invisible i
BOOK ONE
BY MELISSA KANTOR

for jillellyn riley and lisa holton

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

About the Author

WHO IS THIS AMANDA TRULY?

Signal From Afar

CORNELIA’S CODE

Copyright

About the Publisher

CHAPTER 1

Why is it that when you don’t want to think about something, you can’t stop thinking about it?

From the second I woke up, the scene Amanda had witnessed at my house yesterday kept playing over and over in my head like some kind of sick YouTube video on repeat. I’d thought about it while I was getting dressed, while I was riding my bike to school, and even while Kelli and I stood by her locker and she tried to recap the entire plot of the Reese Witherspoon movie she’d caught just the tail end of last night. Now I was sitting in history class, hearing not Mr. Randolph explaining the causes of World War I but my dad’s voice in my head saying the same words over and over again while I tried to figure out what, exactly, Amanda had overheard. Everything, probably. The phone rang while I was upstairs looking for my Scribble Book, and since my dad was practically screaming into the receiver by the time I got back to the kitchen, the conversation had obviously begun a while back. I mean, considering how much she and I have talked, Amanda had obviously known something was going on. She knew more than anyone else at school did. But up until yesterday she hadn’t known everything. She hadn’t known the worst of it. She knew about my mom, but she didn’t know about the money. And now she did.

The crazy thing was, she hadn’t seemed surprised. It was almost as if somehow she’d guessed a long time ago …

“… Which is why, yes, the assassination of the Archduke is the catalyst but is not the cause per se.” I’m usually kind of into Mr. Randolph’s class even though I’m not exactly what you’d call a history buff. He’s really nice and patient and he explains everything clearly, and he’s one of the only teachers at Endeavor who actually prepares you for the test he’s going to give. Still, there was no way I could concentrate on this morning’s lesson.

I shook my head and straightened up in my chair, clicking some lead out of my mechanical pencil. Perhaps if I resembled an attentive student, I would become one.

“Did you all write that down? Entangling alliances. If you remember nothing else from today, remember that.”

The board was covered in notes, but Mr. Randolph had found room to write entangling alliances in letters almost six inches high and he’d underlined “entangling” about fifty times. I rolled my eyes at myself as I began to copy down the crucial phrase. No doubt entangling alliances was the only thing I’d be remembering from today’s class. Too bad I had no idea what they were or who had them.

Just as I started writing alliances, Lexa Booker, who was sitting next to me, slid a crumpled piece of paper across my notebook. I palmed it expertly—Heidi and I have had enough classes together that I can pretty much make a note from her disappear in a nanosecond—and finished the word, then carefully unfolded the paper.

I looked up. The desks in Mr. Randolph’s room are in a big horseshoe, and Heidi was all the way on the other side of it, but her eyes met mine and she raised her exquisitely shaped eyebrows. I nodded almost imperceptibly, grateful to have something to think about besides Amanda knowing even more about my screwed-up family than she had last week. This Saturday’s party was going to be amazing, and the I-Girls—Kelli, Heidi, Traci, and yours truly (okay, I briefly spelled my name with an “i,” but not anymore!)—the reigning queens of the ninth grade, were going in green. That was cool—I have a dark green fitted T-shirt, and once when we all went to the movies I wore it. Lee was there, and he’d said my eyes looked really pretty when I wore green. Thinking about Lee, I felt my face go pink, which is what happens to redheaded Irish girls when we’re embarrassed. Or scared. Or hot. Or just the slightest bit nervous or uncomfortable. Basically between twenty and a thousand times a day. “Callista Leary?”

My head shot up at the sound of my full name. Had Mr. Randolph noticed the note going around the horseshoe? Some teachers, if they catch you passing a note, make you read it out loud to the class. Not that this was such an incriminating missive, but still. Then I realized it was a woman’s voice that had said my name and Mr. Randolph wasn’t even looking at me; he (along with everyone else in the room) had turned toward the door where one of the secretaries from the main office was standing.

“Um … that’s me.” Everyone was staring, and I could feel the heat spreading across my face and down my chest in a hard-core blush.

“You’re wanted in the vice principal’s office.”

For a split second it was as though I’d just been addressed in a language other than English; I literally couldn’t make sense of the words she’d spoken. “I’m … ?” I repeated stupidly.

“You can take your things,” she added, bobbing her head with its tight bun. “You won’t be coming back this period.”

As if my befuddlement were written on my face, Mr. Randolph said, “You’ll get the notes from someone tomorrow, Callie. Go with Mrs. Leong for now.”

Suddenly I wasn’t confused anymore, I was frightened.

Could this have something to do with my mom? I stood up fast, nearly toppling my desk. Then my backpack got twisted up in the chair and my shaking fingers couldn’t work the zipper. I could practically hear everyone in the room pitying me.

As I passed her, Heidi whispered, “What happened?” Unlike Traci and Kelli, Heidi knew about my mom. She knew, but we never talked about it. Just like we never talked about anything else that happened that night. Ever.

I shook my head as a way of saying I had no idea, and as she reached out her hand to touch mine for a second, her lovely face wrinkled with concern, I had this really ugly thought. Is she doing that because she’s worried about me or because she wants it to look like she’s worried about me?

I seemed to be having those thoughts about Heidi a lot lately, but before I could turn back to check the expression on her face, I was outside the classroom with the door swinging shut behind me.

It was weird walking down the silent hallway. Normally I’m only in the corridors between classes, when there are a million other Endeavor students elbowing past one another to get to class. Now it was so silent I could actually feel the echo from the click of Mrs. Leong’s chunky heels. I noticed a corner of an old homecoming banner had come loose, the heavy blue felt swaying in a breeze I couldn’t feel. “The Endeavor Enders: We don’t GOT spirit, we ARE spirits!” How had anyone ever thought having a ghost for a mascot was a good idea? And why did I have to be reminded of ghosts now, when for all I knew I was about to find out that my mom was …

Mrs. Leong pushed open the door to the main office. Here there was no hint of the silence of the hallways—a dozen phones seemed to be ringing at once, a Xerox machine was going about a hundred miles a minute and at least two other secretaries were busily typing away at their computers. It was like I was in the headquarters of a major corporation instead of the office of the Endeavor Unified Middle and High School.

Remembering Amanda’s suggestion for a new school motto ("We don’t stand a ghost of a chance!") momentarily held my anxiety at bay, but my stomach sank as Mrs. Leong gestured toward Vice Principal Thornhill’s office. “Go in. He’s expecting you.” I had a second to consider the irony that it was Mr. Thornhill who was about to witness my getting the worst possible news about my mom. For no good reason, my dad totally hates him, yet it was in this man’s office that he’d have to tell me the awful truth.

Heart pounding, I pushed open the door, sure the next sight I’d see would be my father’s tear-stained face.

CHAPTER 2

But my dad wasn’t even there.

Three chairs faced Mr. Thornhill’s desk. The middle one was empty, while the other two were filled by Nia Rivera, the biggest freak in the ninth grade, and Hal Bennett, who I guess is what you could call a recovering loser. All through middle school, Hal was this bean pole who wore high-waisted, too-short pants and looked like his mom cut his hair by putting a bowl over his head and trimming around the base of it. But he must have spent his summer watching Queer Eye for the Straight Guy or something because when we got back to school in September, he had become Über-cool. Now he wore vintage T-shirts and worn jeans that he totally filled out, if you know what I’m saying, and his dark blond hair had this whole shaggy-but-styled thing going on. Also, he was, like, an artistic genius. Maybe he always had been, but this year he’d done a devastating caricature of Thornhill in the school paper that created a buzz for a few days, and then he was chosen to go to New York to represent the entire state of Maryland in a contest that some big museum sponsored back in November. He’d even shown up on the I-Girls' radar—Kelli and Traci were talking at lunch last week about what a hottie Hal Bennett was becoming, and after years of being afraid that they would somehow find out that he and I had hung out together before I became an I-Girl, I suddenly wanted to tell them. I didn’t say anything, though. I noticed that Heidi did not weigh in at all, and what if I told them about our once having been friends and then he somehow got re-dorkified?

“Have a seat, Callie,” said Mr. Thornhill. Totally confused, I slipped into the empty chair. Clearly my being summoned here had nothing to do with my mother.

Mr. Thornhill had his hands folded under his chin, his index fingers touching the ends of his short, bristly moustache, forming a V around his mouth. The fluorescent light shone on his bald head, so shiny you’d have thought he spent his mornings polishing it.

No one was talking, and no one other than Mr. Thornhill acknowledged my entry. Since I’d never been in the vice principal’s office before, I checked out the room. There wasn’t a whole lot there, no diplomas or pictures of his family. One wall was covered in file cabinets with alphabetized labels, and in the center of the desk was a small pile of manila folders but nothing personal—no Endeavor mug to hold his pencils or a #1 DAD paperweight. It was almost weird how blank the room was considering Mr. Thornhill had been the vice principal here since I started middle school.

The silence grew. I turned my head slightly to look first at Hal and then at Nia, but he was staring at the carpet, and her thick hair hung along the side of her face so I couldn’t see her expression. As my eyes swept the room, Mr. Thornhill and I made eye contact for a second and his stare was so intense I had to look away. It was like he was … angry at me or something. For the first time, it occurred to me that I could be in trouble. I mean, he was the vice principal. I tried to think of a rule I might have broken recently, but it wasn’t like I’d been smoking in the bathroom or not doing my homework or anything.

“Well,” he announced finally, “I think you all know why you’re here.”

