Anderson was the boy everyone left alone. It wasn’t that they were frightened of him – no one could really be frightened of someone like him, after all – it was just that they weren’t quite sure what to do with him. His name was James Anderson, but no one ever called him Jim, Jimmy, or Andy. Just Anderson.               The way Anderson held himself told people everything they needed to know about him: he knew what he was about, and he was not going to let anyone change his mind.
          “Dude, you’ve been scribbling, like, for an hour,” Jamie pressed him with a whisper. Anderson shrugged but didn’t stop moving his pencil. She was a fresh transfer who had yet to learn that people never started conversations with him. “Let me see,” Jamie Greggs demanded across the aisle, holding out her hands and wiggling her fingers.
            Anderson winced as her nasally voice ground across his ears. After a brief internal discussion, he obeyed his classmate’s command.  Charismatic Jamie Greggs had caught his attention when she transferred two weeks ago. How could she not? Her voice was like a baby elephant, always trumpeting down the hallway, blasting through his comfortable walls of silence and overturning whatever neat process had been spinning in his mind.
            Jamie observed the drawing that Anderson had been sketching. It wasn’t any good, much to her relief. She gave a snicker of derision - at least he wasn’t one of those cliché, quiet kids who poured their souls into art and paved the way for more mainstream teen novels. He had just scribbled random thoughts that came to his mind as Mr. O’Flaherty lectured to his glassy-eyed class. Jamie drew her large blue eyes over the bizarre train of thought in the margin of his paper.
          “I can’t even tell what that is,” she muttered, irreverently tossing the notebook back.
          Anderson smirked as he caught his notebook. It did not matter what she thought of him or the sketches in his notebook margins.

         But as the bell rang, drowning everyone in a flood of relief, Anderson stayed in his chair. He couldn’t seem to forget the sound of her baby-elephant voice in his ears as she scoffed in disapproval over his peculiar illustrations.
          “Hey, Anderson,” Greggs said as she stuffed her bright blue pencils back into her pencil bag. “How come you never talk to anyone? Do you, like, have any friends?”
          Anderson turned his pale green eyes to Jamie. He was genuinely nonplussed by her question, but she mistook his slightly knitted eyebrows as a cold glare. “Just saying,” she mumbled under her breath. She slid from her desk and scooped her books into her arms. “Oh, never mind.” The stunned Anderson barely had time to catch the scowl on her face before she wedged herself into the flow of students heading towards the door.
            “Anderson?” Mr. O’Flaherty was still holding his marker, and looked rather haggard. “Anderson, do you need something? You’re going to be late to your next class.”
           Anderson’s eyes dropped to the sketches on the margins of his blank paper. He cleared his throat and spoke hoarsely, “No, Mr. O’Flaherty. I don’t need anything.” The blood drained from his face as he pulled an eraser from his backpack. For a moment he gripped the rubber tightly between his thumb and his forefinger. The graphite cacophony of doodles and drawings danced across his mind with a mocking laugh.
            What bizarre rational had gone through his head and permitted him show his paper to Jamie Greggs? That look in her eyes as she saw his thoughts vomited onto paper….                        Anderson felt the palms and creases of his hands dampen with sweat as he gripped the rubber eraser. After a brief flinch, he pressed the edge of the pink rectangle to his paper and began to slash it across his unapproved doodles. The skin of his fingers burned with friction as his thoughts were reduced to little bits of rubber. It was almost invigorating to see his thoughts disappear so quickly, subject to a whim…something was satisfying about possessing such authority over his mind’s expressions.
              The flecks sat on his paper like blackened worms. They seemed to cling almost desperately to his fingers when he briskly swept them from his paper. When the last black worm had tumbled to the floor, he threw his things into his bag and caught it up on his shoulder. “Hey Jamie, wait up!” he called, stepping towards the door. The flecks of material that had once been his doodles remained behind him, doomed to join the others that students had been brushing onto the floor for years.