Now You See It . . .

by Vivian Vande Velde

  This woman had gray and stringy hair that hung down to her shoulders. Her nose was crooked. And could it possibly be? Yes, definitely: a wart at the tip. The eyes were red rimmed, with the whites more yellow than white. And malevolent as she glared at me.

  There's old. There's ugly. There's mean. But this went beyond that. The woman standing by the desk gave new meaning to the expression "made my skin crawl."

  "Well, Wendy. How nice of you to grace us with your presence."

  There was the scrape of a chair, and I saw Mrs. Robellard get up from behind the desk and step around the witchy-looking person to confront me.

  Well, for good or ill, at least the newcomer hadn't shoved her into an oven and eaten her.

  "I, I, I..." I couldn't get any further than that, so I just handed her the note.

  While the hideous stranger glowered at the interruption, Mrs. Robellard gave a suspicious "Hmph!" then said, "Do you have a late pass for your homework, too?"

  "No," I managed to mumble, and I got my homework out from between the pages of the biology book. Because the book is a bit shorter than a sheet of paper, the bottom edge was crumpled.

  Mrs. Robellard eyed the page dubiously. "You may take your seat," she told me because I was just standing there, gawking at the other woman, at the way her dry, wrinkled skin, dotted with nasty age spots, hung loose from her arms. I thought, If I was that old, I'd wear long sleeves, regardless of the weather. But this woman had on a little spaghetti-strap top as though she was the age of the students and not about a hundred years old. Beneath the top, her boobs—She isn't wearing a bra! I realized in horror—drooped nearly to her waist.

  "Wendy." Mrs. Robellard's voice was sharp. "Sit down. Read chapter twelve. Quiz starts at a quarter after. And take off those sunglasses. We are not in Hollywood."

  "Ahm," I said, "I broke my other pair. These are prescription lenses."

  "If you say so." She'd seen me wearing glasses from September to May, but she curled her lip suspiciously. Then she waved me to my seat, and sat back down at her desk to resume her conversation with the old witch woman.

  I took my seat, but I couldn't stop staring at the class visitor. I leaned to my right, to Franklin Yeager, since Tiffanie Mills, who normally sits in front of me, apparently wasn't in today.

  "Who's that?" I hissed to Franklin.

  "Who?" Franklin whispered back as though there was more than one new person in the class.

  "With Mrs. Robellard."

  Franklin gave me his version of Mrs. Pincelli's fishy look. "You mean Tiffanie?" he asked.

  "No," I said in disgust and inclined my head toward the front of the room, toward the desk. I know Mrs. Robellard is old herself and not exactly on the attractive side, but how could she stand to have her face so close to that other woman's?

  Franklin just shrugged and shook his head and went back to the reading.

  Tiffanie? What in the world was he talking about, Tiffanie? Tiffanie wasn't even in today. He must have misunderstood my question. I wondered what he thought I'd asked: Who's the best-looking person in the school? Who's the most popular? Who do all the girls wish they were, and all the boys wish they could date?

  Something, however, made me push my glasses down my nose a bit, to squint over the top.

  Sure enough, heading back to the desk in front of mine after finishing her talk with Mrs. Robellard, wearing that same spaghetti-strapped little red top, was Tiffanie Mills.

  5. A Bad Day Gets Worse

  Tiffanie Mills is the most popular girl at James Fenimore Cooper High, so she isn't what I'd call a personal friend. That was probably the only thing that saved me from screaming "Tiffanie! What happened to you?" and making a total moron of myself. Which is good, because my status at school is already semimoron, and I wouldn't have liked to have committed myself completely to the camp that includes those kids who are most likely to end up working at fast-food franchises or being featured on America's Most Wanted.

  I checked out the other kids. Nobody else seemed affected by my glasses, just Tiffanie.

  I only dropped my biology book once before I got it opened in front of me on the desk. I had no idea which chapter Mrs. Robellard had said to read, and probably was incapable of finding it, anyway, so I just flipped the pages till I was about halfway into the book, and then pretended to read.

  What in the world was going on with Tiffanie?

  I glanced up once more, first over the tops of my glasses, then through the lenses. Tiffanie was just flouncing into her seat in front of me.

