An Excerpt

Last night's word count: 8,442. Today's goal: 10,002. Five digits, twenty percent of the novel. We can do it!

And now for a short excerpt to get you all wondering...

To say that I knew who Seth was, of course, was not to say that we were friends, or that I had ever exchanged more than a startled glance with him. Everybody who had gone to my high school during the four years he was there knew exactly who he was; he really couldn’t be missed. It seemed as though he looked in the mirror each morning and decided he wasn’t noticeable enough naturally, so he added things to make himself moreso. For the most part it was black clothing, studded with metal spikes and dripping with chains, but he was a little more creative than the school’s gothic crew. I had seen him add to the outfit, among other things, hunter-orange sneakers, a large drooping silk peony, a midnight-blue blazer, and various bright jewelry and even brighter nail polish. These things had not, fortunately, been all at the same time, though there were certainly days when looking at him was the visual equivalent of riding a roller coaster through a tropical forest.

I avoided him like I tried to avoid snakes in the woods, not always successful, but always enthusiastic. No one who was anyone at school spoke to him, and they too tried their best to leave him plenty of space, moreso than any human actually needed. On the occasions that he would appear somewhere that we were, the girls would make their way elsewhere, some more loudly and hastily than others. The guys would either walk away in contempt or else loudly announce to him what his proper place was: not there. The most noticeable thing about him was how he seemed never to take the slightest notice of these things. I had seen him yelled at, insulted, run from, and even pushed into walls, but he always continued whatever he was doing without missing a step, the look of freakish calm on his face never changing.