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.
[Image via Wikimedia Commons]
Tags: fiction, mysterious boarding schools, non-traumatic coming of age, not like all the other girls, transformative summers
Her hair didn’t glow in the sun or retain any particular shine. It was average length, and could be best described as “brown.”
Her eyes weren’t purple, or emerald green, or silver. They never glowed with an unearthly shine either.
Her skin was not perfect, poreless alabaster. Sometimes she got nasty spots.
She knew how to use a computer, and was reasonably competent with things like email and smartphones. She’d only hit “reply all” once in the past two years.
She liked the things the other girls liked, which means she liked some things her friends did and other things her friends didn’t, but there were other people in the world who also liked those things.
No dark, brooding, oddly-old-looking teenage boy fell in love with her at first sight. She had a brief crush on the boy who worked in the supermarket, and then another on the girl two year above her. That confused her a little but she came to terms with it.
Aw gee, Mallory, I didn’t think you’d noticed.
She wasn’t any more clumsy than anybody else, or particularly graceful such that it made people stop and stare as she walked past.
Her skin was not perfect, poreless alabaster. Sometimes she got nasty spots.
I was under the impression that everyone who went to boarding school was special?
The ones I’ve known who went think they are.
that seems kind of harsh. some people just go to boarding school because that’s what makes sense for them. anyway in my vast experience of life most people think themselves special regardless of where they went to school.
Most people I know who went to boarding school either did because their family moved and they wanted to stay in the area, or they grew up in another country/spent time living in another country and decided later on to return to their home country (and the only way to do that was via boarding school because they no longer had family there). Or they got a scholarship and the boarding school was better than their local school/in a safer area. Or their home life was such that it was better for them to be elsewhere. I think it’s just regular people who find living away from home while they attend school works best for them.
It’s not just boarding school kids. I went to public high school, and if I’d turned out as special as I fantasized, I’d be a retired prima ballerina, married to a rock star, and a secret agent for MI-6 who fluently speaks 12 languages, including Afrikaans.
I’m a little late to the party but this is DELIGHTFUL. I love YA but sometimes my eyes about roll out of my head about how super special magical glamorous teenagers are and how all this weird shit happens to them. There aren’t a ton of YA books that also detail the mindnumbing drudgery of driving your sisters to school every day and arguing about whose turn it is to refill our mom’s perpetually empty birdfeeders or the inevitable dismay at never finding a mysterious, charming guy prowling the stacks at the local library.
Mainly because the only people in the library were mothers, young children, my grandmother, and middle aged men learning how to use the computers. The only mystery I encountered was the continued existence of mosquitos indoors, well into January and February.
YA wasn’t always this ridiculous. When I was a teenager back in the Late Middle Ages (AKA the 80s), the popular YA was more realistic stuff by Ellen Conford, Katherine Paterson, Paula Danziger, Judy Blume, Francine Prose, et al.
(OK, the Sweet Valley High books weren’t that realistic, but not because Todd was a flippin’ secret werewolf or anything. Although that would have made him more interesting.)
There is good stuff in there- you just have to look.
It's not just boarding school kids. I went to public high school, and if I'd turned out as special as I fantasized, I'd be a retired prima ballerina, married to a rock star, and a secret agent for MI-6 who fluently speaks 12 languages, including Afrikaans.
YA wasn't always this ridiculous. When I was a teenager back in the Late Middle Ages (AKA the 80s), the popular YA was more realistic stuff by Ellen Conford, Katherine Paterson, Paula Danziger, Judy Blume, Francine Prose, et al.
(OK, the Sweet Valley High books weren't that realistic, but not because Todd was a flippin' secret werewolf or anything. Although that would have made him more interesting.)
Her grades didn’t indicate genius or neglect, but rather showed that she was good at some things and bad at some things. Some subjects she showed interest in, an interest that didn’t necessarily indicate an unbridled and uncageable passion which was inevitably to lead to a wonderful career opportunity by offering an obscure piece of knowledge at just the right time, but rather a mild interest which occassionally culminated in a mumbled “oh cool”.
There is good stuff in there- you just have to look.