Read Online The Suburban Strange by Nathan Kotecki - Free Book Online

feeling, this experience of Diaboliques, elsewhere in their lives. Being here helped her to understand the choices they made and the way they lived during the rest of the week. The next time she was in the middle of the chaotic school cafeteria Celia was going to find it that much easier to ignore everyone around her, as her friends did. Spending Friday nights here in this beautiful room, where everyone else from school would have been so obviously out of place, was the prize for enduring everyday life for the rest of the week. Celia realized she only had been on the outside, fearful of the eyes that dismissed her, thinking it was easiest just to disappear, because she hadn’t figured out where the inside was. It wasn’t with those kids at school any longer. It was here at Diaboliques. It was with the Rosary.
    “How do you like it?” Liz asked her at one point when they were standing off to the side again.
    “It’s beautiful. I didn’t know anything like this existed,” Celia replied. “If you had described it to me I wouldn’t have believed you, and now here I am, in the middle of it!” Every song was strange and amazing. Every time she looked around she found something or someone new to admire. There were elaborate wall sconces that dripped cut glass like chandeliers. A woman in a fitted smoking jacket and floor-length gown used the mirror in her compact to check the flat, shiny waves of hair on her temples. A man arrived dressed completely in ivory. A sort of shawl-collared knee-length coat over a cream ribbed sweater and wide-legged canvas pants made him look like some kind of heavenly longshoreman. Celia studied everyone at Diaboliques, wanting to take as much of it home with her as she could. She felt the familiar impulse to re-create all of it in her sketchbook, knowing she could spend the rest of the weekend capturing all these stunning people. But for the first time, underneath that impulse was a new one: Celia wouldn’t be content to know this world from behind a sketchbook—she wanted to take her place in it.
    In the midst of this sensory overload Celia noticed a tall boy with closely cropped black hair on the other side of the room. His broad shoulders and thick forearms made him look powerful even standing still. He wore a black shirt and pants that were plain by Diaboliques standards, but Celia was more taken with the silvery sparks in his gray eyes, which she could see from twenty feet away—because he was staring at her. She looked away and then looked back, and still he stared. Celia felt a strange current flow through her, a mix of anxiety and pleasure. She wanted to decode the boy’s gaze, but she wasn’t sure she dared.
    “Who is that?” Regine asked, easily locating the source of Celia’s distraction. Regine turned to Liz and pointed at the boy without even attempting to be subtle about it. Liz looked and then shrugged at Regine. Celia was embarrassed, but the boy across the floor didn’t seem to care. He continued to stare at Celia, keeping his hands deep in his pockets. “I don’t know about him,” Regine said. “Maybe I’m being overprotective, but I’ve never seen him before. We know all the regulars in this room.”
    As it turned out, no action was required. The boy never came over, nor did he try to speak with any of them. A few times Celia saw him dance to the most abrasive songs Patrick played that night, and Brenden told her the names of the bands: Fields of the Nephilim, Christian Death, and Virgin Prunes. The boy had a leonine grace, gliding surely from foot to foot, but he kept his eyes down, and to Celia he looked as though he were hearing the music through headphones rather than loudspeakers. He didn’t seem to notice anyone around him until he finished, returned to his place across the room, and raised his silver eyes to find her again.
    “If you keep watching him, he might think you’re interested,” Regine said.
    “He’s the one watching me!” Celia