outcase

Over the years most of my peers had come to hate me__ never understood why. I guess I was just different and, like dogs, they could smell it. So I never had many friends.

True, beneath the human façade, I was an interloper, an alien whose ship had crashed beyond hope of repair in the backwoods of Southern Appalachia__ut at least I__ learned to walk and talk enough like the locals to be rejected as one of their own.