Jeremy called to me. “Hey, Paige! Come worship the mystical blue dot!”
“The mystical blue dot heals all woes!” Elizabeth added. “Praise be!”
“Oh,” I said. “Um.” I could feel the curious eyes of the crowd on me, wondering whether I’d join them or hang back, and I thought of Shanti on Friday night, laying out the social strata I’d never even thought about. Jeremy wasn’t a popular kid, not in the way that Lacey and I were popular, but he was the president of the senior class and widely liked.
An amused voice spoke in my ear. “The blue dot knows all, tells nothing.” I jumped in surprise. Ethan stood beside me, smiling. “Sounds like someone I know.”
I rolled my eyes. “Hardly.”
“The blue dot grants the truest wishes of your secret heart!” Elizabeth called, still giggling.
Jeremy looked at me. “What about it, Paige? Behold the power of the blue dot? What lies in your heart? Fame, fortune, and a bag of Skittles? Homecoming queen? One touch and the throne can be yours.”
For a moment, homecoming queen sounded wrong, but then I shook myself. What else could it possibly be? Though I wouldn’t say no to Skittles.
“Behold its majestic power!” Elizabeth cried. “Worship the blue dot!”
Six months ago I would never have touched a stupid blue dot just because the weird kids were yelling at me. In fact, I wouldn’t even have slowed down, and I definitely wouldn’t have been singled out as their target. Then again, if my friends had been yelling about something in the hallway, I would have stopped to listen. What was the difference? Just that the weird arty kids were yelling about a piece of paper, while my friends would have been yelling about some kegger they were planning?
Jeremy smiled at me, and I made a decision. “Fine.” I glanced at Ethan and tried to match Jeremy’s royal tones. “I shall grant thy wish, but henceforth I warrant the blue dot should, um, behold the awesome power . . . of me.” I reached forward and poked the paper, and the crowd applauded.
I turned back to my place at the back of the crowd, but Mr. Tremont was standing in my spot, next to Ethan. “Nice,” he said. “Whitman would approve.”
Shanti joined us. “I celebrate myself, and sing myself,” she said, her voice lilting up and down with the lines. “And what I assume you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”
“I’m impressed,” Mr. Tremont said. “But not surprised.”
Shanti’s round cheeks turned pink, and she shook her dark hair over her shoulder. “That’s all I know, actually. My dad made me memorize tons of poems when I was little, but I only remember the beginnings of most. I can do the first few stanzas of ‘Prufrock’ for you, if you’d like, or all of ‘Ozymandias,’ or most of ‘Stopping by Woods,’ or —”
“Yeah, yeah, we get it,” Ethan said. “You’re a genius.” He smiled at me, as if this were some inside joke we’d been passing back and forth for years.
Shanti ignored his teasing tone and answered him seriously. “Only insofar as your average African gray parrot is a genius. I was my father’s little parlor trick, that’s all.”
“Parrot?” Ethan asked. “Don’t you mean cuckoo?”
She shook her head. “Poor Ethan. You try so hard, but you’re just not funny.”
Behind us, Jeremy and Elizabeth were still yelling about the dot. “All hail! All hail the power of the blue dot!”
Mr. Tremont laughed. “You guys remind me of my friends in high school.”
I took a half step back, knowing he didn’t mean me and not wanting to intrude. I could hardly follow the conversation, much less start quoting Whitman. Anyway, I had to get to my locker before history, and even though Elizabeth was in my class and didn’t seem concerned about the time, I didn’t want to be late.
But Mr. Tremont looked at me and asked, “How’s the writing going? Going to be ready for workshop?”
I cleared my throat. “I don’t . . .”
“Of course she will be,” Shanti said. “We all will. Class guinea pigs. First to fly, first to fall. Like Laika the Space Dog.”
Mr. Tremont looked confused, and Ethan said, “She means Muttnik. Sputnik II had a dog in it.”
“Actually, the Russians sent nine dogs into space, all total,” Shanti said. “I like to think that they flew off and started their own planet. A dog planet.” She caught my eye and shrugged. “I did a research project on it in seventh grade. Sputnik, not the dog planet.”
Mr. Tremont said, “Well then, yes. You’ll be our Space Dogs, and you can tell us how the view is from up there.”
“Laika died of stress and overheating a few hours into the flight,” Shanti said.
Ethan rolled his eyes. Mr. Tremont said, “Let’s hope my class isn’t quite that bad.” He looked at me and smiled. “I know you’re up to it, though. You’re tough.”
The five-minute-warning bell rang, and the crowd around Elizabeth and Jeremy began to disperse. The hallway flooded with people, and Nikki appeared, grabbing my forearm. “Paige. I have to talk to you.” Before I could protest, or even say anything in apology or thanks to Mr. Tremont, she dragged me off to a corner between a fire door and the end of a bank of lockers.
“Ow.” I rubbed my arm where she’d pulled on it, wondering if it would bruise. I imagined a tiny black-and-blue circlet above my wrist. It would match the one on my ankle from Friday night. “Jeez, Nikki.”
