Maggie lived her life as if she was observing through an opaque glass wall.

As she moved down the crowded school hallways, listening to the almost overwhelming chatter that blended together to one irritating buzz, she couldn’t help but note that the faces she passed all looked the same. The girls all carried themselves in the same way, wore the same clothes and talked in the same way. The boys all screamed, yelled and generally made fools of themselves.


Maggie never could hear too much either. It was always muffled speech that she was never interested in. Besides, the buzz was always the same. It may change in tone or rhythm, but it was always the same. Sometimes, she wondered what it would be like to listen and see without a wall between her and the rest of the world, but she usually quickly dismissed the thought. She might have been able to see like a normal person at one point, she thought, but it must have been so boring that she couldn’t remember it.

The glass wall never bothered her. She supposed if anyone else found out that she was so separated from the rest of the crowd, they would be worried. But she was used to the glass wall. It was a bit of a rule that she would leave everyone else alone and everyone else would leave her alone.

“Hey! Maggie!”

Of course, there would always be that break in the wall between them and her when someone tried to talk to her. Maggie put on a practiced smile and gave a small wave to the petite, brown haired girl that had shouted out her name.

“Be sure to email your part of the project to me, okay?” the girl said, catching up to Maggie and keeping pace with her. “Everyone else seems to have forgotten, so I thought I might as well try and remind everyone that it’s due tomorrow.”

A nod. Maggie didn’t bother to remind the girl that she had already emailed her part of the project days ago.

“Thanks a bunch gal. You’re a sweetheart!” She bounced off, quickly swept away by the current of people and leaving the break in the glass wall, her face becoming blurry and the same as every other girl’s. She blew out an irritated breath and pushed her way against the flow of the hallway, squeezing her way between two dolts that had stopped dead in the middle of the hall to chat, and entered her classroom for yet another lesson.

The teacher smiled at her as a customary greeting, but didn’t speak as Maggie took her assigned seat in the back of the room, surrounded by graffiti desks and textbooks that had been abused so much that they looked ragged even though they were brand new.

The teacher was just as bad as the students. The same lessons, day in, day out, that started with a review of the previous day’s lessons that stretched on so long that, at the end of the forty-five minute period, they had learned next to nothing. His voice, joking and good-natured, repeated most of the gossip and buzz Maggie had heard outside. The only reason she hadn’t lumped him with the rest of the other monotonous drone was because she needed to differentiate between their voices in order to listen and take notes in those rare moments when pieces of knowledge were actually taught.

Yes, if Maggie had the chance to summarize her life in a sentence, she would have said that it was seen through a glass wall. It was mostly correct, but not entirely, as most statements are.

See, Maggie would have never told anyone, but she had a friend who had somehow lodged herself in the glass wall, not exactly staying with her in her isolation but not exactly drowned out like all other people. Amber was her name. She always wore bright colors and clothes that stuck out in the midst of other people like a sore thumb. She was quiet around other people, passing unnoticed for the most part until she and Maggie were alone. At that point, she became an energetic machine, goofy almost to the point where it was no longer endearing but simply annoying. She seemed like the person that most other people would have liked to have befriended, but for some odd reason, they never want anything to do with her.

Perhaps that was why they got along. Two loners who wanted nothing to do with the world and whom the world wanted nothing to do with.

Maggie didn’t have any classes with Amber—and she never did, through all of her time knowing the girl. She never had the same teachers either it seemed—when she mentioned her named when she did talk to her teachers, all they would do was smile vaguely and say that the name sounded familiar.

But she was a good friend. Sometimes she would see her flash in the middle of the crowded hallways, Amber smiling at her for a moment before she was engulfed back into the current. They would eat lunch together, always, in the corner of the noisy lunchroom where nobody really looked at. Sometimes Maggie laughed at a joke that Amber told her, making everyone else look at her strangely for a moment before returning to their own conversations.

Amber would always come home with her, which Maggie thought was strange at first (she learned later, when she met her parents, that her parents were extremely easy going people). But she would always spend her afternoons with Amber, doing their homework together and Maggie sigh a little bit as Amber ran outside and simply did a cartwheel before returning to her seat and explain that she had gotten “the jitters”.

Amber had never failed to at least bring one smile to Maggie’s face each day, which was something to be praised.

