can you .:see:. it? //semper

I always set myself up for the worst situations, it seems. On the days I get out of letting my mom drive me to school, it starts raining when I’m halfway down the street. The select few times I’ve joined my mother and her horrid, vomit-inducingly colorful friends for dinner, I ended up either passed out on the floor simply because one of them bumped into me on their way to the lady’s room or face-down in the meat loaf because my brain makes me do things I don’t want to do sometimes.

And then there’s now – sitting at the desk closest to the corner in the library, hunched over worn, old copy of Crime and Punishment with brows furrowed in concentration and pencil scratching furiously across the page as I work diligently to finish an English term paper that isn’t due for another six weeks. And just yesterday Jango Jiggins gave me a black eye for acing my history test when he'd made a forty-three. I can’t help it, though – I love school, and I love studying. Call me a masochist, but Jango can punch me as much as he wants if it means I get to stay in the top ten percent of my class. But at this rate, I’ll have another black eye and not a single tooth left in my mouth by the end of the month.

The pencil lead snaps suddenly beneath the force of my hand pressing it against the paper, and I mutter a quiet curse under my breath. The break in my concentration brings me back to the present – the sound of pages being turned, the rapid clacking of fingers on keyboards coming from the kids at the computers on the other side of the room. I could just type my paper – Ripred knows it’d be a hell of a lot faster - but I’ve never really been one for technology. I prefer to live far simpler than most kids in the Capitol, a lover of books instead of television and the feel of the sun and warmth against my skin, not the artificial burn of a tanning bed or the sting of “corrective” chemicals. Too bad I’m in the most technologically advanced city in the country. Lucky me.

I reach down into the backpack propped up against the leg of my chair and root around for a pencil sharpener, anxious to finish my term paper within the hour. I don’t notice the soft thump of slow footsteps as someone wanders closer to me, don’t see the dim shadow that rolls across the floor as the boy stops in front of a shelf just a few feet away. But when my fingers curl around the item I seek and I sit back up with a satisfied grin, my eyes immediately find him. Standing between the towering shelves of the aisle directly to my right, the boy is one of the most incredibly plain boys I’ve ever seen. No bright colors or crazy hair or obnoxious and expensive cologne assaulting my senses – just a young man around my age with simple brown hair and slightly rumpled clothes and an unassuming demeanor, and he seems to be looking for something.

Without even realizing it, I stand up and start walking toward the boy, drawn to the stranger by the hope of finding someone with a like mind and a similar desire to simply be as human as possible in a world of people who seem to be anything but. “Uh, hello there. Are you looking for a particular book? I’ve read half the library, so I might be able to be of some help.”