“Yes, you do.”
“No. Zach has friends who try to be nice to his loser sister. It’s not the same thing.”
For years, Jude had moved heaven and earth to make her children happy, but this was one battle she couldn’t fight. It wasn’t easy to be the shy twin sister of the most popular boy in school. “I have a present for you.”
“Really?” Mia sat up. “What is it?”
“Open it.” Jude offered the small wrapped box.
Mia ripped open the box. Inside lay a thin pink leather diary with a gleaming brass lock.
“I had one when I was your age, and I wrote down everything that happened to me. It can help—writing stuff down. I was shy, too, you know.”
“But you were beautiful.”
“You’re beautiful, Mia. I wish you saw that.”
“Yeah, right. Zits and braces are all the rage.”
“Just be open to people, okay, Mia? This is a new school, make it a new opportunity, okay?”
“Mom, I’ve been going to school with the same kids since kindergarten. I don’t think a new address is going to help. Besides, I tried being open … with Haley, remember?”
“That was more than a year ago, Mia. It doesn’t do any good to focus on the bad things that happen. Today is the first day of high school. A new start.”
“Okay.” Mia tried gamely to smile.
“Good. Now get out of bed. I want to get to school early today, so I can help you find your locker and get you settled into first period. You have Mr. Davies for geometry; I want him to know how well you did on the WASL test.”
“You are not walking me into class. And I can find my locker by myself, too.”
Intellectually, Jude knew that Mia was right, but Jude wasn’t ready to let go. Not yet. Too many things could go wrong. Mia was fragile, too easily flustered. What if someone made fun of her?
A mother’s job was to protect her kids—whether they wanted it or not. She stood up. “I’ll be practically invisible. You’ll see. No one will even know I’m there.”
Mia groaned.
Two
On the first day of school, Lexi woke early and staggered down the narrow hallway to the bathroom. One look in the mirror confirmed her worst fears: her skin was pale, a little sallow, even, and her blue eyes were puffy and bloodshot. She must have cried in her sleep again.
She took a quick, lukewarm shower, careful not to waste her aunt’s money. There was no real point in drying her hair. The waist-length black strands would curl and frizz and do whatever they wanted to, so she pulled it all into a ponytail and went back to her room.
There, she opened her closet door and stared at the few articles of clothing she owned. There were so few choices …
What did kids wear here? Would Pine Island be like Brentwood or the Hills, where kids dressed like avant-garde fashion models? Or East L.A., where rap-star wannabes and grungoids filled the classrooms?
There was a knock at her bedroom door, so quiet Lexi barely heard it. She made her bed quickly and then opened the door.
Eva stood there, holding a cotton-candy-pink sweatshirt with a rhinestone butterfly bedazzled onto the front. The kidney-shaped wings were purple and yellow and shamrock green. “I got this for you at work yesterday. I figured every girl should have something new to wear on the first day of high school.”
It was the ugliest thing Lexi had ever seen, better suited to a four-year-old than a fourteen-year-old, but she loved it instantly. No one had ever bought her something special for the first day of school. “It’s perfect,” she said, feeling a tightening in her throat. She’d only lived with her aunt for four days, and every hour she felt a little more at home. It scared her, that settling in. She knew how dangerous it could be to start liking a place. A person.
“You don’t have to wear it if you don’t want to. I just thought—”
“I can’t wait to wear it. Thanks, Eva.”
Her aunt gave her a smile so bright it bunched up her cheeks. “I told Mildred you’d like it.”
“I do.”
Eva bobbed her head in a little nod and backed into the hallway, closing the door behind her. Lexi put on the pink sweatshirt and stepped into a pair of faded Target jeans. Then she filled her hand-me-down backpack with the notebooks, paper, and pens Eva had brought home from work last night.
In the kitchen, she found Eva standing by the sink, dressed now for work in her blue Walmart smock, lemon-yellow acrylic sweater, and jeans, drinking coffee.
Across the small, tidy space, their gazes met. Eva’s brown eyes looked worried. “Mrs. Watters worked hard to get you into Pine Island High. It’s one of the best schools in the state, but the school bus don’t come over the bridge, so you’ll have to take the county bus. Is that okay? Have I already told you all this?”
Lexi nodded. “It’s fine, Eva. Don’t worry. I’ve been riding buses for years.” She didn’t add that she’d often slept on their dirty seats when she and Momma had nowhere else to go.
“Okay, then.” Eva finished her coffee and rinsed out her cup, leaving it in the sink. “Well, you don’t want to be late on your first day. I’ll drive you. Let’s go.”
“I can take the bus—”
“Not on the first day. I got the late-shift special.”
Lexi followed her aunt out to the car. As they drove toward the island, Lexi studied her surroundings. She’d seen all of this on maps, but those little lines and markings only told so much of the story. For instance, she knew that Pine Island was twelve miles long and four miles wide; that it was accessible by ferry to downtown Seattle and by bridge to mainland Kitsap County. On the Port George side of the bridge, the land was tribal. Pine Island, she saw now, was not.