  Believe me, flouncing takes on a whole new meaning when it's done by someone who looks like your great-grandmother wearing strappy sandals, a skimpy skirt, and no bra.

  The back of Tiffanie's chair jostled solidly against my desk.

  Tiffanie was not a ghost. The other dead people I'd seen—amazing how quickly that begins to roll off the tongue—The other dead people I'd seen were different. Without the glasses, there had been no sign of the businessman. Without the glasses, the woman who'd been run over just lay on the street until she was carried away by the ambulance crew. If Tiffanie was dead, other people shouldn't be seeing her. And in any case, she shouldn't look like a hundred-year-old crone. What kind of death could have caused her to look like that? Severe inhalation of toxic hair spray? Allergic reaction to lip liner?

  "Wendy," Tiffanie whispered.

  Through the lenses, I could see her drumming her fingertips on my desk: perfectly sculpted passionberry red nails at the ends of pale, arthritis-gnarled fingers.

  I didn't raise my head but looked at her beautiful self up over the rims of my glasses. She'd twisted in her seat just enough that she could recover herself quickly if Mrs. Robellard glanced this way. In a hushed voice, Tiffanie asked, "Got a nail file?" She extended her index finger, which might or might not have had some tiny imperfection.

  Just look at her OVER the glasses, I told myself. Still, I had to swallow before I could manage an "Um, sorry."

  "Okay," Tiffanie said in a tone that indicated she wouldn't hold this against me. She started to face forward, then turned back again. "Wendy," she whispered.

  "What?"

  "You're reading your book upside down." She gave her patented crinkled-nose smile at me. I was just grateful I didn't see that through the lenses.

  "Thanks," I whispered to get her to turn back in her seat.

  Mrs. Robellard stood and announced, "All right, books away. Get out a clean sheet of paper and pen."

  People groaned because she had said the quiz would be at a quarter after and it was only twelve after. Of course, everyone would have groaned in any case: There's never enough time to cram for a quiz when you haven't been paying attention in class. What was this unit about again? Oh yeah, dinosaurs. They couldn't have given this to us when we were eight and interested?

  Next to me, Faith Wickstrum was rummaging around in her purse. I knew she was looking for her MarineLand pen, the one with the dolphins on it. Earlier in the year, she had been using it when she aced a geometry test she hadn't studied for, so she figured the pen was lucky, and now she always used it for tests and quizzes.

  All of a sudden, two tiny little creatures appeared. They looked like little men, except for the fact that they were about three inches tall, and they were that shade of eye-bedazzling blue that the manufacturers of Popsicles and Kool-Aid call blue raspberry. I don't know if they just materialized out of thin air or if they crawled out of, or up from, or down from somewhere—but suddenly they were on Faith's desk.

  "Get it, get it, get it!" one shouted in a shrill little voice as the other dived headfirst into Faith's purse.

  My biology book must have fallen from my numb fingers, because I heard the thud as it hit the floor. Mrs. Robellard probably gave me a dirty look, but all my attention was on the two little guys.

  "Got it!" I heard a muffled little voice proclaim. I saw the top of his tiny head poking out from the front pocket of Faith's purse. His hair looked like purple faux fur, a
nd he was wearing clothes that seemed to have been manufactured from leaves and birds' nests. "Here you go." He handed Faith's lucky dolphin pen off to the other guy. I would have thought that they'd have trouble managing, since the pen was so much longer than they were tall, but they must have been stronger than they looked.

  "Look out!" the first guy warned as Faith, who apparently couldn't see these guys—or her pen—moved her hand to search another compartment of her purse. She appeared totally oblivious to them, even as she knocked one back into her purse, and the other teetered on the edge of her desk, holding the pen like a high-wire artist trying to get his balance.

  From inside the purse came muffled squeaks, squawks, and cries of "Hey!" "Watch it!" "Don't get so personal!" as Faith felt around for her pen.

  Suspicious, I lowered my sunglasses down my nose. Sure enough, the little blue whatever-he-was disappeared. I couldn't see the pen, either.

  "Miss Wickstrum!" Mrs. Robellard asked impatiently. "Are you ready to begin the quiz?"

