63rd Ash, 4606
He read the note again for the fourth time:
Thomas,
I can’t keep my eyes off of you lately. I don’t know what it is, but there’s something about you that’s different, now, and I am inclined to learn more. If you’d be so kind as to grant my request, I’ll be waiting for you behind the utility shed after everyone has gone home at the fourth bell.
Please be mine,
Margaret
Thomas could think of many Margarets in his school. Grisic was not known to use an abundance of names, after all. There was only one that would write a letter like this, though, and only one whose handwriting he recognized. This had to be the Headmaster’s daughter, Margaret Bell. They had Raeelian together and were frequently partnered up to practice their speaking skills. He was normally rather quiet, but with her it was markedly worse; he could barely get a word out without blushing and stammering. He loved listening to her voice, though, as she recited the foreign phonetics. It came through clear and strong, and he often found himself so lost in the rhythm of what she was saying that he couldn’t process the content of her speech
He wasn’t great at Raellian, or really at school in general, but she was so patient with him. She helped him with the vowel sounds, as they gave him the most trouble, and praised him when he did well. He’d even started studying a little bit, just on the off-chance that if he did better, she would do so more. He wanted to be a good partner for her, the kind she could rely on.
He wanted to be the other sort of partner to her, as well, although he was not particularly well-studied in that area, either. There had been some kissing, and one of the other boys had taken a bit of a shine to him and taken him out to a play once, and then there had been a bit more kissing. Nonetheless, she must have taken notice of him, despite his shabby clothes, his shyness, his almost pathological need to fade into the background.
He’d been working on that last bit. After he felt that he had mastered holding a fake smile, he worked on additional expressions. Some of them came rather easily: he could scowl, frown, grimace, and look repulsed without much practice. Positive emotions were more difficult, but he was mastering them with time. He was still nailing down a look of adoration, but he found that when he thought of Margaret, it came to his face quite easily.
This could be because he was working on his presence. His natural inclination was to fade into the background. He’d actually been working on that, first by trying to do so more. Not hide, so much as be as bland, slippery, and forgettable as possible. He knew it worked when Miss Hannegan forgot to curse at him, when she miscounted his bed, when she forgot to move him into the smaller dorms with the older boys upon his fourteenth birthday until he reminded her.
Eventually, though, he tired of fading into the background, and started working on the opposite: commanding attention. It was tough going at first. He looked for people who were able to hold people’s attention seemingly without effort: actors, some salespeople, even a few of his teachers. He looked at how they walked, and how they held themselves, and emulated their gait and posture. He stopped listening so much to what they said and started listening to how they said it: word choice, intonation, and inflection. He observed that salespeople who could foster a connection to prospective customers seemed to do better than ones who just barked out what they were selling at regular intervals.
He didn’t know why he was doing all of this, exactly, but he knew he was tired of people overlooking him. In the orphanage, it helped him escape a lot of the worst of it, but in the outside world, it just meant being passed over for jobs, friends, opportunities. So he started trying it, just a little bit, in his day to day life. When he wasn’t at the orphanage, he practiced walking more confidently. When he was cleaning houses, he enunciated when the families asked him questions. And over the last few weeks, he’d started bringing all those lessons into school with him, into Raellian. Perhaps it was this, plus the dedicated studying, that had made her notice him. Perhaps, all of this practice could be used to attain something beyond a feeling of accomplishment.
He’d even started wondering about a career as an actor. He’d only been to see one show, with Ned, a sweet older boy who had helped him move into the older boys’ dorm and now insisted on eating together every evening. It suited Thomas fine. Ned was the strongest guy in the orphanage; people left him alone, and Ned didn’t talk much, so they could just eat in companionate silence. That evening, though, he planned to talk a bit: he wanted Ned to know about what had happened, since he was the closest thing Thomas had to a friend.
The rest of the day, he felt like he was walking on air. He didn’t have Raellian that day, so he had no chance to ask her about the letter, but he saw her in the hallway and smiled at her. When she gave him a little smile back, he felt his heart soar in his chest. He could scarcely remember ever being this happy. As the bells chimed and classes shifted, he thought about what he would say.
A monologue? A poem? He’d memorized many of them while bored and not paying attention in Literature class; he’d found he had a rather good memory, actually, which seemed to surprise people. There was the perception that just because he was not paying attention to what teachers thought he should be that his brain was doing nothing at all, but it was often busily thinking about or analyzing something – just not often focused on the alleged task at hand.
At length, though, he decided it was best to show up and simply listen. Anything Miss Bell wanted to say to him would be worth hearing. Perhaps he would even say something back. Something clever, perhaps, or something that would make her laugh. Perhaps they could hold hands. He couldn’t stop thinking about how lovely it would be to see her in her well-made red coat that was tailored just for her, cheeks slightly flushed from the omnipresent chill in the air. His coat was ill-fitting, tattered, and inexpertly patched, but never mind. She liked him, and his origins weren’t a secret. All of the children in Lady Ryan’s Home for Wayward Children went to this school by virtue of proximity. Educated orphans were productive orphans so the state generously paid for him to go to school in exchange for pocketing ninety percent of all wages he earned. He was uncertain who was getting the better deal, but it was better than living in a workhouse or drudging away in a factory, so at least there was that.
At long last, classes were dismissed, and Thomas remained behind, as instructed, until everyone had left. It was all he could do to walk with some semblance of normalcy. He wanted to skip, to prance, to dance for joy. This was what it was like to be noticed. This was what it was like to be wanted. He couldn’t ever remember feeling quite like this, but he wanted it to continue forever.
He rounded the corner to the Utility Shed all but whistling, but there was no bright red coat. Just four sparrows like him, four boys his age or older, all also from Lady Ryan’s. As one of them aimed a well-placed kick for the back of his knee, the other three jeered.
“Wh–” was all he was able to get out before they were on him.
Two held him down, the other two kicked him. When it seemed like they were getting tired, they switched: the two holding him began kicking him instead, and the ones kicking him regained their breath.
Just as suddenly and as viciously as it began, it ended. All four of them walked off, laughing and talking like nothing had happened, which to them it hadn’t, leaving him prone on the cobblestone path. He knew when he saw them all later on, they’d pretend that nothing happened.
He didn’t need to ask how they’d done it. They’d stolen one of Margaret’s assignments and copied her handwriting adequately, or she’d been tricked and agreed to write the letter, or she knew what was going to happen and agreed to write the letter. While he hoped she had no involvement, he was still lying on the ground either way.
He also didn’t need to ask why they’d done it. Because they didn’t particularly like him. Because their lives, like his life, weren’t all that good. Because this was something they could do and feel better, if only for a moment. Because they could do it in general, and who was going to care, or stop them.
After a few minutes, he got to his feet, or tried to. He couldn’t put weight on one of his feet, which was alarming, and there was the angry sharp pain below his knee on that same leg that sent the sky spinning around above him, so after a bit of negotiation with himself, sat on his bum and used his hands to scoot along the cobblestones, back toward the front of the school. Getting home like this would take quite some time, but lying around behind an outbuilding at a school that everyone had left in the cold seemed like a great way to get frostbite, or pneumonia, or worse.
By the time he got around to the front entrance, the sun was starting to sink behind the horizon, his hands were freezing, and he was, despite himself, crying. Just this once, he hoped someone would save him.
He didn't deserve it. 
