Experiment 5
This is exercise #2.
Every day I see you, I know there is something different between you and the rest of us. While we talk during passing period you stare blankly into your locker for the five minute duration. As we ask the teacher for help, you complete the assignment with no questions. We eat our lunch and you disappear for a half an hour. The last bell rings for the day and as everyone else rushes out of the building you patiently roam the halls until everyone has left. What are you hiding? Who are you really because this charade can only be that, an act?

I stare at this girl from eight am until three thirty pm each school day. She is in most of my dumb classes here at Ash Grove High School. I cannot figure her out, I don’t even know if she realizes that I’m watching her. I have never had issues with girls not noticing me until she came to school. Second grade she came as a transfer from somewhere in Connecticut. I only know this because that’s what our teacher recited to us; as if she had memorized only the essential questions her folks gave answers to. Questions they thought eight year olds would ask. Since then I don’t think I’ve ever heard her speak. I take that back, in seventh grade she was in Mr. Burke’s class who made everyone answer a question of his every day. She switched that class for another science teacher as soon as she could.

Normally I don’t creep on people, but it is freshman year and I just have to know within these next four years before we graduate who she is. Whether she tells me or I find her family, I need to know who she really is and why she has been so distant. That is why I have paid attention to her class schedule, what she fills her passing periods with, and when and how she leaves from school. For a small town nothing unusual happens, but I know she isn’t what folks around here would call a normal teenage girl and neither are her parents that she may or may not have. I’ve never seen them for myself, but no one else seems to be questioning their existence.
…
Four hours later, once the school closes and locks the front doors Grayson finds Braley walking towards  the outskirts of town. There are only a few blocks of houses on either side of the street, what we natives have named “downtown”, until the great plains of Nebraska flooded with corn and bean crops surround the outskirts of the village called Endicott. Strangely enough she walks with confidence into the tall stalks of corn right past Ms. Crillin’s old farmhouse on the edge of town.

As Grayson peaks his head in between the corn rows Braley jumps out as if to protect herself while scaring him for dear life in the process. Before Grayson can start pestering her for answers she guilt’s him into explaining himself. As Grayson explains his curiosity Braley cuts him off in a long sigh and begins her story as if she has been waiting for someone to ask.