Okay, this was getting really weird. For the first time since Mrs. Leong had called my name, I actually started to find the whole thing funny. I imagined telling Heidi, Traci, and Kelli the story over lunch. And then it was like he thought I’d done something. With Nia Rivera! For the past two years, the words Nia Rivera had been a guaranteed punch line with the I-Girls, so I knew they’d crack up as soon as I uttered them.

As it happened, Nia was the first to break the silence. “Actually, I have no idea why I’m here.” She swept her long brown hair over her shoulder, not flirtatiously, like an I-Girl would have, but impatiently, like it was annoying to have hair.

I was really surprised by how confident she sounded, as if she wasn’t afraid of the vice principal at all, and for a second I was reminded of the fact that she is Cisco Rivera’s sister. Cisco is the coolest, most popular guy in the junior class. It’s hard to believe two people who are such polar opposites could be even distantly related, much less siblings. It makes you think their parents performed some kind of social experiment on them when they were young.

Mr. Thornhill slammed his hand down on the desk so hard I jumped slightly, but I noticed Nia did not flinch. “Nia, I really don’t have time for lies right now. This is potentially a very serious situation.”

Like I said, I don’t exactly spend a lot of time getting called into the vice principal’s office, but I had heard him get mad before. Actually, the person I’d heard him getting mad at was Amanda—many times since she arrived in October, and most recently about a month ago. I’d come to the office to drop off the day’s attendance slip for Mrs. Peabody, and his door was open and he was yelling at her. It was the day after the President’s Day holiday, and the vice principal had opened the door to his office to discover a huge stuffed raven wearing a stovepipe hat sitting on his chair. I don’t know how Thornhill figured out that Amanda had done it, and she’d never told me if he’d been right to accuse her or, if he had, how she’d gotten into the vice principal’s office in the first place, but he was furious. And that was far from the only time, either. After the master clock in the office was rigged to run fast so that school got out early two Fridays in a row, I could hear him yelling at her in his office while I was walking by in the hallway.

Now he sounded that mad. Mad like Nia had done something really, really terrible.

Whatever it was, I definitely didn’t want to be associated with it. Or her. I cleared my throat. “Um, Mr. Thornhill, I think there’s been some mistake. We don’t even know one another.” Sometimes the cluelessness of adults is nothing short of shocking. I mean, not to be snotty, but I’m an I-Girl and Nia’s a social leper. Did Mr. Thornhill think we were friends or something?

“Callie, you’ve always been an excellent student with spotless behavior.” Mr. Thornhill tapped the folders on his desk and I wondered if one of them had something to do with me. “I highly doubt you want to ruin such a stellar record by failing to tell me what you know.” Was it my imagination, or did Mr. Thornhill emphasize the word stellar? Once again, I thought of my mother.

“Look, Mr. Thornhill, they’re not lying,” said Hal. “We really don’t hang together.” As he leaned forward, the small gold loop in his ear caught the light, and I remembered Traci had said something about his supposedly getting a tattoo somewhere on his body over the summer.

“No, you look, Hal. I am talking about a serious act of vandalism. I want you to tell me what you know and I want you to tell me now."

Mr. Thornhill was so angry a vein bulged on his neck. I

actually felt a little afraid of him. This time, when I glanced over at Nia, she was looking at me, and I knew the What the hell? look on her face was mirrored on my own.

“Why don’t you tell us what you know?” said Hal. His voice was calm, soothing. Like he thought Mr. Thornhill was crazy or something.

Which, given the circumstances, didn’t seem so impossible.

Mr. Thornhill leaned forward and jabbed his finger in Hal’s direction. “Don’t you condescend to me, Hal Bennett. You all know what Amanda Valentino did this morning. What I want to know is, why has she implicated the three of you in her crime?”

Okay, this was so weird. I mean, I’d just been thinking of Amanda when Mrs. Leong called me into Thornhill’s office, and now he was mad at me for something she’d done. But still, what he was saying made no sense. I mean, Amanda and I were friends, but Amanda and Nia and Hal weren’t. Nobody was friends with Nia, except maybe some of the other weirdos in Model Congress or Mock Trial or whatever lame clubs she belonged to. And as hot as Hal may have been, he still only hung out with a few other dorky guys whose names escaped me. But not Amanda.

“Look, obviously you’re not going to believe us if we say we’re innocent. So why don’t you just ask her yourself? She’ll tell you,” said Nia, and the crazy thing was that now her confidence didn’t remind me of Cisco so much as of Amanda, the only other person I knew who never backed down in the face of authority.

Vice Principal Thornhill got up and walked around to the front of his desk. Then he leaned back on it and crossed his arms, staring at each of us in turn.

“That’s a lovely idea, Nia, and I’d be happy to comply. There’s just one problem with your plan. As the three of you know perfectly well, Amanda Valentino has disappeared.”

CHAPTER 3

I felt as if Mr. Thornhill hadn’t spoken so much as he’d just slammed me in the head with a piece of wood from my dad’s workshop. Amanda had disappeared?

“But—” I was about to say that Amanda hadn’t disappeared, that she’d just been over at my house yesterday, but before I could finish my sentence, Nia cut me off.

“But you don’t seem to understand, Mr. Thornhill. None of us is even friends with Amanda Valentino.”

I jerked my head to stare at her. On the one hand, I knew Nia was telling the truth. I knew it. How could Amanda have been friends with someone so … well, so weird? And she’d never even mentioned Nia, not once. Of course they weren’t friends.

But there was something about the way Nia’s face was whiter than the school mascot and how tightly she was clutching the arms of her chair that made it seem as if she were lying. Which would mean she and Amanda were friends. Only that was …

“Impossible, Nia,” said Vice Principal Thornhill, and now he sounded almost tired. “That is simply not possible.” He walked over to the window and opened the blind. “First of all: look.”

The sky had cleared after last night’s rain, and the bright sun on the wet pavement of the parking lot was nearly blinding. I squinted against its rays as the three of us stood up and went over to the window.

“What are we looking at?” asked Hal, and I realized I was so lost in my own thoughts I hadn’t been looking for anything to look at.

“My car,” said the vice principal.

As soon as he said it, I saw which car was his. Which car had to be his. Parked slightly off to one side of the faculty parking lot, it was the brightest thing in sight. Actually, it could have been the brightest thing in the entire world. Even from a distance, it seemed to throb with color—I couldn’t decipher all the designs,

but there was a gigantic rainbow that extended from the front wheel to the back wheel and a huge peace sign covering most of the driver’s side door. I could just make out what looked like a group of stars on the back door and a bright yellow sun on the hubcap below it.

The whole thing was so outrageous that I suddenly burst out laughing. I couldn’t help myself—it was like the car was some huge joke of Amanda’s. Only, once I started laughing, I couldn’t stop. I was sure everyone else was going to laugh, too, but they didn’t, and I started to get freaked out, like maybe I was getting hysterical or something. I almost wished someone would throw a glass of cold water in my face.

“I’m glad you find this funny, Callista,” said Mr. Thornhill.

It wasn’t a glass of cold water, but it worked like one. As if I had an on-off switch, I stopped laughing immediately. Mr. Thornhill left the blind up, walked back to his desk, and sat down. I wasn’t sure if we were supposed to sit down also, but since neither Nia nor Hal made a move to go back to their chairs, I stayed with them by the window. I didn’t look back at the car, though. I was afraid if I did I’d just start laughing again.

“Even if Amanda did paint all over your car,” said Hal, “what makes you think we had something to do with it? Like Nia said, we aren’t even, you know, friends with her.”

I was about to open my mouth to correct Hal and tell Mr. Thornhill that I was friends with Amanda even though obviously Hal and Nia weren’t, when Hal looked directly at me with his startlingly blue eyes and added, “We don’t know her at all.” Was it my imagination or was he trying to tell me something?

Or trying to tell me not to tell something?

“If you aren’t friends with her,” said Vice Principal Thornhill, “then why, in addition to vandalizing my car, did she spray-paint a symbol on each of your lockers?”

Amanda had spray-painted something on my locker? I was about to ask what, but before I could say anything, Mr. Thornhill continued.

“And perhaps you’d like to tell me if she left something inside your lockers?”

She’d gone in my locker? Why would he think she had gone in my locker? Anyway my locker was locked, and nobody but me knew the combination.

As if speaking my thoughts, Hal said, “How could Amanda even have gotten inside our lockers?”

For the first time since we’d entered his office, Mr. Thornhill smiled. “An excellent question, Hal,” and he slipped his hands behind his head and leaned back in his chair. “Why don’t you tell me?"

“I just like having them, knowing somewhere there’s a lock and I could open it if I wanted to.”

Outside it was pouring, a freezing February rain that seemed as if it might continue forever. The rain only made my room, which I generally love anyway, feel even cozier, like a tiny haven that the wet and cold could never penetrate. Even the fact that the silence from my dad’s workshop meant he was probably drinking and not working didn’t bother me when Amanda started talking about something cool, like why she collected keys.

“They’re not worth anything,” I pointed out. As usual, my mind was quick to turn to money. It’s funny how when you don’t have any, suddenly all paths seem to lead to it.

“True,” said Amanda, fingering the tiny, ancient-looking key she always wore on a ribbon around her neck. “But I like their symbolic value.”

We were sitting on the floor, Amanda resting her back against the big armchair and me facing her, my back against the bed. We were both wearing a pair of slippers from the basket by the front door, and I had my comforter wrapped around my legs. The day before, Amanda had cut her hair short and blunt, but today she was wearing a long, platinum wig. I’d asked her if it was because she didn’t like the cut, but she’d said, “No, I like it. Why do you ask?” in this way that made it seem like wearing a wig the day after you get your hair cut was just something anybody would do.

