“In addition,” Principal Ramos continued, “you’ll notice that your principal is still doing the school announcements this week. Apparently, our ASB president and vice president decided to move to San Diego over the summer.” Principal Ramos hermed into the microphone. “Without telling anyone. So we’ll be holding a special election this Friday to fill the open positions. Details and sign-up sheets are available in the office. And last . . .” I heard a rustling of papers. “I’m pleased to announce that we have new coeditors of the Fullerton Hills Herald. This year, our school paper will be produced by Gabriel Muñoz—”
I grabbed Spencer’s arm, I was so excited to hear Gabe’s name.
“—and Michael Torres.”
TWENTY
“MICHAEL TORRES IS coediting the school paper?” I repeated, still confused by what I’d just heard.
“Sounds like it,” Spencer said.
“Could there be more than one Michael Torres at this school?”
“Possible,” Spencer said. “But I doubt it.”
The school paper didn’t even crack the top ten of Michael Torres’s interests. The Cosplay Chess Club would have been more up his alley, and I was relatively sure he’d never even read the Herald let alone considered working on it before this semester. What was he up to?
“Moving on from Donne,” Mr. Schulty said, leaning back against his desk and loosening his tie. He did this every day, as if he were getting comfortable with us, and I wondered if he did that with every class, retightening it after the bell. “We’re going to tackle Milton’s masterpiece, Paradise Lost. Who wants to read from the first book?”
I had never once offered to read aloud in any English class I’d ever taken, especially not poetry. I’d made my thoughts on the genre pretty well-known, but a manic pixie craved the spotlight and adored romantic things like poetry, so once again, I intensified my energy, plastered an enormous smile on my face, and shot my hand into the air.
Mr. Schulty’s eyebrows practically disappeared into his hairline. “Beatrice?” he said, clearly skeptical. “Do you have a question?”
“I’d like to read,” I said.
His eyes narrowed. “You realize it’s a poem, an art form you’ve described as a necessary high school evil.”
“Yes.” I stood up and marched to the front of the room, my English poetry anthology in hand. “Where should I start?”
He blinked, watching me closely as if trying to decide if I was putting him on, then opened his book. “Line two forty-two.”
I flipped to the assigned section and threw myself into the part. Milton’s early modern English prose was stilted and stiff, but not nearly as bad as I’d anticipated. I wasn’t exactly sure what all the words meant, especially in their current arrangement, but I’d learned enough about reading poetry out loud to know that pacing was guided by punctuation, not line breaks, and I tried to interpret it accordingly. Some of the lines I even kind of liked: “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.” I mean, wasn’t that what my friends and I were doing with the Formula? Making a heaven of hell with the power of our minds? I could get on board with that.
I read to the end of the section, then paused, unsure if I should continue. I looked up and found every single set of eyes in the classroom upon me.
Not that I hadn’t expected to find some people watching me. But most of my classmates followed along in their books when someone was forced to read out loud, or doodled in their notebooks from abject boredom. But everyone was staring at me, eyes wide, as if I’d just done a striptease on Mr. Schulty’s desk.
I felt a familiar wave of panic boiling up, and I turned to Spencer instinctively for help. He was watching me too, but instead of the stunned look everyone else wore, he was smiling.
“Was that okay?” I asked, more to Spencer than to Mr. Schulty, who answered.
“Beatrice,” he said, “that was—”
My brain kicked in, reminding me of why I’d volunteered to read in the first place. “Trixie,” I corrected him. “Call me Trixie.”
He shrugged. “Sure, whatever. That was quite good. I’m impressed. Thank you.”
He was telling me to go back to my seat. But what would a manic pixie do in this scenario? My brain quickly accessed my brand-new manic pixie film database and retrieved an image of Winona Ryder spinning around on an ice rink in Autumn in New York. That would do.
I threw my arms wide and my head back, and spun around in what must have been the world’s most awkward pirouette. I lost my balance, staggered into Mr. Schulty’s desk, and sent a file holder and pencil caddy careening across the room.
