A Very Usual Kind of Girl -The Toast

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The thing you had to know about her, the most important thing, was that she was very much like all of the other girls. So when she moved to town, or started attending the exclusive and mysterious boarding school in the mountains, people noticed in a general sort of way, in the sort of way you notice new people, but that was pretty much it.

She wasn’t unusually good or bad at anything that would have made her an object of shock or admiration or ridicule to everyone else. A few people, if pressed, would have said they thought her face looked friendly.

She didn’t fall down or accidentally break some unspoken rule or run into someone dangerous. She just sort of went about her business, and then the first day was over, and things seem to have gone pretty much fine.

She wasn’t a witch or anything. Nothing in particular changed the day she moved to town. Nothing really changed for a long time after.


She didn’t make a lasting enemy on her first day, or end up stumbling onto a secret that would eventually bring an entire class system down. She mostly just went to her classes, and never stumbled into anyone profoundly good-looking and secretly sensitive in the hallways. She did make some friends, eventually. They were nice. It took a while, of course, because it always takes a while to get to know people. There were times when she felt lonely and ill-at-ease but that’s mostly because it’s a completely normal part of the human condition and wasn’t a special quality of hers that made her different.


If you’d asked her who her family was, she would never have said fiercely, “My friends are my family, and I will protect my family with everything I have.” Her friends were her friends. Her family was her family, as is generally the case.


Everyone at her exclusive boarding school was actually pretty nice. Most nights she fell asleep tired and happy. Sometimes she had a little trouble sleeping, but that was normal.


That summer, no one beautiful and cruel broke her heart or made her realize her own hidden strengths. She worked at the Jamba Juice part-time. She didn’t teach any strange, heavy-lidded boys anything about life. The Jamba Juice was a pretty good place to work, and she got free smoothies.


None of her teachers fell passionately and ashamedly in love with her, because they were all more or less happily married and at the very least sexually disinterested in their chattering, panicking, happily adolescent students. Besides, there really wouldn’t ever have been time for them to fall in love. They never chaperoned any of the school trips she went on, and they didn’t run into each other much outside of school, and they all had fairly reasonable boundaries. So they just taught her, her teachers.

Nobody who was secretly a witch-hunter or a wizard prince or a werepanther or a thousand years old or half-demon took special notice of her, either. Which isn’t to say they disliked her. They just didn’t have much in common. She was a regular sixteen-year-old girl, which meant she spent a lot of time at soccer practice and a little bit of time reading manga and the rest of her time listening to music, and they were really more into esoteric magic shit.

Regular music. Pop music. She didn’t listen to, like, Rachmaninoff or anything like that. Nothing that would have struck anyone as particularly unusual.

No one ever described her as an “old soul,” or quietly older than her years, because she wasn’t.

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