“But where do you get used keys?” I asked.

“Oh, the Salvation Army or antique stores. Or if someone’s

got a really big ring of keys it usually means there’s at least one they don’t use anymore.” She swung the key chain back and forth, admiring her collection.

“It’s like something a custodian would carry,” I said. Once I watched a custodian get something out of a supply closet at Endeavor. Even though his key ring must have had a hundred keys, he found the one he needed in less than a second. “I could never find the right key if I had as many as they do.”

Amanda looked at me. “You don’t carry a house key.” It was a statement, but there was a little question mark at the end of it, like I should explain if I wanted but I didn’t have to.

My family never locked the front door. Not that there would have been any point to locking it. Farmhouses built at the turn of the last century might have a lot of charm, but they weren’t usually designed with airtight security in mind. Even if we did bother to lock the doors, anyone who really wanted to break in would have needed about ten seconds to do so.

“I don’t have a key,” I said. “My mom lived in New York City for a while, and when she and my dad bought this house she said her favorite thing about living in the country was not having to lock her door.” As soon as the words were out of my mouth I realized my mom might never again open our front door with or without a key. The thought made my eyes burn.

Amanda didn’t say anything, just looked away from me and studied her key chain. I knew she wasn’t avoiding the subject, she was giving me a minute of privacy. I took a deep breath.

“Here,” she said suddenly, and she flipped the keys fast around the circle before slipping one off. “Take it.”

I took the key from her hand and studied it. It was just a regular key, but it had a five-digit number and the words do not duplicate stamped on the top.

“What does it open?” I asked.

Amanda shrugged. Then she smiled, her bright eyes sparkling with the joke. “Well, whatever it opens, I sure hope they duplicated it before they lost it.”

I laughed and slipped the key into my pocket. “Thanks.”

“Unscrew the locks from the doors! / Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!” she said.

“Totally.” Seeing she was ignoring my confused expression, I stood up. “Now let’s eat. I’m starving.”

CHAPTER 4

Vice Principal Thornhill marched us to our lockers so we could show him anything Amanda might have stashed inside. While we were in his office, first period had ended and second had started, so the halls were empty again. This time I was glad rather than creeped out by the stillness; the last thing I wanted was the population of Endeavor staring and pointing at the three of us as our lockers were inspected like we were criminals or something. I distracted myself by reading the flyers for chess club, band rehearsal, call-outs for newspaper contributions, and the formation of some new after-school jazz quartet. None of these were I-Girl activities.

Nia’s locker was in the humanities corridor, just a few feet from Mr. Randolph’s room, and I realized I’d passed it on my way to class this morning and definitely hadn’t noticed anything weird (not that I would have even known it was hers if I had). As we stood in front of it now, though, I saw that in the bottom right-hand corner was a small stencil of an animal, a bird of some sort, painted a metallic gray slightly paler than the gray of the metal locker. Nia’s expression definitely changed when she looked at it—as we’d walked from Mr. Thornhill’s room, she’d been scowling as usual, but suddenly her face was the picture of amazement. The look was gone almost as soon as it appeared, and I didn’t know if Mr. Thornhill had seen it or not.

“Anyone could have done this, Mr. Thornhill,” she said. “What makes you think it was Amanda?” Her hand fluttered up, and it looked like she was about to touch the picture, but then she seemed to think better of it and jerked her hand back, pulling the sleeves of her pale blue sweater almost to her fingertips as she crossed her arms tightly across her chest.

Mr. Thornhill gave her a long look but all he said was, “Open it, please.” She hesitated for a second, like maybe she really did have something to hide, but then expertly turned the combination lock and jerked the door open.

I couldn’t help being curious to know what someone like Nia would have in her locker. She was so serious—it wouldn’t have surprised me if there’d been a bound set of Supreme Court cases or a collection of Save the Whales bumper stickers in different languages. While Mr. Thornhill rifled through the unexpected amount of junk piled high inside—books and notebooks, two pairs of broken sunglasses, a bunch of empty candy wrappers, a bag of marbles, some Mardi Gras beads—I

snuck glances at the postcard of the poster for a movie called The Thin Man taped next to a picture of a Mayan or Aztec warrior-looking guy on the inside of the door under a magnet in the shape of a fish with the word DARWIN written inside it. Pretty surprising stuff compared with what I’d imagined.

Mr. Thornhill didn’t find anything that would have definitively proven Nia’s guilt, and it obviously pissed him off. He slammed her locker shut and started walking. Hal and I followed a few paces behind. When I looked around to see what had happened to Nia, she was standing, staring at the closed door of her locker. A minute later, she turned and ran to catch up with us.

As soon as she was walking alongside me and Hal she said,

“I—”

“Not now,” said Hal. His voice was somewhere between a whisper and a hiss. “But—”

“Not now,” he said again.

Hal’s face remained completely blank as we stood in front of his locker, where there was a stencil of another animal—some kind of cat or maybe a lion—also in pale gray, also in the lower right-hand corner. He was wearing a long-sleeved white T-shirt, and he looked almost bored as he leaned his hip into the wall of lockers next to his own, toying with one of the cuffs while Mr. Thornhill rifled through his stuff. Hal’s locker was really organized for a boy’s—there were books and notebooks neatly lined up, and hanging on the inside of the door was a small pouch with a bunch of colored pens in it. At one point,

Mr. Thornhill took what looked like a sketchbook off the shelf and held it, closed, for a minute, looking at Hal as if to see if he’d flinch.

I flinched for him. I mean, Hal’s a great artist and I can barely draw a stick figure, but my artistic talents (or lack thereof) aren’t the reason that if Mr. Thornhill ever looked through my Scribble Book, I’d die of shame. The whole thing is just so … personal. It’s the closest thing I have to a diary, and the only person I’d ever let see it was Amanda. I realized that if I hadn’t left it at home today, Mr. Thornhill, Hal, and Nia might have had the opportunity to look at my most private thoughts, and I wondered if that was the kind of thing Hal sketched. If so, he must have been crying inside.

But Hal’s face remained blank as Mr. Thornhill raised the book slightly, then lowered it, as if he were weighing the decision to open it, literally and metaphorically. After a minute, he slipped the book back where it had been and slammed Hal’s locker shut, too. Hal stayed behind to lock it after Thornhill had walked away, and when I turned back to check if he was following us, I saw him standing with his head leaning against the cool metal.

I could feel my heart beating in my throat as we turned the corner into the science wing, where my locker was. I never go to my locker until after first period since all of my first period classes were about as far from the science wing as you can get without actually leaving the town of Orion. The last time I’d been here was yesterday, right before math, my last class. I’d actually been standing right here when I got Amanda’s text—

My locker is halfway down the hall, and it seemed to me that the trip was definitely proving Zeno’s Paradox—you can’t travel from point A to point B because the distance must be divided by half each time, and you can divide distances in half indefinitely until you’ve proven you can’t move forward at all. I watched the numbers climb from 100 to 110 to 120 and then, finally, 128. My locker.

I scanned the scuffed, metal surface, but I didn’t see anything in the corner where Hal’s cat and Nia’s bird had been. I had time to feel an instant of confusion and disappointment when suddenly my eyes caught a shape, the same gray color as theirs had been, up on the top right-hand corner.

It was a little bear. And in spite of myself, I let out a tiny gasp of amazement.

CHAPTER 5

“You’re getting the bear.”

It was weird to be out of school so early, but since math class was canceled, Amanda convinced me to go with her to Lakshmi’s Henna Tattoos. She’d said it was because she was thinking about getting one, but almost as soon as we walked in the door, the focus changed from which tattoo she might get to which one I would.

“Amanda, I’m not getting anything. I don’t even have any money on me.” I added the “on me” quickly, though the sentence would have been equally true without it.

“It’s my treat.” She walked over to the wall where the tattoo designs were displayed. There were hearts, anchors, letters, and words. Some of the designs were enormous, like a skyline

of New York City with the Empire State Building in the middle, some were tiny, like the peace signs and doves I associate with hippies.

Amanda focused on a spot on the wall. “I think this is the one.”

“You’re crazy,” I said, but I went over to see what she was looking at.

“Remember, the bear is your totem.”

Amanda had already taught me about totems. Apparently we have animals that can protect and guide us. Usually it takes a while to figure out which animal spirit we’re associated with, but because of my name, Amanda had immediately known my totem was the bear.

Most people are named for normal things like family members and important historical figures. Not me. I’m named for a constellation. No, really. Callista is for Callisto, also known as Ursa Major (the Great Bear). I know, you’ve never heard of it. No one has, unless your mom, like mine, happens to be a world-famous astronomer. If you’ve ever heard of anything even remotely connected with Callisto, it’s the Big Dipper (which, sorry to burst your bubble, isn’t actually a constellation, it’s an asterism), which is part of Callisto. My mom is named Ursula, for Ursa Minor, the Little Bear (of which, yes, you guessed it, the Little Dipper is the most famous part). Technically, I’m named for both Callisto and Ursula, since I’m Callista Ursula Leary.

I looked at the bear on the wall. It was a small brown bear standing on its hind legs, its right front paw reaching up as if it

were about to grab some honey or whatever it is bears reach for. The bear was cute, the way bears are, but there was also something brave about it. It looked strong and steady, like nothing could knock it over. Without realizing what I was doing, I reached my hand up and touched the plastic display.