She always left before Maggie’s parents arrive at home, sometimes quite abruptly. There was one day where Maggie had been coming back from a bathroom break when she found a tiny sticky note that had been hastily scribbled and simply said “Need to go. Cya later :D”.

And even though Maggie was happy with having a friend (even one that made her sigh in exasperation more than she had ever done in her life), she couldn’t help but noticed that as the days wore on and became warmer, other people’s faces became less and less distinct. Even the teacher’s face was becoming blurred and distorted through the glass wall, something that Maggie found somewhat disturbing the first day, but disregarded later.

Amber always stayed clear though. Maggie could pick her out from the middle of a crowd easily. She was always so clear and different, sticking out like she didn’t belong but apparently normal enough to not be commented upon.

Maggie knew there were other people that saw the world through glass walls too. They were the unfortunate ones, the ones that were always laughed at and scurried from place to place like little rats. She guessed that they were too different—they weren’t able to hide their distance from everyone else as easily as Maggie was. But for the life of her, she wasn’t able to see them, wasn’t able to distinguish their faces from the rest of the crowd’s. They must be trying to fit into the rest of the people, she decided. It was probably why they were being picked on. Maggie knew that if she had tried to break through her glass wall and become a blurred face grey being that she would have stuck out too much.

One day, Maggie saw Amber in the halls. She waved and Maggie waved back when she accidentally hit another person in the face. He grunted in surprise before scowling. “Who are you waving to, eh Schiz?”

“That’s not my name,” she muttered quietly before trying to walk off, attempting to avoid conflict.

“You didn’t answer my question. You were waving to no one.”

Maggie blew out an annoyed breath. “You’re near sighted. I was waving to Amber who’s—” she turned around to point out the girl when she noticed that Amber had already vanished, probably going to one of her classes. “She left . . .”

The kid snorted. “’Course she did. You’re a funny kid, Schiz.”

After another weak “that’s not my name,” Maggie left, wondering where Amber went.

There was one time where Maggie had caught a bit of a nasty cold where Amber didn’t come and visit her at all. Her mother had given her some pills in order to help with the symptoms. It didn’t seem to reduce her coughs at all, but her mother always insisted on them, saying that her fever was slowly going down. Even her doctor had recommended them, looking into her eyes worriedly.

“You’re quite sick Maggie. The pills will help you get better.”

But it didn’t. In fact, she felt sicklier than ever. She hadn’t been to school in weeks, which was something odd, as the finals were coming up in three weeks. She told her mother that her cold was better and that she should be able to go back to school, but her mother always bit her lip nervously and insisted on just a little more time.

She always felt nauseous now. She always got a headache when she saw the light, so she was confined to her bedroom, a trash bucket near her bed. Sometimes, when the day was gloomy enough for her to open the blinds, she would glance out and see the kids returning from school. She never saw Amber amidst her, but their faces were always blurred and indistinguishable, just like before.

Finals weeks came and went, and Maggie was still sick and eating those pills. She had decided that the pills were the cause of all of the trouble. After all, a normal cold doesn’t last this long. It had to be the pills. Her mother was doing something. Did she find out about how Maggie lived and saw everything through a glass wall? Were the pills meant to cure that?

It was about a week after school had let out that Maggie had stopped taken her pills. Actually, according to her mother, she was still taking pills. According to Maggie, she had been hiding them under her tongue and spitting them out later.

She recovered once she stopped swallowing that poison. It was funny though. The glass wall that she had lived behind was becoming more opaque by the day, even though she had stopped with the pills.

And then, one day, in the middle of July, Amber had reappeared.

It was the middle of the night and Maggie had opened the window to let some of the cooler night air flow in, washing over her face when she heard a small yell—a clear, defined yell. She scrambled up to her feet and looked out through her window to see Amber standing on her front lawn, waving brightly, still wearing clothes and colors that stuck out from the rest of the blurred crowd.

Maggie smiled and waved to her friend, who mouth some words to her and gestured for her to come outside.

And so, Maggie did, happy that her one friend had come back to her.
***

Her parents found her the following morning.

They hadn’t reacted at first. They were too busy staring, dumbfounded to think about how this could have possibly happened and, at the same time, silently berating themselves for not predicting the event.

In the end, it was the neighbors who saw the bloody concrete—and screamed.