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 ^{(it's beta!)}

So there is this girl he doesn’t know.

He’s interested in her. Not that way though.

But she is captivating, fascinating, really. She says things none of his friends understand. Not the way he does. But he’s not in love with her, no, never love. It’s just the look in her eyes, like she knows that he’s the only one who could ever comprehend her.

He just goes a little weak for that look.

She broods, with her top hat and trench coat and combat boots, leaning against the wall as snow falls, gathering by her feet. He pauses as he walks out the door into the courtyard, admiring the monochromatic view. From far away she seems colorless, but her eyes, which upon a quick glance might look a watered-down gray, are actually silver and blue, streaked like fractals, spreading in a kaleidoscopic pattern, outward and inward at the same time.

If he were in love (but he’s not), it might have been for her eyes.

She speaks and acts with an economy of motion that, in an older woman, would seem like grace. She maintains a gravity that hangs between solemn and somber. During their few conversations, he finds himself filled with certain disquiet, welling up from within some dark, still place tucked beneath his ribs. She is so unlike everyone else he knows. He has never heard her gossip, never heard her lie, never heard her speak of something that can be considered recent. She is evanescent, living in the present through the past and the future. He once spent fifteen minutes listening to her explain how the present has never really existed.

She hasn’t always been here. She just appeared one day, without all the usual speculations, announcements, and clique-assertion-of-dominance fights that usually happen over new kids. He wonders about that still, as their friendship grows, slowly. Despite how discomfiting she naturally is, no matter how many strange theories she spouts outs to him, (all of which she can back up with math or logic, or both) no one at school ever mentions her. She isn’t the elephant in the room; she’s a mote of dust in the room. But not even that, because she’s there and she’s noticeable, and nobody avoids talking about her. They just don’t do it. Ever.

He makes a point to talk to her, or more recently, trade ideas with her, at least weekly. His friends call it his weekly dose of insanity and roll their eyes as he wanders off to her place by the wall; he refers to it, in mind only, as his weekly dose of reality.

She has never seen the difference.

She’s changing the way he thinks, he’s seeing beauty everywhere, in places he had always ignored, brushed past, forgotten. He finds it in the position of a rock against a wall, the bend of the corner of a page in a book, the freckles on his best friend’s upper lip. He grows inward by looking outward all the time. He is learning that life is completely dependent on perspective, and she’s changing his. Every time he realizes that he will never be the same, a warm tingle works its way up his back and his body hums with the thrill of life. ‘Life is beautiful,’ he whispers to himself at dawn, dusk and every unexpected revelation in between. Life is beautiful.

Sometimes he has to remind himself that other people can see her. Sometimes he has to remind himself that she’s not someone he’s made up.

Sometimes, he’s not sure she isn’t.

She used laughed a lot. But no one ever saw her when she did. Because it was quick and painless, like nothing else in life ever was. This was her fourth school in 3 years. Most of the people here were no different than they were anywhere else. But there was this one boy...

She had hope for him.

Oh gods, she has hope.

Because it’s not love, no, never love. But he listened to her and didn’t call her crazy and believed her when she said that beauty is found everywhere. She has had to remind herself to keep her distance because he sometimes brought out emotions she had thought she could control and suppress. Not because emotions made her weak, no, never that, but because she won’t know what to do with them. And she has never liked not knowing what to do.

She watched him, when his attention was elsewhere. He was a whirlwind of motion, a dancing, thriving, pulsing mass of life, here, perhaps, to save her from cynical stagnation. She’d seen his notebook, filled, not with doodles or angry song lyrics but with scathing haikus about his classmates and teachers. He once told her that his favorite way to make himself smile was to beat box over jazz music while driving. He wore braided hemp flip-flops year round and cursed when it was cold. She had never met something, someone, like him before.

She knew that he had never considered himself to be brilliant or engaging or clever, but she believed otherwise. No, she knows, because he looked at her with curiosity quirking his lips and she went home and drew his face, his mismatched eyes, his hair a thousand different ways and then burnt each drawing. Because she’s not a stalker and she’s not obsessed. She’s just curious about him.

And because charcoal burns so well.

She waited for him each day, in the concrete courtyard. She’s pretty sure he didn’t know that she waited for him but everyday she ended up taking him home in her beat up old car that smelled faintly of imported brown vanilla and new paper and they would talk. Or she talked and he listened. But normally, he would have something to say, or to add, that just strengthened her belief that he was special, perceptive… unique somehow. And she knew that his friends didn’t see it.

She is teaching him to see beauty. He is already reminding her of how to laugh.

One night, three and a half months after she really started talking with him, she called his cell phone at 2 am. It was a school night and sleep made his voice heavy and low. She told him to get dressed, that she’d be at his front door in less than five minutes, then hung up.

In four minutes and seventeen seconds she was standing on his front porch; in four minutes and twenty nine seconds, he’d joined her, wrapped in a wool blanket, glaring and stomping his feet. Within four minutes and forty three seconds they were both in her car, speeding through empty small-town streets, driving to the stadium where she spread out a blanket and laid with him on the pole-vaulting mat to point at the sky.

She watched him instead of the sky as the meteors started. She still hadn’t told him why she had woken him up at this ungodly hour when the first ones streaked across the heavens.

He gasped, eyes widening in delight and wonder.

A volley of racing stars arced over them as he turned to her and said, grinning, “I didn’t even have to look for the beauty this time…”

They returned home around 4:30 in the morning, tired but filled with wonder and feeling insignificant, liking it. On the way home she gave him her art folder and told him to open it once he made it inside. He nodded and promised that he would, fingers catching on the rough edges of the paper. He mentioned that he didn’t know she was an artist; she grinned and told him that she wasn’t.

They parted ways and during the drive back to her house she was tense, trembling. She knew that, if she were wrong about him, she could have just given him every reason and more to never want to speak to her again. Any normal boy would probably be scared instead of flattered, but he will know, he will get it in a way that proves that normalcy is no place for him. She feels more alive than ever, because she’s sure that she’s right about him, she couldn’t be anything else.

He waits until he’s inside to open the portfolio, but only just, and for the simple fact that he needs more light to see. The cover page is simple, the words “When the Snowflake Meets a Meteor” scrawled in blue and burgundy calligraphy ink. He smiles softly, touches the letters and shakes his head in disbelief.

Inside are pages upon pages of charcoal sketches of his eyes, his hands, his hair, his face. Even one of his ankles. He flips through them, incredulity slowly painted along his uplifted eyebrows and his dropped jaw by the rough work in front of him. He is aware that maybe he should be bothered by this, somehow, but all he can think is that she always finds beauty somewhere. He just never realized she saw it when she looked at him.

At home she’s sitting in her room, phone lying beside her; fingers twitching to reach for it, to dial the number she know the way she knows chaos theory or charcoal pencils. She knows this isn’t love, no, never love, but she’s never felt this uncontrolled, never felt this vulnerable. Never felt this desperate.

And as they both sit in their own forms of denial, snow begins to fall. It spills through the branches of the trees onto quiet, placid streets as the last of the meteors burn up upon entry to this violently passionate world.

And the snowflakes fell like meteors.