What bothered him the most was probably her hair. It beautiful, gold, silky he was sure. He imagined that some guy would get the chance to even touch it and twist it. But every day Riley Simmons took her long blond hair and twisted it into a plain braid straight down her thin back. What bothered him, as he sat behind her in Chemistry, was that always, every day, there would be one strand that was loose. This was the beginning of his hatred for Riley Simmons. When Riley Simmons passed in the hallway, there would be a small stain on her crisp white shirt. She would smell of lemons and roses, but there was always this hint of something burnt. He didn’t understand how Riley Simmons could be so perfect, except for that one loose strand. It was like looking at a photograph and seeing a tiny blur but something was different, something made her different. She sought the slightest imperfections in her own perfections. She ran away from what he craved. Perfection was the ultimate goal, was it not? But he wondered why that loose strand kept him up at night.

He didn’t understand how she would sit in the back of the bleachers during pep rallies, her large blue eyes wide and silent. Ah, that was another thing. No matter what he did to her, what he said, Riley Simmons never opened her mouth. He didn’t understand how someone could be so intimate with solidarity, so alone yet so alive. How could someone stand by herself in gym class and stare at the sky while the rest of the world looked down at the ground to make sure that their feet stood among others? It made him mad that someone who never spoke a word could tell stories after stories by the way she bit her lip while she read.

Riley Simmons didn’t feel the pain of words, he knew. Riley Simmons, he knew, lived in the clouds, the pure white ones that rolled by in the sky. He had never hated someone more in his life. And Riley Simmons hated him.

He could feel it when she would set her crystal blue eyes on him, looking at everything he had done and said, calmly sifting through the dirt in a routine fashion. She knew everything about him when she looked at him, but nothing in her eyes ever changed. He would throw it on her, trying so hard to make her starch white blouses look a little dirtier, but it just slid off like oil on water.