“Crap!” I said. Most of the students laughed at my clumsiness, but it felt good-natured, not derisive, and I smiled at them sheepishly. “Sorry.”
I started to pick up the mess. But Mr. Schulty stopped me.
“No, it’s fine.” He gathered pens and scissors off the floor. “Just . . . take your seat, Trixie.”
I flounced back to my desk and dropped into my chair, puffing an errant curl out of my face. This manic-pixie-dream-girl thing wasn’t so hard after all.
I take that back. This manic-pixie-dream-girl thing was freaking exhausting.
First off, I’m pretty sure I smiled more during first and second periods than I had in the previous seventeen years of my life. My cheeks ached with the effort to keep my lips curved into an upward arc, and I was convinced my forehead was permanently wrinkled from my perky brows. Meanwhile, my eyes were starting to glaze over, and my lighthearted laugh, which I whipped out for everything from introducing “Trixie” to my second-period Latin teacher to explanations about my shoes, was beginning to sound more hollow and maniacal with every passing second.
The rest of my body felt equally run-down, as if I’d sprinted two laps around the track without adequate warm-ups or appropriate footwear. I’d spent all morning engaging anyone and everyone in conversation. I noted with some concern that Toile’s fashion statement for outlandish hats had spread like wildfire. I saw a variety of sun hats and cabbie hats (even Esmeralda was wearing a snood) on the female denizens of Fullerton Hills. But instead of avoiding it, whenever I saw funky headwear in the hallways, I set myself on a collision course, amping up my energy and perkiness as I introduced myself to the wearer. I had to fight Toile at the source, but keeping my intensity at a fevered pitch all morning had drained my will to live.
That said, my transition from Beatrice to Trixie was going pretty well. A few classmates looked at me strangely, or thought I was new at school instead of just a new version of the nameless Math Girl. But most people, including my teachers, simply noted that I had undergone some kind of radical style transformation over the weekend, and moved on.
Who knew reinventing yourself could be so easy?
It was with equal parts adrenaline high and sugar crash that I trudged out of second-period Latin, smile still plastered on my face, and forced myself to skip down the hallway to my locker like a six-year-old. I really wanted to spend the fifteen-minute nutrition break before third period hiding in the library reference stacks, curled up on the floor, where I could hopefully snag a quick disco nap, but, unfortunately, there was something else I had to do first. I swapped textbooks quickly, casting a furtive glance in the tiny magnetic mirror on the inside of my locker door to make sure my glitter eyeliner was appropriately sparkly, then headed off to find Toile and Jesse.
I needed to confront them before lunch in the cafeteria, where the fishbowl effect would be in full force and a thousand pairs of eyes would be witness to the first encounter between Jesse’s ex- and current girlfriends, but as I rounded the corner toward the stairs, I bumped into someone who made my entire body tense up.
Michael Torres.
“I know what you’re doing, and it won’t work.” His narrow dark eyes were even narrower and darker than usual, and his spiky hair unfurled like a porcupine on the defensive.
Could he know what I was up to with t
he Formula? No, that was impossible. Michael Torres was a sneak and a narc, but he was utterly lacking in imagination. I just needed to stay in character.
“Mikey!” I cried, hoping such an adorable nickname for my mortal enemy would throw even the stoic Michael Torres off balance. “Isn’t it a beautiful Monday?”
“Huh?”
“The start of a week is so full of promise.” I winked at him. “You know, most people hate Mondays, but I always look forward them. You can make anything happen.”
Michael Torres stared at me, dumbfounded, as if he’d just discovered that I was the long-lost granddaughter of Albert Einstein, and that NASA had decided to let me skip college and postgraduate school altogether and offered me an exclusive directorship right out of high school. “I . . . guess,” he stammered.
Never in my three years at Fullerton Hills had I known Michael Torres to be tongue-tied.
“Oh, and congratulations on the coeditor position on the paper! Sounds super exciting. Anyway,” I said, flashing my megawatt grin, “gotta go. See ya!” Then I turned and skipped off.