I hadn’t noticed Amanda watching me, but when I turned my head, her eyes looked deep into mine.

“You were destined to have this tattoo.”

I laughed. “You can’t be destined to have something that’s going to disappear in a few days. Destiny’s about bigger stuff. You know, things that last. Things that are permanent.”

“But nothing is permanent,” said Amanda. “The only permanent thing is change.”

Everything seemed to stop for a second, to freeze, as if all the energy of the universe was focused on me, on my face and my arm and my locker right in front of me. I couldn’t quite catch my breath, and I felt my hand lift slightly as if the bear on my locker were calling to the one on my forearm.

“You recognize this. It means something to you.” Mr. Thornhill wasn’t asking a question at all, he was making an observation.

His tone was gentler than it had been all morning, and for a second I was tempted to tell him the truth. Yes, I recognize this. Yes, it’s a message from Amanda. Where is she? I need to talk to her.

“I’m named for Ursa Major,” I said, surprised that my voice didn’t shake.

“The Great Bear,” he seemed to think aloud. “Who would know that?”

I forced myself to shrug. “Anyone who knows the legend of Callisto, I guess. Or who knows about astronomy. It’s not like it’s privileged information.” Remembering how casually Hal had leaned against his locker while Mr. Thornhill stared at him, I forced myself to meet the vice principal’s gaze.

“Does Amanda know?”

I made myself shrug. “I really don’t know what she knows about astronomy.”

“She’s a brilliant math student.”

She’s a brilliant everything. "There’s more to astronomy than math,” I said.

Mr. Thornhill gave me a look that made it clear just how furious he was, then he gestured for me to open my locker. Once I had, I moved to the side, and while he went through my books and notebooks, I made myself stare at the pictures of me, Heidi, Traci, and Kelli that lined the inside of the door. In every single one of them we were all smiling, like nothing bad had ever happened to us. Like nothing bad could ever happen to us.

Mr. Thornhill didn’t take anything out of my locker, just poked at what was inside it and stepped away, as if there were nothing even remotely interesting there. If I hadn’t been so relieved, I might have been offended.

I shut the door and slipped the lock through the hole of the handle as Mr. Thornhill started walking back down the corridor toward the main office. I wondered if we were supposed to go with him or if he was finished with us now that he’d seen we weren’t hiding anything, but he’d only gone a short distance before he snapped, “Follow me.” He set a fast pace, and I had to jog a little in order to keep a few steps behind him.

Just as Mr. Thornhill turned the corner to the main lobby, I felt a hand on my arm. I looked down and saw that Hal was gripping me just below the elbow. Nia was on his other side, and he was holding her the same way.

When he saw we were both looking down, he let go of us and eased the sleeve of his shirt up about six inches. There, in the exact same spot as mine, was a brick-colored tattoo of the same cat that had been on his locker. As soon as she saw it, Nia looked up at Mr. Thornhill’s back, then reached over to her left arm with her right hand and slid her sweater up just enough to reveal the image I’d seen earlier on her locker. A second later, she slid it back down again.

“Let’s go, kids,” said the vice principal. He was already at the door to the main office, holding it open with his back. We were no more than twenty feet away from him.

Fifteen feet. Ten feet. I raised my right arm in front of my face and reached behind the back of my arm with my left hand, like I had an itch on my shoulder I needed to scratch.

Seven feet. Five feet.

Pressing my hand against my bicep, I slid the fabric of my shirt up just enough to reveal the bear’s reaching paw.

“Oh my god,” whispered Nia, and we crossed the threshold from the lobby into the office.

CHAPTER 6

"Have a seat,” said the vice principal, gesturing to three empty chairs outside of his office. “I have a meeting, so, Mrs. Leong, I’m going to ask you to keep an eye on these three. I want them sitting here silently until I come back.”

“Yes, Mr. Thornhill,” said Mrs. Leong.

“Now.” He turned back to the three of us. “While it is true that, historically, Amanda has felt that her attendance at Endeavor was … optional, this is different. Today as part of her absenting herself, she chose to send me directly to three people to ask about her whereabouts.”

“If you want to know where she is so badly,” snapped Nia, “why don’t you just call her house?”

Mr. Thornhill’s eyes flashed with irritation. “I’ll thank you not to tell me my job, Nia. You can rest assured that I’m handling things on that front. Meanwhile, I want the three of you to think very, very carefully about everything you’ve just seen.”

My heart was beating hard enough that I could barely hear him, so it was a relief when Hal took it upon himself to answer for all of us. “We certainly will, sir. We certainly will.”

Despite Mr. Thornhill’s instruction of silence, I thought for sure we’d have a chance to talk about our tattoos, but the one time Hal started to whisper something, Mrs. Leong jerked her head up and stared at us so fiercely I was actually afraid. Two periods passed while I tried and failed to make sense of what was going on, and by the time Mr. Thornhill walked back into the office and asked if we were ready to talk, I was so tangled up it was all I could do not to tell him everything I knew about Amanda just so he’d help me make sense of it.

But after Hal had answered, “I’m just as confused as you are,” and Nia had said, “Has it not occurred to you, Mr. Thornhill, that we, too, are simply victims of a troublesome student’s practical joke?” I couldn’t start spilling my guts. When he looked at me for an answer, I just shook my head.

“Well, I’m sorry to hear that. Very, very sorry to hear that. Perhaps you’ll feel differently after you wash my car this afternoon after school—”

“But—” began Nia.

“And, if not, I’m sure a month of Saturday detention will change your mind.” “That’s—” said Hal.

“That’s final,” finished Mr. Thornhill. “Unless you can convince your friend Amanda Valentino to come by my office and explain everything herself.” The bell rang right then, as though Mr. Thornhill had planned it. “You may go to lunch.”

I’d expected Nia, Hal, and me to start dishing everything we knew as soon as we stepped into the corridor, but once the office door closed behind us, Nia clutched Hal’s arm and pulled him into the sea of humanity that fills the hallways during period changes. It was like I hadn’t been with them in Thornhill’s office, hadn’t shown them my tattoo. I didn’t know what to do—was I supposed to trot after them like some kind of desperate puppy? Take me with you! I want to talk about Amanda, too!

Um, no. If they thought they were too good to include me in their little powwow, let them think that way. I’d go straight to the source.

Cell phones are totally forbidden in school, so I had to slip into one of the stalls in the bathroom to dial Amanda’s number.

“Life is too short to wait. Except for the beep.”

Beep. "Okay, wherever you are, you have got to get back to school. What is the deal with Thornhill’s car and the lockers and everything? Call me as soon as you get this. Okay, bye.” When I hung up I wished I’d said something about her knowing Hal and Nia. But what? I happen to know for a fact that you’re good friends with two other people at Endeavor besides me. It wasn’t exactly like I didn’t have friends other than Amanda. I mean, a table full of people was waiting for me right now in the cafeteria. So Amanda had other friends, too. What was the big deal?

But as I made my way to the lunchroom, I couldn’t deny that it did feel like a big deal. After Amanda had chosen me, I’d just assumed that I was her only real friend. Now it turned out that I was one of three people she assigned totems to. Three people she’d gotten involved in her prank (whatever it was). I mean, she knew about the I-Girls. So why didn’t I know about Hal and Nia?

The cafeteria was packed, but I spotted Heidi, Traci, and Kelli at our usual table. They’d clearly been looking for me because the second I walked into the room, Kelli’s hand shot up in the air and she said something to Heidi who turned around to wave. As I made my way toward them, I passed Hal and Nia sitting together at one of the small tables by the windows that someone must have thought would make the place feel more like a café. They were leaning toward each other and Nia was talking and gesturing.

Even as every atom in my being longed to know what she was saying, I couldn’t not be conscious of the nearby table of upperclassmen, some of whom I recognized, who were looking at me. I realized everyone must have heard about the VP’s car by now. And if they’d heard about the car, they’d probably heard about the three people who’d been called into the office: Nia, Hal, and me.

Would they think the three of us were friends now?

At our school, there are a lot of what I think of as social neutrals in the ninth grade. You know, they’re not popular, but they’re not unpopular. Nia Rivera was so totally not one of those people. The irony of it is, she’d had to work to be the outcast she’d become. I mean, even with her baggy sweatpants and lumpy ponytails and geeky glasses and angry, confrontational attitude, I still think that, if for no other reason than her brother, she could easily have spent her life as a social neutral.

Could have, that is, if she hadn’t turned Heidi and Traci in for cheating on a math test two years ago.

Remembering the poisonous song Heidi had made up about Nia after the cheating incident (the song she’d then taught to the entire grade) made it easy for me to turn my feet in the direction of my usual table. I may have wanted to know what Nia was saying, but this was a perfect example of curiosity having the potential to murder the cat.

Or at least the cat’s social life.

“OH MY GOD!” Heidi yanked me into the seat next to her. “I heard everything!”

“This is the most insane thing ever!” said Kelli.

“Everyone’s talking about it,” said Traci.

“We were, like, freaking out,” said Kelli.

Kelli and Heidi both have long blond hair, and when we’re all out together, people think they’re sisters, which they sometimes pretend that they are. Traci gets her straight black hair from her mom, who’s Chinese, and her blue eyes from her dad. All three of them look like they could be models, which, as you can imagine, does wonders for my self-image. I mean, I’m not a dog or anything, but my legs are kind of on the short side, and my hair’s more frizzy than curly, and even on my best, best day, I could never be taken for someone whose only job is to look good. Which is probably about reason number one hundred and fifty why it’s so incredible that I’m one of the I-Girls and that a popular and great-looking guy like Lee would choose me for his girlfriend. Or kind-of girlfriend. Or whatever we are.

