I hope it won't come off as insulting to say that, in a strange, almost surreal way, she was like me. I don't mean to say that she wan an outsider, whatever you take that to mean, for to me – an outsider myself – the very term is so formless that its meaning varies between any two people. It casts a long, hazy shadow; so long, in fact, that no one can really agree on where it is coming from.

That being said, I am an outsider, one who stands on the edge of things. I like to think of myself sitting on the front step of someone's house watching the cars roll by, the people walking their dogs, or pushing strollers, or talking on cell phones, or whatever else I myself, as an outsider, am not doing.

And, in a way, she was like me. But, I suppose, in order to successfully explain how she was, I must first explain how she wasn't.

She had friends, as any good outsider like myself does not. Not many friends, but the few she had were awfully close.

She talked a lot, and she laughed; I can't remember the last time I told someone a joke or explained that funny thing that happened last Friday.

She wore fashionable clothes and did her hair in a fashionable way, and wore shoes that let everyone know as they came tapping down the sidewalk that she was not an outsider.

But the way she watched people with that wanting look in her eye, the way she tried to do all the most popular things but came up short, and the way she was so obviously in love with everything she could never be made her heart so transparent that it could have been made of glass.

I haven't had the nerve to tell her that I know the truth, for fear of that heart shattering into a million shards upon the cold ground. But someone like her, wanting so bad to be someone she can't, she's bound to find her true self sometime, as an outsider on the edge, watching the cars roll by.