IT WAS THE PERIOD WHEN I WISHED MORE THAN EVER that I could sleep. High school. Or maybe purgatory was a more appropriate word? If there was a way to atone for my sins, then it would certainly weigh heavily on the scales. Idleness was not something I could get used to – every day seemed unbearably more monotonous than the last. Maybe this was my own kind of sleep – if sleep is defined as a period of inactivity between periods of activity. I stared at the cracks in the plaster in the corner of the cafeteria, imagining they formed nonexistent patterns. It was a way to ignore the voices that babbled like a torrent in my head. Hundreds of those voices I ignored out of boredom. As for the human mind, I had heard it all by now, and many times over. That day, all thoughts were dominated by the trivial drama of a new addition to the small circle of students. They could get upset over something so minor. I had seen the new face repeated in every thought, from every point of view. An ordinary human girl. The excitement over her arrival was tiresomely predictable – it was the same reaction a group of toddlers would have if you showed them a shiny object.

I tried even harder to ignore them. There were only four voices I tried not to listen to, out of discretion and not aversion: my family's, the two girls', and the two boys' who had become so accustomed to the lack of privacy in my presence that they rarely worried about it. I did my best. I tried not to listen, if I could. No matter how hard I tried though... I knew. Rosalie, as usual, was thinking about herself – her mind was a stagnant pond with few surprises. She had seen her reflection in someone's glasses and was thinking about her own perfection. No one's hair came closer to the color of real gold, no one's body was as perfectly hourglass-shaped, no one's face was so flawlessly, symmetrically oval. She did not compare herself to the people around her – the comparison would be laughable, absurd. She thought of others like us, but none matched her.