Once upon a time there was a girl trapped in the haze of a world she lived in. She traveled the streets every day with her one track mind and her five dollar headphones without bothering to notice life moving around her. One dreary, autumn afternoon when the rain was falling awfully hard, the girl decided she missed her family quite terribly and so she set out to the train station to voyage home for the weekend. The path to the station was long and treacherous, and she almost didn't make it past the deadly force field cast by her evil college professors, but as soon as she passed through the magical land of Philadelphia, she was well on her way.

At once the young girl was confused, she had never taken a train before. She frantically looked at all the different signs around her with her unobservant eyes and tried her best to figure it out. Oh, but I sure wish someone would help me, she thought. She wandered around for what felt like hours, stumbling through the train station in a daze, trying to focus her unnecessarily scattered mind. Then, something remarkable happened.

Just around the corner from where she was standing was a boy. He was standing slightly slouched, nodding his head to the song coming from his music player. But she was not fooled, this was no ordinary boy. He had lips as red as blood, skin as white as snow, and hair as black as ebony wood. The girl locked eyes with him, fumbling with the gum wrapper in her leather jacket pocket, and walked in his direction.

“Please, sir,” she said, ever so politely, “Could you be so incredibly kind as to help me find the train I’m supposed to be waiting for?”

The boy laughed slightly, as to not embarrass the girl. He adjusted the straps on his bag and inquired, “Oh, but of course, can I ask where you are headed, miss?”

Much to the girl’s surprise, the pair were headed to the same village. They talked until their train came, and the boy played gentleman and stood back while he let the girl walk into the compartment. Much to her delight, she found it quite deserted, so she walked past the elderly man with his round spectacles and the middle aged woman attempting to eat her fingernails, and decided on a pair of seats towards the back. She sat with her rucksack and her desperation for conversation and waited to see if the boy followed her.

He did. She smiled.

The boy sat in the seat in front of her, partly because her bag took up much of the room in her seat, but mostly because he was acutely aware of the repelling spell she had around her, shimmering ever so slightly with the magic of protection. The boy wasn't sure if she was cursed or if she placed the spell on herself, but he knew it would be an impressive feat to break it.

Mildly flustered, the girl sighed in frustration and put her headphones on again. She was instantly shrinking back to her unobservant life. But suddenly, she noticed the boy staring at her with a perplexed look, red lips parted slightly as if he had just uttered something.

“So sorry, what did you say?” The girl asked, with a slight edge of hostility.

The boy noticed — he smiled his smile. The girl hesitated and thought, wait, but how do I know this is the way he smiles? The boy was changing her.

She didn't pay attention to strangers. Strangers were just annoying obstacles blocking her from her obligations and priorities. She didn't want to notice the boy in the coffee shop who she knew worked every third day, stirring her latte without even making eye contact. She didn't want to hear the child screaming in his stroller because his mom took away his candy. She didn't want to realize that there were other people out there who could probably befriend her, keeping her company and lending her a hand of support. So she put up her walls and put in her headphones and kept her head down.

But as she looked at this boy, with the sly smile on his face, and the way his black hair was swept slightly over his blue eyes, and the dog hair on his sweater, and the coffee on his breath, and the lines under his eyes, the girl was entranced. The repelling spell cast around her by her own misjudgments shimmered and quivered and slowly bled out into the space around her.

The boy’s smile grew even bigger and he laughed. They talked for the remainder of their train ride, until it was time for the boy to leave. He slowly zippered his jacket and adjusted his straps once more and smiled his smile to the girl one more time.

Before the girl was a wanderer, a teenager, a fighter, a student, a daughter, she was a believer, and nothing would stop her from having hope. While she watched him walk away, she hoped beyond hope that he would turn around and wave, smile, wink, something. The sad girl closed her eyes and wished for him to return. She waited and she waited and she waited, but this time, nothing happened.

And so it was that the stranger departed, never to be seen again.