I was lost. I realized this, with a growing numbness, standing on an eerily empty night street with the sky hanging low and clinging to the roofs of the houses around me. The stars were cold this night and distant as never before; the flickering street lamps were just as far away.
I shivered.
Or perhaps I was sitting in school, surrounded by my friends, in the middle of lunch break. I don't know what came over me. I swayed a little bit and blinked, then bit into my peanut butter sandwich. I swallowed, tasting nothing. “You okay?” one of them asked me; for a brief, lurid moment, I forgot her name.
“Huh? Oh... yeah, I'm fine – Julie.”
I shook my head and smiled; just as I finished my sandwich, the lunch bell rang, and I rushed off to class.
After I'd finished thinking about homework and upcoming tests and the swim tournament next weekend, but before I fell asleep, I remembered my lunchtime hallucination. I was a little bit worried; surely it wasn't normal? But then, it had hardly taken any time, and perhaps I'd imagined it all. Maybe it was just a fragment of an unsettling dream I'd had. Still... no, there was nothing wrong with me. Everyone has their strange fits, their oddities; this must be mine.
As I turned over and pulled the blanket tighter, I wondered if my friends would have agreed with me.

I'd always felt like a drifter. Not in the colloquial sense, but – it's the word I like. I have my own cozy group of friends, yes, my routines, supportive parents, the swim team, a pet, etc. etc., all the trappings of a teenager, the kind that thinks themselves original and knows deep down that everyone's original in the exact same ordinary way. But I still feel not quite attached. I suspect it's something about the way that at summer camps, I make my way into other's friendships a little too easily, smiling and nodding and saying nothing much but ingratiating myself with everyone around me until they forget I exist and don't notice if I leave. I drift through social relationships, my classes, everyday life.
The midnight street felt more real than any of that.
So that's why even the next day, as I copied down the math teacher's notes from the white-board, I wondered about it and recalled it. It hadn't been frightening, just unnerving. I felt that somewhere in my life, a previous one or a future one, there was a street, and there was me, and I was lost, even as I wrote out x=9y-63 on my graph paper. I looked up, across the room, to the window. The blinds were half-closed, but beyond them was the rough outline of the cafeteria, and the forest that encroached on one side of the school. What if I did something crazy? What if I just stood up, left my backpack, pencils, friends behind and walked out the door, into the woods? I could almost feel the shocked stares of my classmates tingling on the nape of my neck, the soft breeze of the near-summer outdoors, the crunch of leaves under my feet. Would I feel more real then?
I couldn't think past actually leaving the school; probably someone would follow me and force me back, and probably I would be drugged if I resisted. Something unpleasant, I was sure. I continued to solve problems, my pencil tracing out the numbers and signs, until the bell rang. Outside, in the melee of students sprinting to lockers and yelling and laughing, Julie approached me. “Walk home together?”
“Sure.”
So we did. She was unusually quiet, and I kept noticing her looking at me from out of the corners of her eyes, half-hidden by long black hair. But I was too tired – not even tired, but rather inert, in a vague sort of way – to start up small talk, or even ask her how her classes that day had been. The only words we exchanged were at the very end. “Bye.”
“See ya.”
Then I walked in the front door, greeted my mother. Ate a snack – more tasteless and sticky peanut butter on equally tasteless white bread – did homework, scrolled through my Facebook page for a while, changed for swim practice. Swam. Ate dinner. I felt a little emptier each time I went through a routine movement, painfully aware that the sandwich was the same sandwich I'd eaten the day before that, and the one before that, that the swim practice was just as grueling and unfulfilling as the day before, the coach shouting at me and the other swimmers. Endless chlorinated laps. I stood in front of the mirror in my bathroom afterwards, my swimsuit damp on a hanger behind me.
Drip-drip.
Drip-drip.
Drip-drip.
I ran a finger through my long hair, and blinked at myself. My body didn't seem to fit quite right, never had. There it was, an entity quite as separate from me as the whole past days of my life had been, quite different from the street. Which had been a hallucination, as I kept reminding myself.
To my surprise, I fell asleep quickly by the time I climbed back in between the pressed white sheets of my bed. My body and I disagreed on that, too, I supposed.

The wind began to gust, hurling rain against my window. I jolted awake. Now that I thought about it, it had been rather breezy when I went from the car to the front door last night, but I hadn't noticed. I sat up in bed, clinging to the blanket. A faint, disturbed light seeped through my closed blinds; shadowy shapes lingered in my room. The air was permeated with a tingling, shifting like the wind, humid and promising – or threatening. I wasn't thinking now; my thoughts remained on the pillow.
I got up, still holding the blanket, and padded down the hallway. As long as I stepped carefully, the wood wouldn't creak, and the wind – well, my parents – wouldn't hear me. I walked past the sleeping kitchen, where last night's dirty dishes were still piled up in the sink, and pushed the front door open.
A sheet of rain hit me in the face. The cold of it was electrifying; I put down the blanket, shut the door. Now I was outside, walking down the street. This wasn't the sort of town where people stayed up late for the night life; the street lamps on our street were for show. The orange light was giving way around the edges to the dark of the night and the low clouds, and was tearing at the edges, snatched and carried away by the wind. I was aware of the woods on one side of me, shifting like one whole wild and furred beast. Now there was no one to stop me, force me back, and I heaved myself over a fence. The rain was coming down steadier now, the wind dying down.
I sat under a tree that was gently swaying in the wind, hugging my knees to my chest to keep warm; my pajamas were soaked. What now? I was here. It was nighttime, I'd been in a street, but I hadn't been lost, and wasn't lost now. What was I thinking? I closed my eyes, and raindrops traced the path that tears would take down my face, if I ever cried. It was cold, true, but it was also immensely comfortable, sitting in the mud between the roots of the tree. The knobbly bark pressed against my spine, just enough that I didn't forget myself and fall asleep again. A few minutes passed full of sweet nothingness; no thoughts filled my head. It was just me and the rain, equally unexpected visitors in the night to this forest.
I fell asleep, after all.

