dark eyes despite the range in hair tones. They also had dark shadows under those eyes—purplish, bruise-like, shadows that were kind of purple and were sort of like bruises, although not really either of those things. As if they were all suffering from a sleepless night, or almost done recovering from a broken nose. Though their noses, all their features in fact, were straight, perfect, angular.
But all this is not why I couldn't look away.
I stared because their faces, so different, so similar, were all devastatingly, inhumanely, unconditionally and irrevocably beautiful. They were faces you never expected to see in real life, as if they had just leapt from the pages of a fashion magazine, their airbrushed faces pushing through the paper into reality and proceeding to walk around, beautiful and devastating as a sinking sun. Or faces so perfect that it was as if they had been painted by an old master on a fresco of heaven, their faces the many faces of angels. It was hard to decide who was the most beautifully angelic—maybe the perfect blond girl, or the bronze-haired buck.
They were all looking away—away from each other, away from the other students, away from the world. As I watched, the small girl rose with her tray—unopened soda, unbitten Red Delicious apple—and walked away with a quick, graceful lope that belonged to a gazelle on the runway. I watched, amazed at her lithe dancing gazelle's step, 'til she dumped her tray into the trash and glided through the back door, faster than I would have thought possible. My eyes darted back to the others, who sat unchanging.
I was literally blown away. I squealed, "Who are they?" to the girl from my Spanish class, an overly saucy Chica whose name I'd already forgotten.
As she looked up from her burrito to see who I was talking about, he suddenly looked at her; the thinner one, the boyish one, the youngest, perhaps. He looked at her for just a fraction of a second, and then his dark eyes flickered to mine.

20

Chapter 1

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