Aria bit her lip. Normal? God, he'd never seen her at school, then, the way everyone, even the big football players who had so wronged Aura, would flinch away from her. How in middle school when she'd snapped at those popular girls, the ones who were tall and pretty and cruel, and she'd just snapped in the middle of gym class and roasted them and destroyed the gym floor, how everyone had looked at her so terrified, even the teachers, even the psychiatrist they sent her to, just the slightest flinching every time she moved, the way their eyes would track her far beyond the normal demands of good manners and even to creepiness.
"I'm not normal. I have to pretend, every day of my life, that I am, or the world won't have a place for me. I'm too human to live without them, too human to live within them. I'll always be an outcast, unless I pretend." Her eyes filled with tears and she blinked them rapidly away.
She was rather shocked by his next question. "What you are. Elementally speaking you're a metal. My guess would be iron."
"It's got to be your magnetic personality that tipped her off." Aura said. Aria grinned up at her, thankful for the sudden rescue. But then her face went serious again.
"I'm unsure of what you mean, what you are. You're like me. Cursed. But not like me, because you accept it. Because I've not seen you around school though you act like an educated boy. Man. Whatever you call yourself. You accept it and you stay away from people to keep from hurting them, and I can never stay away, no matter how cruel they've been to me, because I love them, and it's that love that is going to destroy both me and them." Her eyes welled up again and this time she did not try to blink the tears away, instead letting them trickle down her cheeks.
Aura put both arms around her little sister most protectively. "Why do you scare her?" she asked the boy. "You're trying to unhinge her and I demand to know why."