Thirteen

I'm 13, chubby, with stringy hair. The first hints of pitch black humor dip into nearly every exchange. In long, even strokes I brush my hair at my locker, but only around the boys. I am not the girl who gets asked to dance, but I'm cool with it, because I know it's not forever. And because of that whole King Midas thing. Yeah. I got that, too. So boys don't matter.

Things are not "okay at home" so I stay over at Stacie's a lot, letting her mom wash my hair under the faucet, waking up early to take in the quiet, clean sounds of normal life. Sometimes I pretend too brightly, I acquiesce too readily; sometimes I pine. But they don't catch on. Not really. They think I'm hiding the pain of dysfunction, and that's okay. Because what I'm really hiding is something much worse: I'm not one of them.

This isn't about girls. Really, it isn't.

This is about the gold.