The first thing he noticed about her was her snake-black fingernails.

He wasn’t sure why, but something about her nails- her hands- her body was drawing him to her. So Daniel kicked his locker door shut, grabbed his backpack, and headed over to where she was sitting at a table just outside the entrance to the school.

He slung his backpack off his shoulder, and it landed with a thump on the table. “Hey.”

Jenny looked up, startled. She hadn’t been paying any attention and hadn’t noticed him coming up behind her. Her eyes scanned up and down him, checking him out. At a school with over four hundred people in a grade, a lot of people didn’t know each other, but Jenny had seen him before. She also knew they guys he hung out with- they were jerks, but Daniel had always seemed alright.

“Hey.” Jenny kicked herself for not being able to come up with a more intelligent response, but sometimes short and sweet is good enough.

“You’re a junior, right?” Daniel asked, though he already knew the answer from the English III and Pre-Calc books sitting on the table in front of her.

“Yeah, you?” So short and sweet was getting old fast, but Jenny really didn’t have a back-up plan.

Daniel had felt pretty awkward when Jenny had been looking at him, scrutinizing him, but now he found himself doing the same thing. He still couldn’t figure out what had drawn him to her. He usually had a thing for blondes and curls, a sharp contrast to Jenny’s straight, dark brown hair. From the set of her shoulders, the books that overfilled her backpack, and the glasses she wore, Daniel could tell that she was one of the scholars of the school. Normally that would make him uninterested, but this time it didn’t. She wasn’t ugly, but she was far from gorgeous- normally that would definitely make him uninterested. But something about her- about the black paint on her fingernails- told him there was something more to her; there was something more than what he saw, and he was determined to find out what it was.

“Me too. And I’ve gotta leave, so can I have your number?”

That was so not what she had been expecting from this conversation. But Jenny quickly wrote her number on his hand anyway, figuring she had nothing to lose from it.

“Thanks, see ya.” Grabbing his backpack, Daniel headed off towards where his car was parked. Jenny watched him for a moment, then looked back down at the notebook in front of her.

When Daniel reached his car, he looked at the number on his hand and saved it into his phone. His friends wouldn’t approve of her, but Daniel would make sure that they soon saw in her what he did… even though he wasn’t sure what that was quite yet.