“So first of all, what did he want you for? You don’t even know that girl.”

Heidi always called Amanda “that girl,” refusing to dignify her with a name. Heidi’s mom is kind of a celebrity in Orion because she’s a TV reporter, and her dad is the police chief, so everyone knows her and her family. Even if she weren’t beautiful and rich and popular, Heidi would definitely be somebody because of who her parents are, and everyone at Endeavor is a little intimidated by her. Even the senior girls (even the popular senior girls) always say hi to her in the halls. The four of us were almost always the only freshmen at parties, and no one ever gave us a hard time because we were with Heidi.

But Amanda never acted like Heidi was anything special. Her first article in The Spirit (the Endeavor paper) was called “Do You See What I See? A Newcomer’s Take on Orion,” and she included something about watching the local news and referred to Heidi’s mom as a “small-town TV reporter.” Heidi was furious, but not nearly as furious as she was after she confronted Amanda and Amanda said simply, “Well, that’s what she is, isn’t she? I didn’t mean it as an insult or anything. But Orion’s a small town, and she’s a TV reporter here.” After that, Heidi was happy to take any excuse to say something bad about Amanda, and Amanda provided her with plenty of excuses, like the time she beat Heidi out for a part in As You Like It and then didn’t even take it because she said she was too busy.

For her second article in The Spirit, Amanda exposed a secretary who’d been giving kids late passes in exchange for money. The secretary was transferred, so the whole situation stopped, and Heidi informed us that Amanda was the devil because Mrs. Rifkin had just been providing a service and sometimes you really, really need a late pass but then Amanda went and ruined everything.

Amanda’s third article was all about how teachers are afraid of popular students. It said that if a student had a lot of friends or if the student’s parents had money, he (or she, of course) is less likely to be yelled at in class, get detention, receive bad grades, or be asked to provide an excuse if he (or she) didn’t have the homework or couldn’t meet a deadline. The article, which came out right after February vacation, caused a huge scandal, which I thought was kind of weird since it seemed like Amanda was just stating the obvious. I mean, everyone knows that who gets in trouble and who doesn’t is totally unfair and teachers have favorites and some kids can basically do whatever they want in certain classes.

But I guess even something everybody already knows can cause a scandal, especially since Amanda backed up her argument with tons of statistical evidence. Like Mr. Thornhill said, she’s a math genius, and she’d managed to get all this data she was definitely not supposed to have access to (like who had served detention when and for what). It was this huge deal, and some students (okay, Heidi) who had enjoyed a certain … privileged status—and who, as far as I knew, had never been held to a deadline, or asked to show their work on a math problem (even after said students had been caught cheating, if you can believe it), or told to stop chatting with a friend—found that once Vice Principal Thornhill had finished lecturing the faculty of Endeavor on fairness, their classroom experience was suddenly quite different from what it had been before.

“Is it true? Was she expelled?” Kelli’s face was pink with excitement.

“Expelled? Actually, I—”

“God, I hate that girl,” said Heidi, and she stabbed viciously at a piece of sushi.

Part of me wanted to say something in Amanda’s defense, but when Heidi really hates something or someone, it’s scary to try and defend it. Plus, after the morning I’d had and the disappearing act she’d pulled, I wasn’t exactly in the mood to defend Amanda.

Traci, who rarely eats, snapped her gum thoughtfully. “I still don’t get why they even called you into the office with those weirdos. You don’t even know them.”

“I don’t know,” said Kelli. “Nia’s a weirdo, but Hal’s kind of a hottie.”

Was it my imagination or did Heidi look uncomfortable for a minute as she drew her chopstick through a small pool of soy sauce on her Styrofoam plate?

Traci was too busy brushing some invisible lint off her bright red T-shirt to notice Heidi’s behavior, and she didn’t acknowledge Kelli’s comment. “Was it just some kind of monster mistake or something?” As she pressed her chin into her neck, it was impossible to know if she was checking her shirt for cleanliness or admiring her chest, which she tends to stick out as much as possible. “How’d Thornhill get the idea that you would ever have done anything with Amanda Valentino?”

The thing was, I’d never intended to keep my friendship with Amanda secret from the I-Girls, it had just kind of … worked out that way. In the brief time between my meeting Amanda and our becoming friends, Heidi had started hating her intensely, and like I said, you really don’t want to try and point out the good side of someone Heidi’s decided to hate. Amanda made it easy, always at newspaper or some other activity at lunch, so hard to pin down during the school day that she was practically the invisible friend. Keeping our friendship very low profile was no problem. But what was I supposed to say now? Um, listen guys, the thing is that I actually am friends with Amanda. Really good friends. I hope that’s not weird or anything.

Great idea, Callie. And why don’t you bring Nia Rivera to that party on Saturday.

The three of them were staring at me, and I thought about Nia and Hal talking at their table. Maybe they did know Amanda better than I did. Maybe despite what she’d said about my being special and her guide and everything, she and I hadn’t ever really been friends.

“Yeah,” I said slowly. “It was just a total mistake.”

Kelli put her arm around me. “You poor thing. I can’t believe you had to spend the whole morning trapped in a room with the biggest freaks in the school.” She squeezed me to her.

“Even if one of those freaks is a hottie freak.”

From my other side, Traci put her arm around me. “Do you need a cootie shot? Like the old days?” She laughed and then reached for my arm, starting to say the words even before she touched me. “Circle, circle, dot, dot—”

As her fingers reached for my wrist, I realized what was about to happen.

“Don’t.” My voice was sharp, and I yanked my arm away from her as if her hand were a flame.

Traci looked up, a hurt expression on her face. “God, Callie, what’s your deal?”

“I just … I burned myself last night. Making pasta. And my arm’s kind of … it’s still sore.”

“Oh,” she said, suddenly contrite. “I’m really sorry. Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” I was relieved to see that my sleeve actually covered half my palm. “I’m fine.”

“Cool,” said Kelli, ready to move on. “Okay, can I show you guys the cutest lip gloss my mom picked up at the mall yesterday?”

“Sure,” I said, and when Kelli went to put it on me, I puckered my lips and let it roll.

Is it possible for forty-five minutes to last a millennium? I must have looked at the clock over Heidi’s head fifty times between when I sat down and when the bell finally rang to end lunch period.

“Oh my god, is lunch over already?” asked Traci, her face crumpling. “I have double bio now. Kill me.”

“Do you guys want to come over and hang at my place after school? Maybe the guys would come, too,” said Heidi. She’d also sampled Kelli’s lip gloss, and the shiny, bright pink—the perfect color for her—made her supermodel smile even more sparkly.

“Sure,” said Traci.

“Yeah,” said Kelli.

“I can’t,” I said, and my mild irritation with Amanda grew into actual anger in the face of their matching, glossy smiles. My friends and my kind-of boyfriend were going to have a great afternoon together while I spent the hours after school scrubbing spray paint off a car with two social outcasts who had the nerve to ignore me. Great.

“And why not?” asked Heidi.

“I’ve got to clean the vice principal’s car.”

“What? But you said it was just a big mistake that he even made you come into his office.” Traci had been checking her nails for chips, but now she looked at me, completely confused.

“Yeah, why didn’t you just tell him you had nothing to do with that stupid psycho painting on his car?” demanded Heidi. She did not like it when her vision of an afternoon was thwarted.

“I did,” I said. And I comforted myself with the fact that I wasn’t lying. That was what I had told Thornhill.

Kelli pulled a pack of Orbit gum out of her bright green Coach bag. “Can’t you have your parents call and complain or something? That is completely unfair.”

I thought about my dad, who was probably about halfway through his second bottle of wine by now, and tried to imagine his making a coherent case to Mr. Thornhill about my innocence. Not exactly a pretty picture. And it wasn’t like my mom was reachable by phone.

“I think it’s easier to just get it over with,” I said, accepting the piece of gum she held out in my direction. “Trust me.”

After we’d hugged good-bye, I slung my bag over my shoulder and turned to head to English. As I left the cafeteria, I almost walked right into Beatrice Rossiter, a ninth grader who was hit by a car over winter break. The whole left side of her body including her face was totally disfigured—she’s got all of these scars and she wears a patch over her left eye and she always walks really close to the wall, like maybe nobody can see her when she does it. Once when we walked past her, Traci whispered to me, “Every time I see her, I’m thankful I’m me.”

I didn’t say anything to Traci at the time, but what I was thinking was, If you were me, Traci, and if you knew what I know, then every time you saw Bea, you’d wish you were just about anyone but me.

I snuck my phone out of my backpack and turned it on, but there were no new messages.

CHAPTER 7

Bio and English were a total blur except for when Ms. Burger pointed out that today was March fifteenth and warned us to “beware the Ides of March.” Her words created a flicker of anxiety in the pit of my stomach. Could there be some connection between the date and Amanda’s prank? But what? I couldn’t even remember why we were supposed to beware the Ides of March, and by the time Ms. Burger told us to open our books to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 138, I’d gone back to ignoring what was going on around me, just focusing on the clock as I counted the seconds until last period.

I was totally sure Amanda was going to be in math class, so sure that I actually jogged the last fifty yards to the room. Even though I was pretty confused and starting to get more than a little annoyed about everything that had gone down over the course of the morning, it would be such a relief to see her. Was she really friends with Hal and Nia? Why had she spray-painted Thornhill’s car and our lockers? I’d run over in my head what I was going to say to her so many times I practically had it memorized.

