She was small, had dark hair but the palest skin. She didn’t have a blotch on her skin and her eyes were the iciest, most piercing blue you’ll ever encounter. She looked at you and you immediately felt smaller, you shrunk inside. She never spoke, just stared. Never even answered the register, just stared at you when the teachers called her name. You only touched her once when you reached over to pick up your rubber, which had rolled astray and over the boundary onto her desk. Your hand brushed against hers. It was cold and you assumed that you scraped against her nail because your hand began to bleed; there was a cut running down the side of your hand between thumb and forefinger. You were only nine at the time and this was enough to put you off her.
You went to different secondary schools; you didn’t see or hear from her for almost three years. Then your parents announced they were going to adopt a girl about your age. It was her. She still didn’t speak, still just stared but suddenly to you that stare became less fearsome, less sharp and began to soften and seem more sad and lonely than the cold anger that’d once chilled your spine when she stared at you. You began to hear her speak, though she never moved her lips. You could hear her voice in your head. It was high pitched, nothing like you’d imagined it would be. Or maybe you were imagining the voice you heard. The line between reality and imaginary had begun to blur; in your head she’d told me there was no such thing as a line to split the two, she’d said they were the same.
You began to hear more things, music you’d never heard before would suddenly play in your head and visions began to come to you. You’d see angels dressed in black, black gloved hands, icicles would begin to hang from every surface. Your parents never saw them, just you. Then one day, she spoke. And her lips moved. But the voice that came out wasn’t what you’d initially imagined, wasn’t what you’d heard but it was instead more of a whisper, a hiss, a rasp. And all she said was.
‘No-one can understand.’
And that was the last thing you ever heard. And the last thing you ever said?
‘I think I’m beginning to understand you.’
But you didn’t die. Instead, you just walked around next to her, the two of you with elbows gently touching one another. You never spoke and you could never hear, just see everyone’s mouths moving. They spoke to her but they never saw you, just stared straight through you, as though you were invisible. Your eyes gradually changed colour, from hazel to blue, your skin began to stretch over your bones as fat ebbed away and your hair got darker, strand by strand, until it was black. Completely black. And all of a sudden she wasn’t there anymore; she wasn’t next to you. It was just you.
And you were completely alone.