Shane had been born in the latter part of the twentieth century, feeling much too early or late to the party. Her invitation had been lost in the mail and most people caught on that she was crashing. Everyone she wanted to meet had either left the party or wasn't expected yet. She was pretty sure she was going to get stuck with the clean up.
She grew up in a sub-suburb in upstate New York where summer was a week in August and cow tipping was high culture. To escape the dependable monotony of her peers, she spent her pubescent years hiding in the stacks of the local library, a practical if prescient course of action. Her hormonally driven transformation from "precocious girl" to "fine young woman" derailed for too long at "lemur."
It wasn't that she so loved books that brought her to the library time and again, though - like the measles -- this followed with exposure. The meager library was a place outside her home where she could slowly discover herself as a being outside the Valentine surname, a name which carried inherent and inherited protrusion given that her family founded this town back when people wore shoe buckles and starched britches. She felt no attachment to any title beyond "Shane" and she was even vague about that. She wore her given name like an old pair of ragged jeans, ill-fitting through growth but too broken in to leave at Salvation Army.
In her travels through the library stacks, she also managed to discover detailed illustrations of every step of puberty as well as the basics of botany. When her tangerines turned to grapefruits (or maybe to tangelos) and her beanstalks became worthy of climbing, she was unearthed by the clerk hired to reshelve books.
The discovery began over a stack of storybooks Shane was studying to discover what attributes made one particularly princessly -- she knew this wasn't technically a word, but felt there should be gender equity in adjectives if not in life. All she knew was that her mop of straw colored hair did not qualify her to be Rapunzel and could not be spun to gold by Rumplestiltskin, she was too active to be Sleeping Beauty, too outspoken to be Cinderella, too keen on tall fellows to be Snow White. Her light blue eyes qualified her only to be the evil ice queen. She held little carriage with sleeping upon legumes to display her regal daintiness and imagined that the only result would be a small, mushy, green stain on the underside of her mattress that no handmaiden would clean.
She did not see the boy and his pushcart, loaded down with misplaced books -- only some of which were directly her fault -- until he was nearly on top of her. Though she made a careful practice of never getting in anybody's way and a more careful practice one of avoiding attraction to anyone her age (or at least in her age; she encouraged herself toward crushes on James Dean and the young Ernest Hemingway), this boy and his rusting, yellow cart had managed to sneak up on her. She rose and began apologizing effusively for the mess she had made, a first for her. She regarded the her cast off books in much the same way that a tree regards its sloughed off leaves. Further, she never quite thought she should be the one apologizing to someone of her generation. She found that nothing she said to them ever seemed to carry the weight they did in Jane Austen books, so it wasn't worth the effort of being courtly.
He was slightly taller than her, though a glance through the almanac told her she was above average in height and below average in weight. Behind fashionably thick rimmed glasses were unfocused hazel eyes, like milk chocolate from a sweets shop. He wore a little facial hair, an attribute Shane had never considered very attractive. Yet, on him, the goatee was nice, sexy even. It did nothing to mar his gaunt boyishness. His hair was a little long, but not she did not think it was intentionally so, more like he had been meaning to get a haircut for quite some times and it persisted in slipping his mind.
The boy looked as though he were torn out of a daydream, which was precisely the case. One cannot cart books around a library for any amount of time and not let one's mind run off in curiosity to find its own fun. Distracted imagination was nearly a prerequisite for employ and he was overqualified.
"N… no problem," he stuttered unconvincingly and, looking down at the mound of mixed-up children's books this girl had created in the middle of the 598s, mumbled, "fairy tales are good."
Shane blushed a deep and becoming scarlet, an ability she never previously had occasion to learn she had. "I… these are for a project."
She secretly hoped and feared he would inquire as to the nature of her scholastic research in the summer, but he did not. Come to it, he didn't need to do much of anything. He was not a man of action, but it wasn't a role he needed to play. He looked at her and, in the reflection of his square framed glasses, she saw herself. Not the young girl she once was or the misshapen goblin that had so often greeted her in mirrors. While she was busy learning about chrysalises, she had become a woman as worthy of wooing as Natalie Wood or Marilyn Monroe. "Of course," she thought to herself, "I'm not a princess, I'm the ugly duckling." There were, she reflected, worse things to be.
We Shadows is a serialized novel being written by Xen, also known as Thomm Quackenbush. It didn't happen to you, your best friend, or his cousin. Why? Because it didn't happen. All persons, living, dead, undead, or unliving are purely coincidental. Any real persons are used fictiously. What you are about to read is not a news broadcast. No portion of this book may be distributed without the expressed written consent of Xen. Feel free to rope your friends into reading it, though. Do it or I start shooting PuppyOrphans.