  "I'm looking for my pen," Faith explained, resuming her search where she had already checked. "I know it's got to be here someplace."

  "Hey, Guido!" the little blue guy on the desk called out to his companion. "You okay?" His voice was thin and high, like when you fast-forward a tape.

  "Sure, I'm okay," the second little guy said, climbing out of the purse, though his purple hair was all pointing backward as though he'd been caught in a mighty wind. Seeing the other guy still doing his balancing act with the pen, he warned, "Hey, don't drop that thing, or she'll be able to see it."

  "I won't drop it," the first guy complained. "Whadyathink I am? Clumsy, like you?"

  "Who you calling 'clumsy,' butterfingers?" The second guy launched himself at the first and they began rolling around on the desk.

  And all the while, Faith kept searching, searching.

  I finally remembered to close my mouth.

  Mrs. Robellard sighed. "Does anyone have an extra pen so Miss Wickstrum can take the chapter twelve quiz along with the rest of us?"

  "But...," Faith protested feebly. In a last-ditch effort, she dumped the contents of her purse out on her desk, scattering lip gloss, hairpins, sticks of gum, small change, and scraps of paper which may or may not have been fortune-cookie fortunes.

  The two bickering blue guys screamed as the deluge of stuff buried them, but it was the kind of scream you give on a roller coaster, so I doubted they were seriously injured.

  Mrs. Robellard said icily, "Miss Wickstrum," and Faith sighed and accepted the pen Franklin Yeager was offering her: an olive green one whose top bore Franklin's teeth prints, and on which was inscribed MONDO TRUCK RALLY/SEPTEMBER 21–28.

  Faith held her purse open and swept the pile of stuff off her desk back in, little blue men and all.

  "Question number one," Mrs. Robellard announced, and so the quiz began.

  Well, one thing the glasses didn't have any effect on was whether I could keep straight what had happened in the Cretaceous versus Jurassic eras.

  While I was glancing around the room hoping for help from some of the posters on the walls, I saw the two little men crawling out of Faith's purse, which she had hung off the back of her seat. They seemed to have resolved their differences, for one reached down to give the other a hand up.

  "Did you lick it good, Guido?" the first guy asked in his high helium voice.

  "Licked it real good," the second guy assured him. "When she finds it, it'll be all covered with purse lint."

  The two guys jumped off the back of Faith's chair, landing lightly despite the fact that, for their height, that had to be like jumping off a minor mountain. They ran up to the front of the room, climbed Mrs. Robellard's desk, and knocked a couple papers into the nearby trash can, laughing all the while. Except, of course, when one said something the other didn't like, which would get them pinching and poking and throwing punches until they lost track of what it was they'd been arguing about and went off to do more mischief. Even the fact that they were targeting Mrs. Robellard didn't make me like them any better: They were just plain mean.

  Sitting in the back row, I had a good view of them as they untied Sean Park's shoelaces, pulled the back off one of Peg Denzler's earrings, and kicked a quarter under the baseboard heater where it would never be found.

  Come on. Come close to me, I mentally dared them. I don't know if they could tell I could see them or if they just found too many others to torment before they got to me, but about the time the quiz was ending, they heard the janitor pushing the restroom cleaning cart out in the hallway and took off after her, laying in plans for flushing away all the toilet paper and jamming the Kotex machine.

  As we were handing our papers up to the front of the classroom, I raised my hand.

  "Miss Selmeyer?" Mrs. Robellard sighed at me.

  "I'm feeling kind of funny," I said. Kind of? I was seeing dead people and blue guys.

  "'Funny,'" she echoed.

  I put my hands over my stomach.

  "Will the ladies' room suffice, or do you need to see the nurse?"

  I didn't want to go to the nurse, but I didn't want to go to the ladies' room if those two blue nasties were tearing the place apart.

  "Nurse, I think," I said weakly.

  Mrs. Robellard sighed. "It was nice having you while we did." She scrawled a pass for me.

  When I went to take it, she held on to it for an extra moment. "Don't think I'll make allowances for this on the quiz," she warned.