Though I'd managed to wake up early enough that morning to get back to the house, change into dry pajamas, and get into bed without arousing suspicion, I paid for my nighttime sojourn with a nasty flu that set in quickly and left me quite incapacitated. I drank hot tea and read book after book, drowning myself in cheap young adult fantasy novels, the kinds with a hero that finds self-worth and joy in a fantasy land where they're the chosen ones. I'd been obsessed with such books in my elementary and middle school years, and though I looked upon them rather cynically now, it was still a familiar motion to reach for them when I was sick. It felt good for my throat and head to ache, and for me to be racked by coughs; the pain brought me back into myself, at least a little bit.
Too soon, the fever passed and my parents deemed me fit to return to school. I honestly couldn't see the point of it. As I dressed in my unnatural uniform, the skirt and the tights and the collared top, I fervently wished I could have been sick just one more day, spent one more day in bed, lost in the books. At least it would be intentionally pointless. And I wouldn't have to be myself, to lie to myself and others, I wouldn't have to appear in front of anybody else, to be tested or measured against others...
I realized I'd stopped in the middle of brushing my hair, my too-long hair, and put the hairbrush down. It was time to go, anyway. For some strange reason, my eyes burned, and I was forced to choke back tears; I swallowed hard, breathed deeply a few times, and brought myself under control.
Classes were hard that day. Last week I'd simply been disconnected, observing all from a hot-air balloon (apart from the rain, and the one unexplainable hallucination); today the teacher's voice grated on me. As I nodded and smiled along to the conversation at lunch, I didn't just feel like a background character, but like a stranger. I'd concealed it before, from myself, but now I felt how detached I was and it bothered me. Their conversations were circular, revolving around complaints about unfair teachers, the terrible food in the cafeteria, and who was going out with whom. Things I'd never, ever cared about, only pretended to. Behind my outward facade, my emotions swung dangerously from irritation at the girls' gossiping to blind anger at myself for not leaving this place where I clearly didn't belong to despair at how, even now, even in tenth grade, I hadn't found what I was looking for.
And I knew all this because I was still dangerously far from myself. The world felt transparent; the hormones that I had learned in biology were surging through my body left me emptier than before. Transparent. That's how I felt. And if I wasn't interested in the world, was it interested in me?

At the end of the long, long day, Julie chose to walk with me from school again. I'd only wanted to be alone, but I didn't even care to refuse her. I wanted to brood and be sullen. So it startled me when she initiated a conversation, and the sound of her voice – so high-pitched, so intentionally flowery and girly (or was that my own voice?) - irritated me. “Er... this is kind of awkward, but...”
“Yes?” I snapped. She'd started sitting with us only halfway through the school year, but had caught on quickly and become a valued member at our group gatherings. Up until now, though, her presence hadn't affected me.
“Um – well... okay, so the thing is, you know, I don't really have any classes with you, and my first day here you were absent, and you know how when you're in the middle of talking to other people you don't really use their names?”
I stopped walking; so did she. Now I was just confused, but an incredulous smile began to spread across my face, against my will, as she chattered on in clear discomfort.
“So, uh, I haven't really ever heard anyone, er... look, I'm really, really sorry I haven't asked you before, but I thought I'd pick it up and I kinda didn't, so... what's your name?”
I didn't answer right away, and Julie took this as a sign of anger. Her eyes widened, and she continued. “Oh my gosh, I'm so sorry, I know it was really stupid of me and I feel so guilty, because I really ought to know your name by now but I don't, and -”
I laughed, and after a moment, she began to laugh too, though still nervously. “It's okay,” I assured her. It was okay by me, really; the situation was too sad and funny at the same time for it to not be okay by me. And yet, somehow the fact that someone in this world still didn't know me by name reassured me, in a strange way. “Really, it's okay!”
“Sorry,” she repeated. Then she added, “So, uh... what is your name?”
I grinned, though the question made me thoughtful. I almost replied right away, but something – something... I looked around. The street we were on was as familiar as my house to me; I'd walked this route thousands of times to and from school. But the angle we were standing at, and the way the light hit it... if I squinted a little bit, and cocked my head – there were the lampposts, the roofs, the absence of cars. What would it look like, at night?
“So what is your name?” she repeated, growing panicky again. I smiled at her.
“Call me Max.”
“Short for -”
“No.”
“But isn't that -”
“Yes.”
“Oh.”
“I think so, yes.”
To my surprise, Julie didn't startle, or even flinch. Instead, she grew thoughtful. I suppose I must have underestimated her, after all, but it didn't matter, it was beside the point with the warm relief flowing through me. “Okay, then... Max,” she said, and then smiled awkwardly. “I guess you'll be needing a haircut or something, then?”
“I guess so,” I told her, and turned away to walk home.