"A Girl Named A" - Part I

            A let out such a loud sigh as she snuggled into her bunk that L rolled her eyes and sighed back, melodramatically. A could almost feel her roommate’s criticizing stare from the other side of the tiny room, but she couldn’t make herself care much at the moment. Nothing had felt right since January, when the simple, clear life she had lived for centuries was ripped away from her. Sometimes, she still had dreams filled with the scratching of pens so loud she could lose herself in them, with the togetherness of language, warmer than any fire, with the comfortable solitude and singularity of articlehood.

            “Your brooding is so loud I actually can’t focus,” Lelayne exclaimed suddenly, her voice like little bells… aggravated little bells. “Would you please lighten up already?”

            A rolled over and watched her roommate’s face in the mirror on the opposite wall. Despite her protests, it didn’t seem like Lelayne was terribly distracted. Her slate grey eyes were locked onto her perfect oval face, one graceful hand sweeping wheat colored hair behind the tiny circle of her ear and the other painting her pouty lips a deep green. With her long limbs, slim frame, and seemingly endless hair, Lelayne always reminded A of the sea: beautiful, proud, and dangerous.

            “I can feel you looking at me,” Lelayne sneered, turning her emerald mouth into a gorgon’s sneer, “You know, it’s only four thirty and you’re in bed already. I hope no one ever finds out about this kind of stuff with you. If one person breathes a word of this to Dr. Wurden, you know…” She shrugged as if the possibility were none of her concern.

            A shuddered, “You know, L, most people would take that as a threat.” Her words were muffled twice, once by the thick blanket and another by her thick tongue which never seemed to obey her, but the way Lelayne stiffened at her real name proved that she had understood.

            “Lelayne,” the blonde girl seethed, drawing her shoulders up to her neck as if a single letter had dropped the temperature of the room. Whirling from the mirror, she spat, “And if that really was a threat, and if I were you, I wouldn’t be using any monosyllabic monikers for those of us who have moved. On. With. Our. Lives.”

            With a final sigh, A tugged the blankets from her face and arms and slid her feet out onto the brown Berber. “I am the shortest word in the English language. I am descended from the ox and the aleph and the alpha. I am the beginning. The beginning.” The mantra filled her mind with a comforting hum, but her heart wasn’t in it.

            “Anyway, dinner?” Lelayne asked cheerfully, the bells already returning to her voice as though they’d never left, and turned back to the mirror and her makeup once more.

            “I’m not sure If I’m hungry,” A replied, burying her right hand in the cloud of black curls that floated about her face. “Maybe I’ll just have some soup or something.” With this, a hint of a grin touched her face, brightening her eyes to an obsidian sheen.

            “God, you are so creepy sometimes. I’m going to fix my hair. Hurry up and put some clothes on, will you? And please, try to dress a little normal.” With another sweep of her hair and a click of the door, Lelayne seemed to evaporate into the hall, leaving A face to face with her new reflection.

            “Hey, weirdo,” she greeted herself, morosely, waving half-heartedly. Her reflection waved back like a human-sized smudge of dirt – at least that’s the way L described her. N always described her as chocolate; skin like cocoa, he said, but that might have had something to do with his obsession with the stuff. A didn’t think N had drunk anything other than chocolate milk and hot chocolate in his life, short as this incarnation of it was. A had a sneaking suspicion that chocolate might also have had something to do with N’s enormous crush on Cici too.

            A forced herself to her feet and tripped over to her dresser. She still didn’t understand why people like L – sorry, Lelayne – could so easily become accustomed to arms and legs, running and walking, while A still had trouble even enunciating certain words properly. Dr. Wurder claimed that speech and motor skill mastery were only a matter of time, but A found it endlessly infuriating to know over half of the words in the English, Latin, Spanish, French, and countless other languages and not actually be able to say them properly out loud. The irony was certainly not lost on her.

            She could hear voices in the hallway outside of the door, so she rushed through the awkward shedding of her pajamas and threw on her standard black t-shirt and black pants before messily ringing her eyes in black eyeliner. Thankfully her fingers seemed to be working moderately well today. The first time she’d tried applying the stuff – a gift from Lelayne – she’d almost blinded herself.

            “Are you coming or what?” Lelayne shouted from the hall, followed by a strange hissing, and A knew her friends were getting impatient. She gave her round face one more check in the mirror. Well, she wasn’t going to be winning any beauty contests, but it would have to do.

            Outside in the hall, the windows at the end of the dorm showed pink and orange over the tops of pine trees. The dormitories were actually the east and west wings of a repurposed hospital that Dr. Wurden bought years ago as an abandoned wreck and used thousands of dollars to slowly rebuild into something habitable. At least that was the rumor. There weren’t many facts about Dr. Wurden that anyone was sure of.

            “A!” N wasted no time in throwing his skinny arms around her neck and squeezing her until she thought she might pass out. “Did you finish your Egyptian homework yet? I felt like my arm was going to fall off, I swear. No offense, Djet,” he added to the dark boy standing quietly behind him.

            “No offenssse taken,” he hissed, his forked tongue slipping between the gap in his front teeth. Djet had attached himself to N after the first week of classes, when, in Alphabetic Evolution, he had learned that N had, in a way, come from him. He could just have easily befriended Jay, but when N asked why he’d been chosen instead of the taller, more athletic boy, Djet had replied, “He is too dessseptive,” and closed his bottom eyelids as if the topic were no longer up for discussion.

            The Egyptian kids weren’t like the Latins, Greeks, or Phoenicians. They weren’t much like the Koreans, Mongolians, or Thaanas either, though, A had to admit, she hadn’t had many opportunities to speak or interact with these or several other types of kids at the school.  A had discovered early on, while trying to ask directions of a very slight boy with a strange series of lines on his face, like a birthmark, that it was nearly impossible to communicate with kids from alphabets outside of her direct alphabetic evolutionary lineage. More often than she liked to admit, she sat in her Syllabic Studies class and silently thanked Dr. Wurden for not bringing any of the Syllabic languages here. She didn’t think she could stand feeling any more culture shocked than she already did.

             But the Egyptians, they were from an old alphabet, almost as old as the animals, and closer to nature, at least according to Dr. Sonja, the Egyptian teacher. Their alphabet was born for sacred purposes, and because of all of the use it got, all of the chanting and hushing that surrounded it in the early years, the Egyptian kids somehow inherited bits and pieces of this energy. “They aren’t gods,” Dr. Sonja told her Egyptian Studies students, “but they are closer to the grandness of the universe.” Most people thought Dr. Sonja was a little crazy, with all of her “grandness of the universe” talk, but A couldn’t help thinking that there was something grand out there. Something that connected users like Dr. Sonja and the other teachers, to the kids in her classes and dormitories, to the world, to nature, to the older things.