She could tell by the houses that the people who lived on the island were rich. The houses over here were practically mansions.
They turned off the highway and drove up a hill to the high school, which was a collection of squat redbrick buildings huddled around a flagpole. Like many of the schools Lexi had attended, Pine Island had obviously grown faster than expected. A collection of portables ringed the main campus. Eva parked in the empty bus lane and looked at Lexi. “These kids are no better’n you. You remember that.”
Lexi felt a rush of affection for this careworn woman who had taken her in. “I’ll be fine,” Lexi said. “You don’t have to worry about me.”
Eva nodded. “Good luck,” she said at last.
Lexi didn’t say that luck was useless at a new school. Instead, she forced a smile and got out of the car. As she waved good-bye, a school bus pulled up behind Eva, and kids poured out of it.
Lexi kept her head down and started moving. She’d been the new girl often enough to know the tricks of the camouflage trade. The best tactic was to blend in, disappear. You did that by looking down and moving fast. Rule one: never stop. Rule two: never look up. By Friday, if she’d followed this pattern, she’d just be one of the kids in the freshman class, and then she could try to make a friend or two. Although it wouldn’t be easy here. What could she possibly have in common with these kids?
When she made it to Building A, she double-checked her schedule. There it was. Room 104. She merged into the crowd of students, all of whom seemed to know one another, and let their tide carry her forward. In the classroom, kids slid into their seats and kept talking excitedly.
Her mistake was to pause. She looked up just long enough to get her bearings, and the classroom went quiet. Kids stared at her; then whispering began. Someone laughed. Lexi felt her flaws keenly—her thick black eyebrows and crooked teeth and frizzy hair, her lame jeans and lamer sweatshirt. This was the kind of place where every kid got braces at adolescence and a new car at sixteen.
In the back of the room, a girl pointed at her and started to giggle. The girl seated beside her nodded. Lexi thought she heard nice butterfly, and then: did she make it herself?
A boy stood up, and the room went quiet again.
Lexi knew who he was. Every school had a guy like him—good-looking, popular, athletic, the kind of boy who got what he wanted without even trying. The football captain and class president. In his aqua blue Abercrombie T-shirt and baggy jeans, he looked like Leonardo DiCaprio, all golden and smiling and sure of himself.
He was coming toward her. Why? Was there another, prettier girl behind her? Was he going to do something to humiliate her, to make his friends laugh?
“Hey,” he said. She could feel everyone looking at them, watching.
Lexi bit her lower lip to hide her crooked teeth. “Hey.”
He smiled. “Susan and Liz are bitches. Don’t let them get to you. The butterfly’s cool.”
She stood there like an idiot, dazzled by his smile. Get a grip, Lexi. You’ve seen good-looking guys before. She should say something, smile; something.
“Here,” he said, taking her arm. At his touch, she felt a little jolt, like an electrical charge.
He should have moved, led her somewhere. That was why he was touching her arm, right? But he just stood there, staring down at her. His smile faded. She couldn’t breathe all of a sudden; the whole world drained away until only his face was left, only his amazing green eyes.
He started to say something, but Lexi’s heart was pounding so fast, she couldn’t hear his words, and then he was being pulled away from her, led away by some beautiful girl in a skirt that was smaller than a dinner napkin.
Lexi stayed a moment too long, staring at his back, still feeling out of breath. Then she remembered where she was and who she was: the new girl in the bedazzled pink sweatshirt. Tucking her chin into her chest, she bolted forward, made her way to a seat in the back row. She slid onto its slick surface just as the bell rang.
As the teacher droned on about the early days of Seattle, Lexi replayed that moment, over and over. She told herself it meant nothing, the way he’d touched her, but she couldn’t let it go. What had he been going to say to her?
When the class ended, she dared to look at him. He moved with the crowd of students, laughing at something the girl in the miniskirt said. At Lexi’s desk, he paused, looked down at her, although he didn’t smile or stop. He kept moving.
Of course he didn’t stop. She rose slowly and walked to the door. For the rest of the morning, she tried to hold her head high as she moved through the crowded halls, but by noon, she was lagging, and the worst was yet to come.
Lunch in a new school was hell. You never knew what was in and what was out, and the whole social order could be upset if you dared to sit where you weren’t supposed to.
At the door to the cafeteria, Lexi paused. Just the idea of walking in there, being scrutinized and judged, was more than she could bear today. Normally she was stronger than that, but Mr. Popular had unbalanced her somehow, made her want the impossible, and she knew firsthand how waylaid one could be by longing. It was a waste of time. She walked back outside, where the sun was shining. She dug through her backpack, found the lunch Eva had packed for her and a well-read copy of Jane Eyre. Some kids had stuffed animals or special childhood blankets. Lexi had Jane.