  I wanted to say, I'd never expect you to make allowances for anything. But I didn't have the nerve.

  6. Some Guys Need Magic Glasses to Look Cute

  The nurse wasn't in her office.

  Because of a tight school budget, we'd long shared a nurse with the middle school, so that Mrs. Starr was here Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings and Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. But ever since the last round of school budget cuts, when they added visiting one of the elementary schools to her itinerary, her schedule had become too complicated for me to figure out. Or maybe there was no pattern. Maybe she just showed up wherever she wanted, waiting for psychic vibes to drop hints which school's student body was most likely to suffer a medical emergency at any given time.

  In any case, the note taped to her door said:

  I had no idea what that meant, but the door was locked, so it probably meant "not here now."

  The nurse's office is in a quiet little dead-end hall on the first floor, located beyond the north wing set of stairs. So I just plunked myself down on the floor, leaning my back against the office door as though expecting Mrs. Starr to be back momentarily. I pushed the glasses up into my hair and rested my face against my knees.

  Had the world just gotten weird, or had it always been and I was only now seeing it?

  Okay, I thought, the glasses let me see into the afterlife—that's why I could see those two ghosts.

  That almost made sense: Scientists might have invented a means to glimpse at someone's postdeath ... what? Soul? Psychic energy? Whatever.

  But what about Tiffanie?

  Well, maybe I was seeing into the future, seeing what she would look like in another eighty-five to ninety years or so. Not anybody else, of course—just Tiffanie Mills. Sure. That was a useful tool that science was just waiting for someone to invent.

  And what about those two little blue guys with the personality deficiency? Aliens? Perhaps scientists—guessing the world had been invaded by malevolent invisible-to-earthlings beings—had developed a technology to enable us to see them....

  But that was hardly reasonable: Aliens traveling from light-years away, taking who-could-guess-how-long to cross countless galaxies, braving unknown dangers ... all to lick Faith Wickstrum's lucky MarineLand pen and trash James Fenimore Cooper High's second-floor ladies' room?

  Maybe I groaned, but—if so—just the tiniest bit. And maybe I was rocking back and forth like one of the special-needs kids coming off her meds, but that was just to keep from
groaning. I was feeling so miserable, I didn't even register the sound of footsteps coming down the nearby stairs until they reached the bottom.

  I had just registered that they'd stopped rather than gone on when someone asked, "You all right?"

  By squinting, I was able to make out Julian York. He was carrying a pile of papers, so I gathered he was running some errand for some teacher, and I was just plain lucky that he had chosen this particular staircase to use.

  "I'm okay," I told him.

  He rocked back and forth a bit himself, maybe inwardly debating whether to accept that answer and continue on his way.

  "Really," I assured him.

  Obviously I did a superb job of hiding my distress. He came and sat down on the floor next to me. "Did you hit your head?" he asked.

  Actually, a head injury would explain a lot.

  I touched my face around the hairline, expecting my fingers to come away sticky, thinking, Shelley, you could have mentioned that I had an open head wound. "Where?" I asked, remembering the dead businessman asking, What, am I beginning to leak or something? Is the steering wheel column sticking out again?

  "We all bounced around quite a bit," Julian said. "Backpacks were flying through the air. Things happened too fast to know what was happening."

  I came to suspect he was asking in a general sort of way if I was hurt because of what we'd been through—not because of a blood-gushing wound.

  Julian must have caught on that I wasn't touching my scalp because I was checking for lice. He said, "You look fine." He gave a slow, warm smile that was sweet enough that even an insecure girl like me could take it as he meant it when he added, "Except, of course, for the fact that you look terrible."

  "Oh, well, in that case, thank you very much," I told him.

  Sitting this close, I could see that I'd been wrong in thinking, when I'd glimpsed him getting off the bus, that he was better looking than I had originally thought. He was too thin and his hair was thin, too, and a bit scraggly; its lightish brownish blondish color could best be described as faded. And his cheekbones were too prominent and his nose skinny and long. And yet I'd been right, too: It wasn't so much that his skin, though pale, was luminous; or that his eyes were a beautiful shade of green; or that his teeth were white and even. It was his expression—he was genuinely concerned—and that's hard to resist.