’re three.
“I never talked to them again. Part of me considered that, if everybody else acted as if they weren’t there, maybe they really weren’t. It was then that I started thinking that perhaps I was the one who had a problem.”
She patted her pockets. It looked like she was going to produce a cigarette, but she stopped and kept talking.
“I kept seeing them, but I learned to ignore them. And usually, they ignored me back. Until one day when I realized what they really were.
“I was thirteen. There was this girl in my class, Briley Brown. I liked her a lot, and we used to hang out. She sort of fancied herself a rebel, and she liked being seen with the black sheep, and people thinking we were lovers. We were at her parents’ when it happened. Her phone rang. An accident. Mr Brown was a nice guy, who only had Briley since his divorce. He was kind to me. Not like dad.
“Two days later, he was there. At his funeral. He was hanging by Briley’s shoulder, looking lost and not understanding anything. He looked around and noticed me, staring directly at him.
“And he talked to me, asking me what was going on. Why Briley was crying, why her beloved daughter didn’t pay him any attention. He shook me. What people at the service said they saw was me having an epileptic attack.”
She took a long gulp of Earl Grey. It was odd. I loved the tea’s aroma, but the smell of hers did not carry over.
She put a note on the table.
“I’m buying,” I said.
“No, you aren’t,” she said. “You know, the dead ones I see usually cling to their family, but also to their favourite places where they used to be happy. Like the café where they used to go to write.”
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This is my entry for the Weekly Writing Exercise: May 23–29, 2016 on the Writer’s Discussion Group in Google+.
Amy Knepper challenged us not to include flamingos or race in our stories, so I went with the contrast the differently coloured bird gave, and added the weirdness.