It didn’t mean anything that she wasn’t there when I pushed open the door of room S-51 (when was Amanda ever on time for anything?). It didn’t even mean anything that she hadn’t shown up by the time the late bell rang. But as the minutes ticked by and Mrs. Watson took us through the homework problems (problems Amanda and I had just done together the night before), the excitement I’d felt started to morph into frustration. Where was she? It was one thing to cut school; god knows Amanda did that fairly regularly. It was another thing to cut school on a day when you’d pulled a prank that got several other people in mad trouble. Of course, knowing Amanda, she would just respond with a raised eyebrow or a quotation of unknown origins to direct questions she didn’t care to answer.

That was so not going to fly this time.

It’s not exactly a major problem when I can’t concentrate in math class. When I don’t pay attention in history, I know I’m a goner on the next test. But math is totally different. Math is like … okay, you know when you’re shopping for jeans and you try on ten million pairs and each one is just a little too tight, or a little too loose, or it’s got some freaky acid washed thing going on, and then all of a sudden, right when you’re like, Oh, forget it, I’m just going to live without a new pair of jeans, you try on one last pair and as they slide up your legs it’s … it’s like you were born to wear them. That’s what math is like for me, like a language I was somehow born knowing.

Actually, I probably was born knowing it. My mom is one of the best mathematicians in the world. I mean, I might be good at math, but she’s brilliant. Like, if you ask me to multiply two three-digit numbers, I can do it in my head pretty fast, but that’s nothing compared to my mom. If we’re at the grocery store and she’s trying to estimate what everything’s going to cost, she can glance at the cart and figure out to the penny what the total’s going to be. And if you ask her in July how many days until Christmas, she can tell you the answer in less than a second.

For me, it’s more … well, when Mrs. Watson puts a new concept up on the board, like when we learned sine and cosine this fall, it feels like the whole time she’s talking and writing stuff down, I’m just thinking, Right. Right. Of course. That makes total sense. I can’t really explain how I understand something when it comes to math—I just understand it.

That was why I was so totally bummed back when Mrs. Watson asked me to catch up the new girl in our class, Amanda Valentino, on one of her first days in school, maybe Halloween or the day after. First of all, I was already half out of my mind because of everything that was going on with my mom, but even when I’m functioning normally, I’m lousy at relaying math concepts to other people. Traci used to ask me to help her with her math homework when we first became friends; after I tried to teach her a few times, she got so irritated by my inability to show her how I was getting my answers that she just told me to forget it. So I knew assigning me to teach Amanda Valentino two months' worth of math was destined to end in failure, but I mean, what can you say? I’m sorry, Mrs. Watson, I swear I wasn’t cheating, but there’s no way I can explain my work to another human being.

Instead I just said what you always say when a teacher asks you to do something. “Sure.”

“How long have you lived in Orion?”

“My whole life.” My answer was more terse

than polite because Amanda struck me as kind of weird. First of all, she was wearing bright, bright red lipstick, which looked even brighter because her face was super pale, like she’d powdered an already Über-white complexion. She wasn’t ugly or anything. Actually, she was pretty; not like Heidi and Traci and Kelli are pretty, not the kind of pretty you’d find in a catalog, but there was something about her that would definitely make you look at her twice if you saw her in a crowd. It might have had something to do with what she was wearing—her black hair was pulled back in a tight, high bun held up by two crisscrossed chopsticks, and she was wearing a gray dress that was really plain but somehow chic, like something you might see on a Vogue model. Around her neck was a thin blue ribbon necklace that disappeared under the front of the dress. It was nothing that anyone at Endeavor would ever wear.

“That must be wonderful, living in one place.” She sounded wistful, which was surprising considering I’d heard she grew up all over the world. I mean, why would someone with a childhood

like that envy someone who’d spent her life in Orion, Maryland, capital of nothing?

“I guess,” I said. Then I felt bad for being so rude. “Um, do you have a favorite country?”

“Country?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said, realizing too late that it might freak her out to know the Endeavor population was already gossiping about her. “I heard you grew up all over the world.”

Amanda laughed this totally unself-conscious laugh that I wouldn’t have expected to come from someone looking so tailored. “Fascinating. Who told you that?”

I’d heard it from the note Heidi passed me in history.

I shrugged. It wasn’t like the name Heidi Bragg would mean anything to Amanda. “A friend.”

Amanda nodded. “And what else did she say about me?”

Okay, the rest of the note so did not need to be repeated. “That was all,” I said. Amanda gave me a look that said she knew I was lying. It was a look I’d get to know very well over the next few months. “Did you not grow up all over the world?” I asked,

not one hundred percent sure what “citizen of the world” actually meant.

“Not a bit,” said Amanda. “I grew up in this country.”

I thought it was strange how she didn’t name a city or even a state. “Where?”

“Here, there, and everywhere.” Her smile was impossible to read.

“Oh,” I said. I mean, what are you supposed to say to something like that? (It wasn’t until much later that I would learn about her penchant for quoting others.) “Well, welcome to Orion.”

“Thanks.” She nodded, looking around the corridor where we were sitting. “I really feel I’m going to like it here.”

“Don’t count on it,” I said. “Not much here.” Okay, I realize I wasn’t exactly being the Orion Township Welcoming Committee, but I wasn’t feeling all sunshine and light right about then. My mom had been gone for two weeks, and my dad was already starting to lose it.

Amanda didn’t seem to mind my negativity, and she didn’t ask why I was so down on my hometown. Instead, she continued to nod, like I’d just given her a really helpful, insightful piece of information. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

I wasn’t in the mood to keep talking. I wasn’t in the mood to do much of anything besides stare out the window and figure out when my family was going to get back to normal. I knew attempting (and failing) to teach someone math wasn’t exactly going to improve my mood, but anything was better than chatting.

“So,” I said. “Sine and cosine.” I flipped open my book to the page we were on, then started to work backward to the beginning of the chapter.

“Right,” said Amanda. “About that.” Suddenly she sounded embarrassed. I was kind of surprised given that she’d been so cool and collected when Mrs. Watson had introduced her while making her stand at the front of the class like livestock to be judged at a county fair.

I held my book open at page 217 and looked up at her. On her index finger was an enormous silver ring shaped like a bunch of grapes, and she was twirling it around distractedly.

“What ’about that'?"

“I actually know about sines. And cosines. My father taught them to me. I’m sure that sounds completely strange to you,” she added quickly.

“No it doesn’t,” I said honestly. “My mom knows tons of math. She’s always teaching me stuff.” I was kind of psyched. All my friends thought it was really bizarre that my mom and I talked about math so much. Back when we were first hanging out, Heidi asked me one day what I’d done the night before, and I said my mom and I had used her telescope to find M31 in the Andromeda Galaxy, only we’d purposely used an out-of-date star planner so we’d have to do the computations to figure out where to look in the night sky. When I finished, Heidi looked at me like I’d just confessed to being a victim of domestic violence.

“Oh, this is such a relief,” said Amanda. “I was debating between pretending not to understand what you were talking

about or saying I learned it at school. I didn’t want you to think I was odd.”

Now I was the one who laughed a real laugh. “Wow, I’m so the last person to think that you’re a freak for learning about math with one of your parents. And you would have been really sorry if you’d pretended not to know what sine and cosine are. I’m the worst teacher.”

“Me too!” Amanda’s voice was a shout, and she put her hand over her mouth. “Me too,” she repeated, whispering this time. “I can never explain how I got my answers on tests. I just … I see them. Teachers are always accusing me of cheating.” She practically glowed with pleasure.

“That used to happen to me!” I said, almost as loudly as she’d spoken before. And then we were both laughing, like being accused of cheating on a math test was the funniest thing that could ever happen.

Amanda stopped laughing first and gave me a look that lasted so long I started to get weirded out. “What?” I asked, rubbing under my nose self-consciously. Did I have a horrible embarrassing something?

“Do you ever get a feeling about the future?” she asked. Her eyes were enormous—a deep, storm-cloud gray that I would later learn changed color with the light.

“What, you mean, like, ESP?” My nose felt clean, and I put my hand down.

“Not exactly,” she said, gently tapping the tip of her pen against her top lip. “More like the sense that something is destined.”

“Um …” Okay, this was getting a little intense. A second ago we’d been joking about math tests and now we were suddenly onto destiny?

Amanda didn’t seem to mind that I wasn’t answering her. She leaned forward and touched me lightly on the shoulder with her pen. “It’s you,” she said.

“What?” I said, not sure how to communicate to her that she was starting to freak me out.

Oblivious to my monosyllabic, unenthusiastic response, and with a sure smile on her face, she exhaled, leaned back against the wall, and closed her eyes. “You’re going to be my guide.” Her voice was quiet.

Even though I had no idea what Amanda was talking about, I felt my heart pounding in my chest. “Your guide?” I asked, and my voice was as low as hers had been.

Amanda opened her eyes and stared straight at me. “I knew I’d find you,” she said.

And since I didn’t know what to say back, I didn’t say anything at all.

Occasionally a geological occurrence takes place that is so dramatic, it actually shifts the earth on its axis. A tsunami. An earthquake. If you could go into outer space and film the planet at the exact moment the event occurs, you would literally witness the world move.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but that is what meeting Amanda Valentino would be for me.