Breaking eye contact must have snapped him back into reality. “Hey!” he called, scrambling after me. “Bea!”
I kept going, refusing to acknowledge my old name, until Michael Torres blocked my path once again.
“No matter what you do, you’re not going to outwit me,” he said, “and you’re not going to win. Not this time.”
Win? I didn’t realize we were in competition for anything. Whatever. Fucking with Michael Torres was an unanticipated joy of this whole endeavor. I blew him a kiss, then spun around and continued down the hall.
“I’ll be watching you!” he cried after me.
Creeper.
Michael Torres was a nice warm-up: as someone who knew me as more than just Math Girl, he was my toughest audience yet, and despite my general loathing of every interaction we had, I was grateful that he’d given me a momentary boost of Trixie pixie confidence, because when I finally spotted Toile and Jesse at the bottom of the stairs, all of my bravado drained away.
He leaned against the banister, laughing as he held her hand, then slowly raised it to his lips.
I fluffed my hair, making my curls bigger and bouncier than ever, and pulled one artfully dyed strand forward so it hung lazily in front of my face, as if I’d just been tossing my hair and couldn’t be bothered with where it fell. Then I squared my shoulders and hurried down the steps.
“Jesse!” I cried, giving him a quick squeeze on the arm before I turned to his girlfriend. “Toile! I’m so glad I ran into you.”
“Bea?”
I didn’t look at Jesse (partly because I didn’t trust myself to stay in character instead of smacking him across the face, and partly because ignoring him would be the more intriguing, Trixie-like move) but I could hear the bewilderment in his voice, as if he’d just come across a Calculus II Maclaurin Series on the SAT while he was still in Trig I.
But if Jesse was overtly confused by my new appearance, Toile seemed genuinely enthused. “I love what you’ve done to your hair, Bea,” she said, reaching out to finger a curl. “I wish mine did that.”
“It’s Trixie,” I said. Then scrunched up the side of my mouth and puffed upward, coquettishly blowing the errant curl from my eyes.
Toile tilted her head to the side, wide-eyed. “That color is called Trixie?”
Dammit. I’d walked right into that. Score one for Toile.
Thankfully, two could play at that game. I laughed, jiggling my curls. “Oh my God, you’re so cute. No, silly. Call me Trixie.” Then I glanced back at Jesse. “It’s a family nickname.”
“It is?” Jesse asked.
I ignored him. “Look!” I pointed at one of the windows that framed the main door of the school. Toile and Jesse immediately turned. “Oh, no. Sorry. I thought I saw a rainbow outside.” I gripped Toile’s arm. “Can you imagine? A rainbow without any rain? What if we saw them everywhere? Every day? Wouldn’t that be the most magical thing ever?”
“Wouldn’t it?” she cried. “I would totally just about burst my—”
“Oh, Jesse!” I said, cutting her off. That was the surest way to curtail her natural flightiness. “I have something for you. I was just doodling, you know, in class, and I thought of you.”
I pulled a brightly colored paper daisy from my tote bag. About two inches in diameter, made of magenta and orange construction paper glued together over a wire “stem.” On the center disk of the flower, I’d written a formula.
Jesse stared at the paper flower. “What is it?”
“It’s an imaginary unit,” I said, pointing to the symbols. “See, j—that’s you—represents a quadratic polynomial without a multiple root, which means the equation has two distinct solutions.” I glanced up at Toile.
“Cool,” he said.
I wanted to further explain the poetic brilliance of the imaginary number in relation to our current situation, how the two distinct solutions to the underlying equation “x2 = -1” are directly inverse, i.e., total and complete opposites, but that was something Math Girl would do, not Trixie.
“It made me think of you,” I said instead.
“That is really awesome.” The corners of his eyes softened and his lips curled into a tiny smile. “Thank you.”
I could have pressed my luck, but I knew it was better to get out quickly and let him think about me. “It’s been lovely chatting and sharing with you guys. You’re adorable together. See you at lunch? Ciao, ta-ta, and adieu!” I chirped, making up my new catchphrase on the spot.
