Peter sat calmly on his desk in the art room where his sister had set him down for third period before dashing off, his eyes tracing over the high walls.  Murals, smeared with shades of neon, adorned the longest segments with what looked to Peter like horses made of light, streaming away the purple darkness behind them.  He smiled to himself.  He wasn’t sure what it was, but the fact that he had actually managed to make a new friend in his last class, combined with the overwhelmingly large image (to Peter, at least) of the horses on the wall, was filling him with a sense of hope.  As if success was within his grasp.  He had stepped forward, and was meeting the challenge unflinchingly.

                The bell rang for the start of class as the final students grabbed the unoccupied seats in the room with a clatter that hurt Peter’s ears as they steadily noticed his alien presence and set to whispered speculation regarding his existence.  The boy was trying to get used to it, and instead focused more closely on the wall murals to block out the cancerously embarrassing attention.  The backdoor opened and the teacher, Mr. Jameson, strolled uncaringly into the tiled art room.  As his gray hair frizzed outward in various directions, Peter guessed that the man was within a couple years, if not sooner, to the sweet release of retirement.

                “Morning, morning…” he grumbled, in contrast to the greeting he was giving.  “Freshmen, right?  Right?”

                A soft mumble of affirmation came out from the room.  Mr. Jameson nodded, coughing lightly into his grizzled fist.

                “Today, I just want to see what you can do.  Paper in the back.  Pencils and paints there too.  Go ahead and… make something.  Create.  Anything you want.  The real learning starts tomorrow.  I’ll be back in a few minutes to check over the attendance chart.”

                The class immediately pulled out of their chairs and lumbered for the back counter to pick up the supplies, while Peter stood up, walking toward the edge of the desk.

                “Mr. Jameson!” he called out, receiving no reply from his teacher, who was at least twenty feet away at the front of the class.  “MR. JAMESON!”

                “What?” squawked the teacher as if awakened from a daydream as he stood and strode toward Peter’s desk, his eyes refocusing.  “Oh right.  Yes, you, they told me about you… Paul…”

                “It’s Peter.  And I…”

                “You’ve got paper, right?”

                “Yeah, all I have to do is put something down and email it to you, and…”

                “Fine,” he said with a single nod, turning back and moving for his office door.  Peter couldn’t tell if the gruffness in his voice was just irritation at the special circumstances he was having to deal with, or if it was just Peter himself.  At any rate, the small boy began rummaging through his backpack for supplies as his classmates took their seats again, deciding he’d try to work on getting the old man’s approval later on, once he re-entered the room.

                No sooner had Peter removed a colored pencil tip from his backpack, along with a tiny paper square, and begun to sketch the outlines of what the boy had envisioned as some sort of fantastical wild beast, before he heard a hushed whisper in a quick, machine gun-like spurt, cutting through the continued buzzing of the rest of the class.

                “Psst!”

                Peter turned his head to the right, and found himself staring into a pair of feminine gray eyes, flushed partially with smoky hazel.

                “Yeah, you!” whispered the young girl, blinking a few times and raising her chin slightly as she ran a finger through her slightly unkempt light brown hair, which was held together messily in a pair of twin pigtails by red scrunchies.  “What’s your name?” she questioned, the slightest of slurred urban accents saturated within her voice.

                “Uh…” gasped Peter, getting his bearings.  “Peter.  Peter Clark.”

                “I read about you, I think.  In the paper or something,” she said, scrunching her nose and making a face of arguable distaste.

                “Probably.  It’s been a few times.  I mean, I haven’t really done anything though, I-”

                “Yeah, okay,” she answered, cutting Peter off and looking back to her large piece of paper and the accompanying water color paints she had selected.  “So, I was wondering if you’d help me out with my project.”

                “Sure!” said Peter enthusiastically.  “Yeah, sure, I’d like to!”

                It’s coming easier now, thought Peter proudly to himself.  Look at all the friends you’re making.

                “Cool,” she said brightly with a nod, reaching forward, fingers outstretched in preparation to grab up her new, diminutive classmate.

                Peter gulped hard, his spine tingling, as the girl’s soft, doughy fingers wrapped themselves tightly around his body like cobras, compressing him against her wide, creased palm.  The touch of her skin was cold, as if she had recently picked up a snowball with her bare hands, and Peter shivered, far too surprised to have any kind of verbal reaction as he was casually lifted off the table and carried across the terrifying gorge between the desks. 

Peter’s blood practically turned to ice.

