Nightlight

EXCERPT

It was then that I saw him. He was sitting at a table all by himself, not even eating. He had an entire tray of baked potatoes in front of him and still, he did not touch a single one. How could a human have his pick of baked potatoes and resist them all?  Even odder, he hadn't noticed me, Belle Goose, future Academy Award winner.

A computer sat before him on the table. He stared intently at the screen, narrowing his eyes into slits and concentrating those slits on the screen as if the only thing that mattered to him was physically dominating that screen. He was muscular, like a man who could pin you up against the wall as easily as a poster, yet lean, like a man who would rather cradle you in his arms. He had reddish, blonde-brown hair that was groomed heterosexually. He looked older than the other boys in the room—maybe not as old as God or my father, but certainly a viable replacement. Imagine if you took every woman's idea of a hot guy and averaged it out into one man. This was that man.

"What is that?" I asked, knowing that whatever it was it wasn't avian.

"That's Edwart Mullen," Lucy said.

Edwart. I had never met a boy named Edwart before. Actually, I had never met any human named Edwart before. It was a funny sounding name. Much funnier than Edward.

As we sat there, gazing at him for what seemed like hours but couldn't have been more than the entire lunch period, his eyes suddenly flicked toward me, slithering over my face and boring into my heart like fangs. Then in a flash they went back to glowering at that screen.

"He moved here two years ago from Alaska," she said.

So not only was he pale like me, but he was also an outsider from a state that begins with an "A." I felt a surge of empathy. I had never felt a connection like this before.

"That boy's not worth your time," she said wrongly. "Edwart doesn't date."

I smirked inwardly and snorted outwardly. So, I would be his first girlfriend.