Excerpt: Hot Pink Chameleon

When I was waiting for my bus at the end of the day, I made another realization. Almost everyone around me was a couple. Everywhere there were isolated groups of two, a boy and a girl, holding hands, or sucking face, or just standing there. How come I’d never noticed before that everyone was someone’s – that boys and girls had paired off together like there was a natural order that had dictated it? I remember this one time in science class when we were looking at rocks. There were all of these different factors to look at when you’re trying to figure out which rock is which – color, reactions to acid, and this thing called cleavage. Basically, cleavage is just when rocks break. They chip off in different ways when you smash them, and the way they break can help to determine what kind of rock you’re looking at. When you break a crystal, all of the little pieces that break off of the crystal are the exact same shape with the exact same number of facets, no matter how small you break it, or how hard you hit it – whether it’s a big chunk or a little piece of sand. It just happens like that every time, no exceptions, ever. If a giant crystal boulder fell from a cliff, the pieces that broke off would be perfect replicas of the large one, and they’d rain from the sky, not because someone said so, but because there’s some natural order governing it all, making it work, and making sure that was how it was. Seeing all of those damn couples standing on the curb, their fingers interlocked like two chips off of the same crystal, I couldn’t help but feel like I’d broken all of the rules of nature. I wasn’t a perfect crystal – I just didn’t break that way.