CHAPTER 8

Nia snickered when Mr. Thornhill offered us a chance to “come clean” right after we’d each picked up a bucket filled with rags, rolls of paper towels, and cleaning products piled by the door. It took me a minute to get the joke about cleaning, but I’m not sure if that was because Nia’s smarter than I am or if it’s because I was so confused by all the thoughts whirling through my head that I didn’t have room in my brain for a pun.

When nobody said anything, he just gestured toward the door and we trooped out in a line: Hal first, then Nia, then me.

“It’s not like we’re going to be able to get the stuff off his car with this,” I pointed out, rattling the bucket toward their backs. “Spray paint doesn’t exactly wash off.”

Neither of them said anything, as if during lunch they’d made a pact to ignore me. Well, two could play at that game, and I didn’t say anything more. A crowd was gathered by the gate to the faculty parking lot to gape at Mr. Thornhill’s car (some people had out their phones and were taking pictures); at first the security guard, who was holding them back, wouldn’t let us through. Hal had to explain for about fifty years that we had to go to the car, and even then the guy was reluctant to let us pass. As we walked past him, I spotted Lee’s curly dark hair towering above the crowd and then I saw Traci, Heidi, and Jake, who were all standing with him. Lee saw me before they did, maybe because he’s so tall, and he put his fists up over his head and shouted, “Go, Callie!” as Traci and Heidi clapped and Jake whistled. I hoped Hal and Nia heard them. I hoped they realized who they were ignoring.

The VP’s ancient Honda Civic was parked far enough away from the crowd that the noise of the onlookers was muffled, or maybe it was just that the sensory overload of looking at something so vivid made it difficult to register anything else. The clouds had rolled in since we’d first looked out Thornhill’s office window, but even in the watery sunlight of a March afternoon, the car pulsed with color and energy.

“Wow,” said Hal.

I had to agree. From a distance, we’d only been able to see the biggest shapes, but up close you could make out the detail work—tiny birds carrying intricate olive branches, long daisy chains intertwining with meticulously drawn rainbows. It wasn’t just bright and colorful, it was really, really good art.

Suddenly, I thought of something. Despite my private vow not to talk to either Hal or Nia, I turned to Hal, who was standing next to me admiring the lunar landscape that covered the driver’s side of the windshield. “Did you draw this?”

Either Hal was seriously ignoring me or he hadn’t heard what I said. He reached out with his index finger and traced the edge of the moon. “Hey, it’s—” he started to say, but before he could finish, I grabbed his arm.

“Did you do this?”

“What?” He turned to face me but I could tell he was still absorbed in admiring the masterpiece that was Thornhill’s car. I noticed that after he’d touched the moon, his finger had a light coating of bluish-white.

“I said, did you draw this?” Hal was the best artist at Endeavor, and there was no doubt someone with real talent had decorated this car.

“I wish,” he said. He turned back to admire the car. “Maybe I could have done this, but only with her, you know?” I wasn’t sure what he meant, but I couldn’t deny that Hal’s tone was friendly enough. I wondered if I’d been paranoid to think he and Nia were ignoring me.

“How did you even know her?” I hadn’t meant to sound so accusatory, but my question came out like an attack.

Hal didn’t say anything, but Nia did. “Oh, what, now you’re the holder of the social registry for the entire grade?”

None of the other I-Girls would have tolerated Nia’s being so rude, but the three of them are way better at confrontations than I am. For a second I tried to think up a snappy comeback,

but when nothing came to me, I just ended up with, “I didn’t realize you guys were friends, that’s all.” Then I shrugged, like there hadn’t been any judgment in my assumption.

I’d expected Nia to back off, but instead she kept going. “Oh, right,” she said. “You and your friends just—”

“Look!” said Hal. He’d been circling the car, and now he was pointing at the trunk.

Glad to have an excuse not to fight with Nia without having to feel like a wimp, I went over to where he was standing and followed his finger. Scattered across the trunk were half a dozen bears, birds, and cats that were the same as the ones on our lockers. There was another animal, too—a lizard of some sort. Then there were stars and moons and a bunch of peace signs.

“That’s a lizard,” I said, half to myself and half out loud. “And that’s a cat—”

“It’s a cougar,” said Hal, rubbing his wrist unconsciously for a second.

I hadn’t noticed that Nia had come up behind me until she spat out, “You thought it was a cat? It doesn’t look anything like a cat.”

This time my comeback was out of my mouth before I even realized I’d formulated it. “Gee, I didn’t realize you were such a friggin' nature girl, Nia,” I snapped. “When you’re on the Discovery Channel talking about the indigenous wildlife of Orion, I’ll be sure to watch.”

“Like I’d even care."

“Um, could you two—” said Hal quietly.

But Nia was on a roll. “And where do you come off questioning our friendships with Amanda anyway? What about yours? I mean, I never saw her hanging out with you and your stupid I-Girls. You probably tried to get her to be friends with you, only she wouldn’t let you call her Mandi so you dropped the whole idea!”

I could feel my face getting red, and I was so mad I forgot I was still holding the bucket as I reached out my arm to point at her. “Nia, you’re so jealous it’s pathetic. Like Amanda would ever, ever in a million years have hung out with someone as—” The bucket swung wildly in my hand, and one of the bottles of cleaner fell to the pavement.

“Hey!” Hal’s voice was a shout this time. I’d never heard him yell before, and it shut me up.

“Listen,” he continued in his normal voice. “I don’t pretend to understand Amanda or what motivated her or anything. But one thing I do know is that she didn’t do anything randomly. And I have a really strong feeling right now. This"—he pointed at the car and looked from me to Nia—"is a message.”

I’m basically the least superstitious person in the world, but as soon as Hal said that, I shivered. Was it possible? Was Amanda trying to tell us something?

Hal continued. “Now, here’s what I can tell you about what she’s drawn. My totem is the cougar. Strong but solitary.” I felt myself blush again when he described himself that way, but he didn’t seem at all embarrassed.

Hal’s words had some kind of magical softening effect on Nia, who pointed at the bird. “That’s me,” she breathed, her voice quiet and almost dreamy. “Night owl. Wise. Independent.”

I managed not to laugh when she said “independent.” Was that what we were now calling people who were incapable of functioning in a social setting?

Hal jostled me gently in the shoulder, and I realized it was my turn. “Bears are strong,” I said slowly. I didn’t add the other important bear fact Amanda had reminded me of: Bears hibernate.

Nia had leaned against the car while Hal and I were talking, and when she stood up, she instinctively brushed some dust off her hip. I remembered Hal’s finger.

“It’s chalk,” I almost shouted.

Hal smacked his forehead. “Yes! That’s what I was going to tell you before. It’s not paint at all.”

“What?” Nia looked from me to Hal.

“The drawing. It’s chalk. Look.” I touched my finger to a bright red apple and dragged it against the metal surface of the car. When I pulled my hand away, there was a red streak along my skin.

Hal leaned down until his face was less than an inch from the car’s surface. “You know, now that I’m looking more closely, I think it’s chalk and pastels,” he said. “This should come off the car really easily.”

“I hate the idea of erasing it,” said Nia.

I knew exactly what she meant. Even if this wasn’t some kind of message from Amanda, it was from her. And it was so cool. I couldn’t wait to ask Amanda about it.

Wishing I could talk to Amanda made me think of something.

“Hey, have you guys heard from her? I tried texting her and calling, but she didn’t answer.”

Both Hal and Nia shook their heads. “Nothing,” said Nia, and the way she said it made me know they’d spent the day calling her, too.

“I’m going to take pictures.” Hal took out his phone even as he said it. “Will you guys help me?”

Neither of us answered him, we just grabbed our phones and began circling the car with them.

“Look!” Nia was sitting on the pavement by the driver’s side door, pointing at the very edge of the car’s side panel, just behind the tire.

Unlike the cougar, this animal was immediately recognizable to me. “The coyote,” said Hal. “Amanda’s totem,” announced Nia.

“Me? I’m the coyote. The trickster.” She made a fist with her hand, then opened it and showed me her empty palm. “Now you see me, now you don’t.”

Supposedly I was catching Amanda up on quadratic equations, but really she was teaching me about totems, specifically hers and mine. When I pointed out that totems and superstition and ancient belief systems were about as far from trigonometry as you could get, Amanda gestured at me with her quill pen.

“Au contraire,” she said. “Belief systems are belief systems.”

“Oh, come on!” I said. “Math isn’t a belief system, it’s an explanation for how things work.”

“Right,” said Amanda. “In other words, it’s a belief system.”

She was wearing something in her hair that made it look as if she’d grown a waist-length ponytail overnight, and her dress, with its puffy sleeves and lace edging, definitely looked like it was something out of another century. I’d meant to ask her about the outfit—the hair and the pen and the dress, but as usual, I’d gotten sidetracked. That was the thing about talking to Amanda: I could never figure out how we’d gotten on the subject we were discussing or how we’d gotten off the subject I’d thought we were on.

“Wait, are you telling me you don’t believe in math?” Over the course of the past two weeks, I’d discovered that Amanda was probably the best mathematician I knew outside of my mom. She was truly a genius with numbers. How could she question their fundamental truth?

“I believe in math,” she said. “It’s not like the tooth fairy or Santa. I believe it exists. I just don’t think it explains things any better than a lot of other belief systems just because it happens to be in fashion in this particular place at this particular moment in history.”

“So, what, are you talking about, like … God?” This was definitely the weirdest conversation I’d ever had with someone. I tried to imagine talking about God with Heidi or Traci or Kelli.

“Religion is another belief system,” she said. “It happens not to be mine.”

