Outliers

Eggs

I love eggs. Scrambled, fried, baked. Good thing I love eggs. That's pretty much what  I eat every day. Eggs are easy, and portable. When you never know where you might lie down at night and get up in the morning, hauling the chicken flock around in their wagon from place to place, grubbing around for whatever roots or greens or berries we can find, eggs are like my rock. They taste good all the time (as long as you don't let them lie around too long, which is not ever a problem around here), and they are always here to rely on. Not like very much else around here. Not like some of the people either.

The only reason I think it's weird that we move around a lot is because of Ivan. Before Ivan, all the ways we do things seemed so perfect, and so normal. Now I know that he's the normal one and we're the weird ones.

Ivan, first of all, has like no hair. Very smooth and weird. He is also quite tall. Everyone in my family, even the grown men, are shorter than Ivan. With his tallness also comes narrowness. He is narrow. Ivan has a narrow head, and a narrow face, and narrow arms and shoulders. He is weak, physically. The first time I saw Ivan, I was alone, hammering down the posts for the chicken coop, beating the mallet against the pins to try to break through the icy crust of frozen topsoil. Otherwise the winter winds might blow the coop away. I am very strong. As I swung the mallet, out of the corner of my left eye, through a lock of my hair, I caught a glimpse of red. Red is not a color you see in wintertime all that often. I carefully turned ever so slightly and caught the red moving again. Slowing my mallet, and casually pushing my hair back, I glanced more intently.

THUD

My mallet fell from my hands as my eyes locked onto another set of eyes, sort of like my own, but no one I had ever seen before. A young man! A boy, really. He was squatting behind a dead bush (with no leaves on it, and therefore a terrible hiding place). His face registered shock and he shuffled back a little on his backside, never taking his eyes off me. I'm sure I looked shocked, too. Never, ever, did we ever see any person that was outside of our camp. Never, ever, did we talk to, or even think about, those people we call the Outliers. I didn't even know the Outliers were real until a few years ago. Until then, I had always thought they were camfire stories told among the kids, just made up.

Did I know, in that moment, that my mind would be forever different? No, I don't think so. The only thing I knew at that moment was that I was in danger and I didn't care. Because, finally, something different was happening and it was new and exciting and all for me.