Down the library’s red carpet she glides, her shoulders back, chest out.  Her long blond hair parted on the side bounces as she walks. Her white dress floats around her skinny body, and modest diamond studs ornament her ears. A black backpack is effortlessly slung over her left shoulder, carried not as a burden but as a symbol of her success. She subconsciously smoothes a stray hair in front and flashes her brilliant white teeth as she passes the librarian.
She continues to stride down the ramp of the library.  Everyone at the usual before-school table looks up, somehow sensing the intoxicating presence of the goddess of perfection.  As she approaches, the array of people gathered around the table parts like a sea and a seat at the head of the table is suddenly vacant.  She sits and gives them a secretive grin, promising stories and laughs yet to come.  Presiding over her court, she is the center of attention.  The girls giggle to themselves, creating a nonexistent inside joke on which she can never be a part of.  The guys tease her about the latest one she rejected and pester her about her plans for the weekend in vain hopes that the one girl that can never be gotten will lower to the level of her “normal” peers.
All they hear from teachers is, “Is everyone taking notes on Amanda’s essay?  This is the way to get an A+” and from parents, “Why can’t you be like Amanda? She’s such a nice girl,” and from sports coaches, “Did everyone watch Amanda play last night?  That’s the kind of aggressiveness and ball handling skills we need to develop”. They hang on her every movement, her every word, because she represents what everyone wants to be.  If they are around her enough, perhaps some of her star will rub off.
She’s not exceptionally pretty, and she would be dubbed a plain Jane except her presence is like a drug.  Her soft features create an easiness about her that covers them with a warm blanket of relief, of a calm that everything will be okay. When she fixes her sympathetic blue eyes on them, they see the best version of themselves, like a distorted reflection after a thrown rock creates ripples in a tranquil stream.  Her skin, free from the terrors of teenage beauty disasters, is clear and soft, reminiscent of a baby’s.  Her long wavy blond hair shines like gold, and they’d touch, but that would stain her pure aura of innocence.
The bell rings.  The table leaves.  A couple guys offer to walk her to her next class, but she declines because she has a free.  As the flurry of people blur past us, we stay at that table, alone at last.  Neither of us takes out work, and she asks, “Would you like to go outside for a while?” 
In the middle of the grass track field, we sit, leaning against the pole-vaulting mats.  It’s still dark outside, and the cold brisk of morning makes me shiver.  I consider starting a conversation, but when I look over, she’s staring in the distance, lost in another world.  Her body is shrunken by a solemn gravity, her shoulders slumped. She pulls her legs into herself, wrapping her arms around her knees.
She’s now far from New Canaan in a time and place where she’s dissolved its jail cell bars, where she lives on her own terms.  Only two years until the end of high school when she can stop being the perfect daughter, the perfect student, the perfect player, the perfect girl.  It doesn’t matter what she will do, as long as it erases the expectations and obligations.  She could farm potatoes in Idaho, go into the Peace Corps, or colonize the Moon.
I wish I could make them understand.  But how could they?  They were oblivious, spared of her innate gifts and are thus spared the curse of pressure.  
And they hadn’t opened her bedroom door and stepped into the shadows, casting the light of truth onto the monsters lurking in the darkness.  They hadn’t seen her wilted corpse cower from it, or her, collapsed, lying on her side with her arm reaching out for something illusory.  They hadn’t held her as the poison of human limitations gushed from her wrist.  They hadn’t looked through her chilly eyes into the ghostly abyss of her soul.  They hadn’t held the peaceful weapon and vowed to bury it far from that black hole.  They hadn’t watched over her all night until the Sun of judgment inevitably rose. 
They only experienced what she became the morning after.  She washed her hair stained with blood; she buried her scars under her sweater; she applied the makeup that covered the pale sullenness and tearstains of her face of the night.  And hanging on, she bravely smiled at herself in the mirror because that’s all she could do. 
So we sit there, me lost in the past and she in the future.