2
You Don’t See Me
Monday, January 9th
· Patrick ·
Every morning they arrived by luxury sport car, chauffeured town car, or taxi. I came via MUNI. My parents were just barely well off enough to get me into the school. They were apparently not wealthy enough to let me drive a car in the city.
I don’t mind the bus really; you find the most interesting people in San Francisco on the bus. Foreign grandmothers chatting in a language you can’t understand. Convention goers with badges that proudly tout their names for all to see. Art students carrying more supplies than body mass, and urban yuppies playing with the newest handheld tech all crowd into the buses of SF every day. If you really want to get to know a city, ride its public transit. You’ll find a whole city’s worth of culture crammed like sardines in a 320 square-foot space. It’s the only place in the city where they’re all equals.
Occasionally I would get the stares from those who recognized my school uniform and would give me that why’s a kid like you riding the bus look? Mostly they just ignored me, leaving me alone to make up their life stories in my head.
I ignored one such stare and looked out the window. The fog was impressive today, drowning everything in a misty cover. The tops of tall buildings disappeared into it, leaving you to wonder just how tall they really were. On mornings like this you were lucky to see a block or two away.
I pulled for my stop and fought my way to the door, always an adventure in and of itself. The stops around Market are the worst: most of the time it’s like trying to swim upstream through a sea of angry fish. Half the time you literally fall off the bus onto the sidewalk as people push past you to get on.
The bus lurched to a stop and the doors popped open. I stepped off the bus alone. It wasn’t only the students that didn’t seem to ride the bus around here. Stuffy rich attitudes practically wafted through the air in this part of the city.
Sighing, I started trudging down the sidewalk toward the school. The air whipped past with a biting cold to it. January in San Francisco, cold as crap but at least it wasn’t raining sideways. If you think I’m joking about the rain, I’m not. Most tourists don’t believe you when you tell them how cold it gets here; they always forget about the wind chill. The wind in San Francisco is a tricky beast; you can walk down one street and have it gently tousling your hair, then turn the corner and get smacked in the face by a gale.
I came to the corner and took a deep breath before I crossed the street to the school. Bayside Academy is a nice enough school, but it’s hard to feel at home in a school filled with the children of diplomats and CEOs.
Bayside Academy’s campus sports an impressive amount of grass and trees for being in the middle of a city. The building itself is three stories with a glassed over atrium and underground parking, but what doesn’t have underground parking in The City, really?
The front of the school was nearly deserted. Like most winter mornings, everyone was in a hurry to get into the building; though most wouldn’t actually make it to class until just before the bell rang.
As I neared the entrance of the school building, an electric blue Aston Martin Vanquish pulled into the last available spot in the above-ground parking. Everyone stared—in a parking lot of nice cars this one was in a league completely its own.
The door opened and Nualla Galathea stepped out shuddering at the cold. I stood transfixed as she glided toward the building in front of me, arm in arm with her cousin Nikkalla “Nikki” Varris. They didn’t look at me as they passed and I fell into step behind them.
Nualla had the most beautiful hair I had ever seen. Not the short kind of long we see in magazines and movies today but the kind straight out of a Pre-Raphaelite painting. Black loose spirals spilling down her back to just below her hips. It might have seemed old fashioned if it wasn’t for the electric indigo streaks through parts of it.
Her cousin’s hair was in sharp contrast; pale blonde with light blue streaks and a short a-line cut. But the two were extremely similar in build, the slender waspish shapes of dancers; same heart shaped faces, same large eyes.
They were some of the extremely popular kids but theirs was an odd sort of popularity. With that much beauty, wealth and intelligence, they should probably have had hordes of friends.
But they didn’t.
They seemed to spend the majority of their time with their best friend Shawn Vallen. Though they were kind to all the students, they mostly kept to themselves. But it was a self-imposed isolation; most of the students at the school looked at them with a strange sense of admiration. In a lot of towns the beautiful popular kids would have used their gifts as an excuse to abuse the other lesser students, but not these three.
I had never heard Nualla say anything unkind to another person. Well, aside from one really. The only person she seemed to openly despise was Michael Tammore. Which was perfectly alright with me, since he was a pretentious wank anyways. He was one of those people who used their power to abuse others. Michael routinely picked on the shy, the less affluent and anyone he felt was less intelligent than himself.
My friends, on the other hand, were the kind of friends you always hung out with at school but who never seemed to call you to do things on the weekend. Well, with the exception of my best friend Connor. There wasn’t a Saturday that went by that he wasn’t hanging out at my place or me at his.
My friends and I definitely weren’t the most popular kids in school but we also weren’t the least popular either. We were somewhere in the realm of people not caring. No one aspired to be us and no one shoved us in the janitor’s closet. Our little group was made up of Connor, Sara, Beatrice, Jenny and myself. We had ended up sitting together the first week of freshmen year and had just never bothered to find new seats… or friends.
After a quick trip to my locker I walked into Trig, my least favorite class, and took my usual seat in the back of the room next to Connor.