The World Beyond Me

Chapter Eight: Conversation

“So?” Nate responded.

You and I both know it wasn’t me who put it there.” He said making it very clear he did not like where this conversation was going.

“Nate, you can’t just let him-”

Just then Nate interrupted her by pointing to me and saying, “Who’s she?”

Both Mabelle and Olivia turned to me as though they’d forgotten I was there the entire time. Now that he'd turned to face me I could finally see his face properly. I could make out his features. His skin was darker than mine, Mabelle’s, and Olivia’s but not too dark like some of the other boys I’d seen. His skin was the colour of milk chocolate. His lashes were long and his eyes were a clouded grey colour, at least one of them was. I couldn’t see his other eye through the thick curtain of hair covering half his face. It almost seemed as though he was hiding half his face on purpose. Mabelle quickly came to my rescue and explained how I was new, who I was, and the day’s events, including the bullies and how I’d nearly fallen down the stairs a couple of minutes ago, all within record time too.

Olivia and Nate seemed to be impressed but then Olivia turned back to Nate with a stern yet concerned expression on her face. I thought she was about to resume her argumentative conversation with him so I quickly interrupted her before she could start. I didn’t want him to walk away before I got a chance to ask him why he was hiding his other eye. If there was one thing I learned from my first three hours of being in school was that boldness was respected.

So I quickly turned to him and asked “Why is your hair covering half of your face?”

I tried to put on my sweetest most innocent face I could master, trying to indicate to him that I was just curious and didn’t want to offend him in any way possible, hoping that this encounter would go a lot smoother than the previous one.

He turned to me looking completely taken aback when Olivia jumped in and said, “Because he’s an idiot.”

She slightly ruffled his hair affectionately, revealing that his other eye wasn’t grey like the other one as I’d predicted, instead it was a very muddled dark brown colour.

Nate looked slightly annoyed by Olivia but not at all offended by her comment. Above his eye was a small scar, it was a rather small scar and was probably from many years ago. By the way, the scar was shaped it appeared as though something had been thrown at him. It didn’t look as though it had been caused by simply tripping or falling down, he was lucky that whatever object had been thrown at him had missed his eye and had landed on his eyebrow/forehead otherwise it could’ve done some permanent damage towards his eye potentially blinding him. I knew this from looking over some of my mothers old file cases over the years. She and I had a common interest in predicting mishaps that involved scars as well as unnatural diseases and cases.

While I was examining the scar near his right eye. Olivia’s brows furrowed when she saw a fresh wound on his cheek,

“Who did this to you?!” she said, all the smugness and amusement draining from her face, replenishing it with furry and deep concern in her eyes.

She reached out to touch his wound but he extended his hand signalling her to stop. Though I could tell she didn’t like it, she stopped.

“We’re gonna talk about this later whether you like it or not.” she fumed under her breath.

Even though I hadn’t known either of them until a few minutes ago I could tell that they were very close, perhaps from childhood even.

I wonder if she knows how he got the scar near his eye. I wondered. Nate started to brush his hair back to cover his right eye when Olivia stopped him

“What are you doing? Everyone already knows okay? You don’t have to hide it anymore” She said in a hushed voice.

Nates’ eyes darted back and forth through the hallway and finally landed on me then averted gaze. Olivia was probably the only one who noticed,

“Don’t worry she’s cool.” she said, patting Nate’s back gently as he reluctantly nodded in agreement as though he understood what she meant. I however did have the slightest idea of what she meant when she had called me ‘cool’ because it was actually quite humid inside the building.

We kinda just stood there in awkward silence for a few seconds before Mabelle abruptly broke the silence and said,

“Okay so now that all of us here would mind finally explaining?!” Olivia looked as though she’d completely forgotten about telling Mabelle, then remembering she struck a wicked grin and uttered two words,

“Eric, Lexi ”.

Yet that was all it took for Mabelle’s brain to nearly explode! (that was meant to be a metaphor.)

Nate looked a little skeptical, but Mabelle immediately started firing questions at her.

“Really?!”

“Are you sure?!”

“Do you think it was really him?!”

“It couldn’t be! Could it?!”

“Are you absolutely positively sure?!”

“I have a video to prove it,” Olivia answered surprisingly calmly, considering she’d just been bombarded with questions that Mabelle had practically screamed in her face only seconds before.

“No way!!!” Mabelle and Nate practically shrieked at the exact same time both barely being able to contain their excitement this time.

A small smile appeared on Olivia’s face as she sighed and slipped her phone out of the pocket of her camo sweater. She then turned towards us and proudly presented a video of me and the boy who’d saved me, I couldn’t believe she’d managed to actually record everything. In the video, everything seemed to be longer than it had felt, in reality, it’d all felt like a blur, but the video’s length was about 3:28. I looked over to Nate and Mabelle were watching the video over and over again with their mouths hanging open, I wondered whether they too were shocked by the duration of the video. Mabelle kept replaying the video and whispering,

“No way” to herself. Then she turned her face towards Olivia and made a weird face that I couldn’t detect the emotion of, to which Olivia responded with a loud laugh.

“What’s so funny?” I asked, giving them a confused look.

That’s when Olivia grinned and said, “a while back Mabelle betted a million dollars that if someone was dying right next to him, he wouldn’t even notice and just walk right past them.”

I frowned at this thought, why would Mabelle just go around betting a million dollars like that, I thought to myself as I remembered when she had said the same thing to me before going up the stairs.

“Looks like he does have a heart after all”, Nate jokes.

Olivia nudges them both playfully and says, “Obviously someone caught his attention~” giving me a smirk.

To which Mabelle replies,

“OoOoOh, it’s love at first sight~”

Giving me a lovey-dovey face, Nate begins to make faces in the background and both Mabelle and Olivia c***k up.

Olivia wipes a tear from her eye and says, “Man, Hailey’s gonna lose her mind!”

Mabelle picks up on the fact that I have no idea what they're talking about so she quickly explains, “Eric doesn’t talk or pay attention to ANYONE, like at all. He’s basically mute because no one has ever heard his voice, not even teachers. It’s like he’s isolated in his own little world where it's just him and nobody else, he doesn't touch, smell, see, hear or talk to anybody! He acts as though they're not even there. Even though he’s kinda a loner, most of the girls still like him mainly because he’s rich and good-looking, especially Hailey. Hailey is the daughter of the principal at this school, and a huge brat who is completely obsessed with Eric! He usually shrugs her off and looks ten times colder around her making it clear he doesn’t like her around but she is soo clingy-,”

I then interrupted her by asking, “Then why’d he save me?”

Just then the final bell rang, warning some of the remaining students in the hall that if they didn’t hurry they’d be late for the fifth period, students started making their way towards their final periods, including Nate and Olivia.

Mabelle shrugged and said, “That's for you to find out, cya tomorrow!”

and raced down the stairs towards her next class. Leaving me to walk alone to the grade 8 drama class across the hallway, as I started to walk down the hallway I felt someone's sharp gaze on my back…