“So, like, what’s yours?” I didn’t mean to sound defensive, but sometimes talking to Amanda made me feel like I was always one crucial step behind her.

“What’s my belief system …” She leaned her head against the wall and closed her eyes for a minute. Then, without opening them, she said, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

I shook my head. “There may be a lot of things in heaven and earth, but the point is, you can still count them.”

She opened her eyes and locked them with mine. “That’s what I’m telling you, Callie,” she said. “You can’t.”

Nia’s camera clicked, and without really looking at what I was photographing I pointed my phone in the general direction of the coyote and took a picture. None of us said anything for a minute.

“Okay,” said Hal finally. “Amanda needs us to do something for her.”

A car pulling out of the circular driveway at the front of the school honked its horn, and when I looked up, I saw Heidi’s mom’s BMW SUV pulling away. Heidi was in the passenger seat and Traci was sitting in the back. She shouted out something that sounded like, Call me! as the car turned onto Ridgeway Drive.

It was so weird that I could be having these two interactions at once: one, the most mundane and transparent, the other unique and mysterious. It was like existing in two parallel universes simultaneously.

But I couldn’t ignore the gravitational pull of what Hal had just said. Turning back to him, I said, “But what does she want from us? And why couldn’t she just ask us for it?”

“He’s not a mind reader,” said Nia. Any softness that had been in her voice earlier was definitely gone.

Okay, I’d had just about enough of this. “Do you have some kind of problem with me or something?” I asked. “I mean, how, exactly, did I manage to offend you in the past five minutes?”

“Let’s see,” said Nia, tilting her head to the side and pressing her index finger to her temple in imitation of someone thinking hard. Then she straightened her head and sneered at me. “No, I’d have to say you have managed not to do anything offensive in the past five minutes.”

“Are you two going to keep—” Hal interrupted, but this time I didn’t care what he had to say.

“Nia, I have never, never done anything to you and now you’re acting like—”

“You’ve never done anything to me?” Nia stood up and took a step toward me, lowering her voice until she was practically hissing. “You’ve never done anything to me? Oh, that’s a good one, Callie. Um, do the words Keith Harmon mean anything to you?”

I took a step back, but it wasn’t just to get away from Nia’s scary voice. The words Keith Harmon did mean something to me.

“That wasn’t me.”

“Yeah, right,” said Nia, turning her back on me.

I reached out and grabbed for her arm. “Seriously, Nia, that wasn’t me.”

She snatched her arm away from me, like there was something revolting about my touch, and I was reminded of Traci’s aborted cootie shot earlier. “Well, like my mom says, ’Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas.’”

At first I didn’t realize what she was saying, and then I did. “My friends are not dogs!"

“Maybe not on the outside,” said Nia, and she went back to snapping pictures of the car.

My heart was pounding. If I was all about avoiding confrontations, Nia was all about having them. No wonder she didn’t have any friends.

But even as I thought that, I couldn’t help cringing a little at the memory of what Heidi had done to Nia in seventh grade.

Nia and Heidi weren’t just in the same math class that year, they also had English together. One day, maybe a week after she’d turned Heidi and Traci in for cheating, Nia left her English notebook behind in class. Heidi picked it up because, as she told us at lunch, she wanted to be a good citizen, and then she dropped it; it happened to flip open, and what did it happen to open to but a page with a few notes on direct objects and predicate adjectives and a small heart in the margin with the initials NR and KH inside of it.

The truth is, I really don’t know exactly what happened or whose idea it was because my dad and I went to Washington, D.C. that weekend to meet my mom at a NASA conference she’d spent the week attending. But apparently, Heidi or Traci or Kelli or maybe all three of them created keith.harmon95@yahoo.com or some address like that, and they emailed Nia and then Nia emailed “Keith” back and then “Keith” emailed Nia and so on. By Monday morning, Heidi had a whole string of emails to show me and the rest of the seventh grade, emails in which Nia admitted she’d always thought Keith was cute and agreed to go out with him sometime. At that point, Nia was just a little geeky with her goofy braids and glasses, but she wasn’t a leper. And even then Cisco Rivera was Cisco Rivera, so maybe if she’d never pissed Heidi off, she could have survived middle school as a neutral. But no.

The whole thing was really, really bad. For a long time, Nia couldn’t walk by anyone without hearing something like, Going to meet your boyfriend, Nia? Or, Oooh, Nia, I think I just saw Keith, were you looking for him? Every time I passed Nia’s locker, I’d see something stuck on it—a piece of paper with NR and KH on it or a dead flower or, once, simply the words AS IF!!!!!! As far as I was concerned, she’d brought the whole thing on herself (what had she been thinking, that Heidi and Traci would allow her to live in peace after she turned them in?), but even I felt kind of bad for her by the end.

Part of me knew I should say something to them, but it wasn’t like I was that good of friends with Heidi and Kelli and Traci. I still felt a little as if … I don’t know, as if I were on probation or something. I mean, now if they did something like that, I would definitely tell them to stop. And anyway, they wouldn’t do anything like that anymore. People do a lot of stuff in middle school that they wouldn’t do in high school. You can’t judge someone forever based on one mistake.

Right at that moment, as if she’d been sent or something, Bea Rossiter limped out the front door. I watched her get into her mom’s waiting car and drive away.

I closed my eyes. What had happened with Bea was different.

But a little voice in my head said, Was it really?

CHAPTER 9

I was glad when Hal’s voice interrupted my thoughts. “We can’t help Amanda if we don’t work together.”

Nia whipped around to face him. “You know what, Hal? Just shut up already. You don’t know that she wants our help. You don’t know why she did this. So why don’t you stop with your whole I-can-read-the-tea-leaves-guru thing, okay? Because it’s starting to get on my nerves.”

I gave Hal a look like, What can you do with a lunatic like that? but he was looking intently at Nia, which kind of annoyed me.

“Hey,” he said quietly. When she didn’t meet his eyes, he said it again. “Hey.” I couldn’t help being jealous of his gentle tone. It was like even though she’d just yelled at him, he really cared about her.

She covered her face with her hands for a second and breathed in deeply. “I just don’t understand. Nothing makes sense. I thought I was … never mind. I am so freaking out.”

Hal took a step toward her and put his hand on her shoulder. “You thought you were what?”

“Nothing,” said Nia, and she shook her head, like it was a door closing. “Anyway, why won’t she call us back?”

“I don’t know,” said Hal. He briefly touched his pocket, where I could see the outline of his phone through his jeans.

“It’s not like her,” said Nia, her statement a question, like things had gotten so topsy-turvy that she needed Hal to confirm something she already knew.

“It’s not like her at all,” agreed Hal.

It was weird to be standing there with no one to talk to while the two of them had their little moment. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt like such an outsider. That’s the thing about being an I-Girl: you’re never on the outside. Of anything. I went back to taking pictures of the car, but I couldn’t focus, and I knew none of my shots were going to be any help if we were trying to decipher a message. When my phone’s memory was full, I just stood there. Nia and Hal were talking quietly on the other side of the car. For something to do, I went up close to one of the windows, but I’d looked at the design on it (a rainbow with a huge, puffy cloud at either end) so many times that I didn’t really know what the point was of looking at it again.

What was Mr. Thornhill’s car like inside? I was sure he was a total neat freak, and I pushed my nose against the window to see if I was right, but it was impossible to see past the stripes of the rainbow.

“Okay, we should probably start cleaning,” said Hal, standing up and addressing me over the roof of the car.

I couldn’t help being annoyed. What, now that they’d had their little chat we could get on with our work? Did they get to decide everything?

Without saying anything, I went over to my bucket, got the spray bottle, and started shooting cleaning fluid at the car. Almost the second the stuff hit the drawing, the chalk began to dissolve. I barely had to rub at the surface to get it to disappear. For a minute, I found myself thinking that it was nice of Amanda not to make us work too hard, but then I was irritated with myself. Whatever Amanda’s purpose, she so clearly was not trying to show how deeply she cared about me, Hal, or Nia. Maybe she thought it was hilarious to play a trick on us or maybe she just wanted us to know that each one of us was an idiot. But the idea that she’d wanted to do us a favor of any kind was nothing short of hilarious.

None of us spoke as we wiped away the brightly colored surface of the car, revealing the dark blue paint beneath. When I could finally see inside the car, I was surprised to discover how messy it was. Empty takeout cups were lying in the back on a bunch of folders and a pile of newspapers on the passenger seat. At least a dozen CDs were scattered on the floor of the passenger seat; I put my nose up against the car, trying to read the titles. On one I could make out the word Mozart, but the others were either upside down or had the writing covered up.

I tried the car door because, hey, you never know, but it was locked. Whatever. It wasn’t exactly like I needed to know what music Thornhill listened to.

It felt like we’d been cleaning for years by the time we wiped the last streak of color off the car, but when I looked, it was only a little after five. Without speaking, we all stepped away from the car and surveyed our handiwork.

Suddenly a phone rang. Amanda. It had to be Amanda. We all jumped, fumbling for our respective cells.

It was Nia’s. “Hi, Mom,” said Nia, and she gave us both an apologetic look, like it was her fault we’d gotten our hopes up briefly. “Nothing.”

I looked back to the car, surprised at how dull and normal it appeared now that all of the artwork had been cleaned. Suddenly I had this really bad feeling about my life, like I was the car and Amanda was the artwork and now she was gone … but I pushed the thought away. Thornhill was being a total drama queen. Everyone knew Amanda cut school all the time. She’d be back tomorrow and all of this would be explained.

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