The girl’s hand squeezed inward gently as Peter was lowered back toward the desktop.  He felt like his lungs were being constricted.  He gulped in a few shorter breathes, panicking slightly, the realization that most of his body had been swallowed up into the all-encompassing flesh of this fifteen-year-old girl’s hand and fingers taking its toll in a mere few seconds.  As much as Peter hated being plucked up by his clothes as Amy had done in first period, he at least had free reign with his limbs then.  At this moment, save for his head and ankles, Peter was immobile in the dominating grip of this stranger, and this alone was enough to send a few beads of sweat down the back of his chilled neck. 

With a sigh, Peter felt his feet touch the desktop, and almost reluctantly, the tree trunk-like fingers pulled back as well, allowing him to inhale and exhale regularly again, the cool, malleable wall of palm skin rising away.  Peter coughed lightly, looking upward at the enormous torso of the girl.  For a moment, she stared into the hand she had just used to grasp Peter without permission, as if he had left a mark there, with glowing eyes.  Her lips parted slightly, allowing her to exhale quietly; clearly, to Peter, the sensation was just as new to her as it was to him.

“Hey, umm…” mumbled Peter, clasping his hands together as he realized they were shaking slightly.

“Mandy,” she answered confidently, shaken from her moment of subjective epiphany by his voice.  Her gray eyes scanned over his body in a pattern, as if she was trying to ingrain his image into her mind’s eye.

“Mandy,” repeated Peter with another cough.  “I… I don’t really know how to say this, but I…”

“Look, I know you’ve got to draw something too on your tiny piece of paper over there, so how about we get to work, huh?” she said wistfully, pointing back toward Peter’s desk and twirling at one of her pigtails with the other hand, as if only half-listening to him and daydreaming with the other part of her consciousness.

“Right, right, I know, I just think you should know… I… look, don’t take it the wrong way, it’s not you… but I don’t really like being picked up… like that,” grumbled Peter, feeling incredibly uncomfortable with each successive word that escaped his lips.

“Okay.  How should I pick you up, then?” casually questioned Mandy as if it was the most natural thing in the world, her pointer finger extending up to her mouth and playfully flipping her plush pink lower lip up and down, creating a little popping sound with each flick.  Her eyes continued to almost unblinkingly study the boy.

“Errr…” groaned Peter, unsure of how to tell her he wasn’t particularly interested in being transported by her, after how brash she had been.  He quickly cleared his throat, deciding against it for the time being.  “W-What do you want me to do to help?”

“Well, see, I got these watercolors,” began Mandy, flipping the plastic lid open and sliding a white bowl full of water closer to the set with her damp fingertips.  “And I was hoping, maybe… you’d walk through it, and make little footprints on my paper?”

“I…” drawled Peter, then shrugged to himself.  It honestly didn’t sound as horrible as he had come to predict, and at this point, the boy just wanted to get this over with so he could return to his desk.  “Sure!  That… sounds cool.”

“I know,” she answered proudly, squeezing her eyes shut and grinning so widely it looked to Peter like her face must have been sore for a second afterward.  She opened her eyes again, and absentmindedly began twirling at the frizzy brown ends of her pigtails again, getting her finger entwined deeply into the long, auburn follicle ropes.  “You might want to take off your shoes.”

“Yeah!  I… right, right,” said Peter.  The situation was becoming so surreal to the lad that he was starting to have difficulty accurately following the developing conversation with this young girl who clearly had only the loosest understanding of basic social etiquette.

It’s okay, reminded Peter to himself mentally.  It’s okay.  This is how you make friends.  And you need friends.  You need friends.  Everybody needs friends.

He kicked off his little tennis shoes, depositing then on the desktop, before sliding his socks off his feet and jamming them into the opening of one of his shoes.

                “Okay, I can go ahead and-” began Peter brightly as he raised his head, only to find the immense wall of palm flesh sliding for him again across the desktop.  His foot raised, and he took an involuntary step backwards as Mandy’s hand smashed into him like a fleshy linebacker, her fingers wrapping quickly around him and catching his fall.  He groaned with soreness as he tripped over her pinky finger, only to find himself easily grasped back into her firm hold.  He could almost feel the muscle in the heel of her hand pulsing against his ribcage as she lifted him from the ground, his arms pinned uncomfortably to his sides.  His eyes darting wildly, Peter’s heart clutched in his chest as he realized where he was headed.

                “Uh… M-M-Mandy?” wheezed Peter as he was lowered toward the porcelain bowl.

                “It’s watercolors, remember?” said Mandy with a cheerful shrug, dunking Peter’s immobilized body roughly into the freezing water with her soft fist.