Geena had the dirty, stringy hair of a low-budget porn actress, clumped strands dangling over the sad, lovely, lonely eyes of a transvestite. She couldn’t straighten her spine, a congenital defect of some kind, a bone disease that went unnoticed and untreated until it was six months past too late. So she stood with a permanent hunch, shoulders rotated forward, palms of her hands slapping against her knees as she lurched down the halls from class to class. She wore men’s clothes, all of them slightly too big, littered with eccentrically placed holes, imparting the skin of her forearms with their musty smell. She was voted “Most Likely to Die Alone.”

Teenagers can be so cruel.

Especially when they’re right.

So, all in all, Ken didn’t know why he ate with her, why he chose on that day to sit down at her table with his lunch tray. He played football. He wasn’t a starter, had been on the team for four years and ridden the pine for each of them. It was pathetic, really. His father talked about his so-called athletic exploits through a forced smile and gritted teeth. But still. He was tall and good-looking underneath the acne. He wore a letterman’s jersey. He got invited to all the big parties. He made out with the fatter cheerleaders.

This was high school. What he was doing was a death sentence.

No one would look at him after that day. No one had to courage to talk to him about it. No one had the decency to explain what was happening even though it was obvious. Half-circles of his peers would close up when he neared. Friends would stop returning his increasingly pleading phone messages. The snickers that trailed behind his footsteps left him with the impression that these private tapes were quickly becoming part of the public record. It would be nice if, then, in the midst of all this, he could say that he stood with Geena, hip to shoulder, that they became companions, partners in this shared misery. That he was able to look past all of the physical flaws and recognize the true beauty that lay within, that he lay with her in her room and listened as she read him her poems, the same poems every girl writes, about the boy and the love and the heartache and the sadness and the tears and the pain and the strength and the freedom and – most of all – the wisdom. That he held her hand when she was done and brushed back her hair and looked her in the eyes and told her how great it was – the best thing he’d ever heard – and meant it, really meant it. That they became lovers.

It would be nice.

But real life hardly ever is.

No. Truth be told, Ken never talked to her again. In fact, he found their entire conversation to be repulsive. He realized why people hated her, why they avoided her. Some people are alone because they choose to be. Some people are alone because they ought to be. Geena fell in the latter category.

Ken, as it turns out, fell in the former.

He just needed a push.

He just needed Geena.