I noticed with immense satisfaction that Jesse stared after me as I skipped off down the hallway.
“And that, my dear Toile,” I muttered, “is how you manic-pixie in the big leagues.”
TWENTY-ONE
WHEN I ARRIVED at the cafeteria for lunch, I was doubly happy that I’d already orchestrated my initial meeting with the new couple. Jesse and Toile were sitting with Cassilyn.
Fine. Whatever. Toile’s popularity with Cassilyn and her friends wouldn’t last long. Those girls had the attention spans of Tasmanian fruit flies, who are born, breed, and die all in one twenty-four-hour cycle, and where the time allotted to individual thoughts is less than a nanosecond. Okay, not that Tasmanian fruit flies have cognitive reasoning skills, and even by insectoid standards, they’re low on the IQ scale. Then again, so were Dakota and Noel.
Point being, I needed only to shift the spotlight in my direction and Toile’s notoriety would fade.
So I made sure I was in perky form as I walked across the cafeteria, swinging my tote bag before me as if I were just traipsing through a field of flowers without a care in the world.
“It’s going to take me a while to get used to this,” Gabe said as I spun onto the seat beside him.
“The hair or the clothes?” I asked.
He pumped his eyebrows. “The perk.”
“I’m not that different.”
Gabe’s jaw dropped in faux shock. “Have you lost your mind?”
“I don’t know,” Spencer said, swinging his long legs onto the bench next to me. “I kind of like Trixie.”
“Do you?” I asked, confused. He’d been the one most adamantly against my transformation.
He smiled tightly. “She’s so much nicer than Bea.”
“Ha-ha.” Behind me at the other table, I heard a peal of laughter. I glanced over and saw Toile leaning her head against Jesse’s shoulder, laughing hysterically at something. Cassilyn, Dakota, and Noel were also twittering in unison, and Jesse beamed down at his new girlfriend as if sunshine were emanating from her eyeballs.
Time to make a move.
I laid my hand on Spencer’s arm, threw my head back, and let out a shriek that pierced the live acoustics of the cafeteria like feedback from a speaker system. I’d wanted to imitate uninhibited laughter, but instead the dissonance that emerged from my mouth sounded like a bird of prey going in for the kill. All around us, people stopped and stared.
Spencer smacked me on the back, hard enough that it set me coughing.
“What the hell?” I said as the people around us returned to their regularly scheduled lunch conversations.
“Sorry,” he said, grinning wickedly. “I thought you were choking on something.”
“I hate you.”
“I know.”
A figure appeared behind Gabe, blocking the sunlight. “Is there room for me?” Kurt asked.
So now just anyone was welcome at this carefully curated lunch table? Great.
Of course, I couldn’t say that. Bea might have wanted to, but Trixie had to be welcoming to everyone. I stood up and cleared my throat loudly, hoping to catch Jesse’s attention. “Oh my God, yes! Kurt, our table is always open to kindred spirits.”
He blinked. “Um, okay.”
I made room, and he slid his tray onto the table.
“So,” he said, his gaze shifting between the three of us, “are you really all doing research for Gabe’s article or is there something else going on?”
“Something else going on,” Spencer said.
I elbowed him. “Like I said at the mall, it’s all part of the same experiment.”
Kurt seemed unimpressed. “Is it working?”
“Well,” I said, gesturing around us, “we’re sitting here. So there’s that.”
“And Spencer’s painting a portrait of the hottest girl in school,” Gabe added. “So there’s that.”
“Who?” Kurt asked.
I nodded toward Cassilyn. Was he really so oblivious?
“Oh, Cassilyn. Right.” Kurt shrugged and turned his focus to his lunch.
“What did you say about Cassilyn?” Thad had spun around on his bench to face us, but instead of addressing the question to Kurt, he was pointing his meaty forefinger at Spencer.
“Nothing,” Spencer said honestly. But he maintained eye contact, and his voice didn’t falter.
“Yeah, you did,” Milo chimed in. “I heard her name.”
Spencer wouldn’t back down. “But not from my mouth.”
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