She was a glass girl.
     She found this out by accident, one day, when the sky was frozen over, shattered clouds splayed across it as though smashed by a giant fist. She'd been walking home from school, a comfortably large and red wool sweater tucked safely around her, backpack slung over one shoulder, long, blond hair loose and stringing out behind her in the intermittently gusting wind.
     When she was one block away from her house, the wind picked up a half-smashed tin can, which had been camouflaged in leaves that were no longer pumpkin-golden-c***tail cherry colors but instead dead and dry, the color of forgotten piles of spices in the back of the kitchen pantry. It was a strangely strong gust, and she bent her head to weather it, spying too late the can hurtling towards her face with undisguised animosity. Just as she was glancing up, startled by the gray object in the periphery of her vision, it collided with her right cheekbone.
     A small, surprised noise escaped her, and she clutched at her smarting skin. The wind had retreated again, leaving the tin can to drop, a few feet behind her. She paused in her stride briefly, exploring the damage done, the torn skin, before continuing home, breaking out in a little trot whenever the wind rose against her.
Finally she made it home, out of the graying light outside, in where it was warmer and brighter. It was there where, looking in the mirror to see what violence the wind had done to her, that she saw it.
     There was no blood, no blue-black bruise, though the spot was still tender. The skin, her lightly freckled skin, had instead sort of – peeled, like the bark of the eucalyptus trees she'd seen long ago on a trip to a faraway, warm land. And as she touched it, gently, with her fingers, it peeled off still further, revealing a sparking, transparent surface.
     She stood very still.
     Her face looked back at her from the mirror, which was coated in dust and innumerable dried-water stains, above an ever-yellow sink, above ever-grimy tiles that used to be blue and white but were now just shades of gray. The light in their bathroom was fluorescent, though it was giving out now and starting to flicker, giving everything an unhealthy, washed-out look. Her dark eyes' pupils were wide and deeply black under it.
     The girl touched the wound again, then began to worry at it, pushing and pulling. It was painless, like getting her hair cut, or scratching off nail polish when it began to chip and crack. Soon she'd uncovered her entire face. Borne now by inertia more than by her own faltering will, she took off her sweater and continued, down and down, until finally she stood in a pile of something that used to be her skin. As she looked down at them, between her clear feet, the peels curled up and dried still further. She shuddered involuntarily, then looked up again into the mirror. She took one step back, to get a better view, then another and another.
     There was no doubt about it: a glass girl. She tapped her own arm with the fingers of the opposite hand: a pleasant, smooth tone rang out. She blinked at herself; her eyes had stayed the same, but everything else – even her hair – was clear, showing through her the rack of bath towels on the shelf. After a moment's hesitation she reached up, and her eyes came off like contact lenses to drop down by her feet with the rest of her. In her torso she'd half-expected to see shifting, see-through organs. Instead, not where her heart would have been but in line with where the sternum used to be, there hung a sphere the size of a softball, smooth and glimmering with a silver-dollar glow of its own. A thin, amorphous mass wreathed it, reminding her of fog or watercolors, shifting in color from violet ink to deep indigo to crimson to black.
     She tried to smile at herself, but found that her new mouth, which she determined could still open and close and even speak, would not settle into that habitual form. Her new, or rather true, self had its limitations.
     She turned away from the mirror and pulled on her clothes again, after throwing the peels and the rest of it away.

     After hours of homework, stumbling through algebra problems about imaginary trains leaving imaginary towns at imaginary times and getting nowhere, she came down for dinner. Her father, her adored father, smiled at her. She could only nod back. But, she hoped, he could see the brightening of the pearl in her.
     The next day at school was ordinary, more so than she'd thought it would be, and passed just as slowly as it always did. Each bell's stringent tones marked another sliver of the day gone by; between bells, rushing across the sprawling, ill-maintained campus, no more people than usual glanced in her direction. The same people she always saw in their well-tread routes from class to class: habit carried her along the same path each time, and she could swear that the people she saw crossed paths with her at the same point each day. A girl that was perhaps a senior, whom she'd noted for her long, ginger hair. A small boy who always seemed to wear the same blue and black checkered jacket, coming apart at the seams now, white threads hanging down from the sleeves. A pair of freshmen girls that always walked side by side but never spoke to one another, each staring down at their respective phone. The same people, though the high school was large enough that none of them were in her classes.
     That day, a single person was out of place. When the glass girl was walking from Contemporary Literature to Physics Basic, passing by the edge of the school campus – marked by a tall, chain-link fence – she saw him on the other side of it.
     A glass boy.
     But the bell's echoes between cement gray walls had already faded, and the last stragglers were pushing by her, their feet tapping frenzied rhythms on the walk between Building A and the fence. She picked up her pace as well, glancing back for just long enough to realize that the watercolors in him were darker and more massive than hers, flowing almost to his very fingers.
     More rationed hours passed through her hands. Now to Algebra,  now to Phys Ed, now to Latin. It was in Latin, in fact, that she lost her voice. She raised her hand when the teacher, an aging and partly deaf crone whose docile gray hair possessed the curious quality of being preserved in a permanent bun on the back of her head, asked the class to conjugate to live. When the teacher called on her, the glass girl opened her mouth to speak, and found that no sound came out.
     She tried again, aware of the textured gazes of the other students rippling over her. The only noise in the class was the ticking clock, blindly staring at her from the wall above the blackboard.
     The crone cleared her throat and chose another student, while the glass girl put her head in her hands.
     It wasn't that she was embarrassed, really. It was almost laughable how little everybody seemed to care. Not even the crone made more than a passing remark as to the sorts of people who raised their hands without knowing the answer. In fact she could feel that her numbness was what was worrying her; her classmates didn't care that she knew that they didn't care.
     When she walked home again, twenty-four hours after her accident, the sky was different. The shattered clouds had been swept away, leaving a pale, blank slate hovering high above the earth; the sun hung somewhere over a distant land, but surely not beyond that slate. Not even a paling sphere evidenced its existence.
     The glass girl clenched her fists as a breeze rose up, but nothing happened apart from a shivering of the fallen leaves around her feet and the passing of a car on her left. She noted that the acrid smell of gasoline was absent.
     At her home, her father was home early. She could tell; the garage door was hanging open like a gaping maw, and his silver car gleamed from within its depths. The glass girl went around, back through the yard, and pushed open the screen door to the kitchen.
There he stood, mussed chestnut hair hanging in his eyes as he leaned over a frying pan of french toast. He'd come home early to surprise her. Now, though, he did not look up. The glass girl couldn't see his eyes, which she knew were shards of summer sky.
     She wanted to smile to him, but her mouth refused to move.
     She wanted to say hello to him, but her voice had vanished.
     She wanted him to see her, but her essence could not expose itself.
     And here, twenty-four hours after her discovery, was where everything changed.
     Under her feet the earth seemed to heave and tremble, the wooden floorboards, infused with dust, to arch their backs. She dropped her backpack and ran up the stairs, knowing her feet would make no noise that others could hear, though they pounded in her ears like kettle-drums. In the bathroom the mirror was the same as yesterday, the fluorescent light still flickering, but now the whole room was swaying from side to side.
     In the mirror she could see it, inside of her, separated from her. The watercolors had enveloped the pearl entirely, gorged themselves on it, sent out tentacles from her core to her extremities. Before she knew what she was doing the mirror lay in shards at her feet, and yet she still felt nothing.
     The glass girl tore off her jacket, her shirt, and stared at it. There it was. Now she could see it clearer than in the distorting glass, see it pulse with a frantic rhythm. It, it, it had to be her voice, her smile. She tried to touch it but of course her fingers were glass, her torso was glass; they slid off, and she felt nothing.
She began to scrabble at herself, her thoughts fading as though carried away by the unrelenting autumn wind outside which she thought was howling. She had torn off her skin but what else was there? The autumn wind had wiped her insides clean and left her empty, the dust swept in where she could not reach it, within her, and she felt nothing.
     Harder and harder, tearing at the seamless glass. It was maddening, it was right before her eyes, the emotion, the blue and the violet and the black, in her. The scratching turned to pounding, a violent assault on the fortress that was her body, and now she was on the blue and white gray tiles, arching her back like the floorboards downstairs, pounding and pounding, and before she knew it she was downstairs and out the door and out in the autumn wind and out on the street pounding pounding and something pounded for her something that was fire and metal and speed and she threw herself into its embrace where the stench of gasoline was lacking and -
     a pleasant, smooth tone rang out.
     Above her floated the watercolors. Now she found she could smile; here at last, among the wreckage of shattered glass and twisted, wrenched metal, she could reach out, her fingertips almost brushed it, and then right before she touched the remains of her soul