“Did you talk to Lacey?” Her eyes shot back and forth, locking first on my left eye, then my right, and back, so quickly I felt a little dizzy. She glanced over her shoulder, into the crowded hallway.
“No,” I said. “I haven’t talked to anyone.”
“Oh yeah,” she said. “Where were you all weekend? I called you, like, six hundred times.”
“I was sick.” Across the hall, Jeremy and Elizabeth were taping the paper with the blue dot to the door of the newspaper classroom, laughing and yelling, “Praise be!”
Ethan and Shanti walked past, laughing. They didn’t look at me.
I turned back to Nikki, who was still doing the darting-eye thing. “Paige. Listen. Please don’t say anything to Lacey about Friday night, okay? Because she would be mad. And I really can’t handle that right now. She can’t know. Okay?”
There was only a minute or so before the last bell, and the teachers in their doorways started shooing kids off to class. “Hurry up, folks! Let’s go! Get to class!”
Nikki grabbed my hand. “Paige. Please.”
I nodded, distracted. “Yeah, fine. I promise I won’t say a word to Lacey.”
Nikki sighed, relaxing her hold on me. “Oh gosh. Thanks, Paige. You’re the best. Okay. Thanks. I have to go. Okay. Thank you!” She took off down the hallway, skipping lightly on impossibly high heels. I watched her until she disappeared, and I didn’t move until the final bell rang.
I avoided Lacey and Jake all morning. In Contemptible History, I sat on the other side of the room, behind Jason Anderson, who always smelled like the pigs his family raised. I watched with satisfaction as Lacey craned her neck, searching the room for me. The look on her face — confused, troubled, cracks in her usually serene mask — made sitting behind Pigboy utterly worth it. Between classes, I took different routes down the hallways, avoiding the rooms I knew they’d be coming out of or going into.
At lunch, I hid in the library, idly flipping pages in physics books so the librarian wouldn’t ask questions. Halfway through the period, I heard familiar voices and peeked through the stacks to see Nikki hunched over a computer, sitting with Jeremy. I tried to remember if they had a class together. Nikki took notes as Jeremy moved the mouse, clicking and pointing to the screen. I leaned in closer, trying to see what they were doing, but managed to knock a dictionary off the shelf and had to duck as they both turned in my direction. Embarrassed, I slunk back to my carrel, gathered up my things, and spent the rest of lunch in the English hallway bathroom.
As usual, the best part of the day was creative writing. “
If you’d be so kind as to focus your attention on the board here,” Mr. Tremont started, pulling a white screen down from above the chalkboard and wheeling an overhead projector into the front row. “Jenna, could you please hit the lights for us? And, Paige, could I get you to scoot your desk over just a bit?” I did, and he maneuvered the projector in next to my desk.
“Great. Okay, guys, today I want to talk at you a little before we write, if you don’t mind.” The class murmured its consent. Mr. Tremont turned the projector on, and a hazy field of haystacks appeared on the screen before us. “How many people have heard of the Impressionists?”
A few people raised their hands, and Mr. Tremont asked Jenna French to share what she knew about them. “Well,” she said, “the Impressionists were a group of artists in the eighteen hundreds who took their canvases outside and tried to capture the landscape by painting really fast. They used colors in new ways, and their brushstrokes were visible in their finished paintings.” I twisted in my seat to see if she was reading from a textbook. Her cheeks were pink in the reflected light of the projector, and I caught her smile before she glanced down at her desk to hide it.
“Perfect,” Mr. Tremont said. “The Impressionists realized that in order to capture the truth of the landscape in that particular moment in time, they had to paint quickly to get the light right, because light was everything. They began to understand that everything that we see, at every moment, is just light bouncing off everything.”
He slid a new painting onto the projector. Another hay field. “The light changes at every second, so you have to work pretty fast to capture the truth of any given moment.” He showed us another haystack, and another, and another. They all looked similar, but none of them was exactly the same. “Anyone know who painted all these haystacks?”
A couple kids shouted out in unison. “Monet!”
Mr. Tremont smiled. “You guys are awesome. That’s right, Claude Monet.” He put up another haystack and turned to us. “So here’s the deal. In order to capture the truth of a moment, you have to work fast. The painters used big brushstrokes. We’ll use pens. For the next twenty minutes, I want you to find a spot in the school, anywhere on campus, and capture the truth of your setting as well as you can. Write fast. Write big. Get every single moment. Notice the details: not a kid walks down the hall but a dog-faced boy with red high-tops and a Lisa Frank binder swaggers down the hall.”
We laughed.
“See?” he asked. “Original details tell the truth. That’s all we’re trying to do here, folks. We’re just trying to tell the truest truth we can. Push through the voice in your head that says, ‘You can’t write that! It’s not allowed!’” He smiled at us. “I’m giving you permission to write whatever you want, as long as it’s true. Okay? And really, don’t think too hard, just write.”
He clapped, and the class started gathering notebooks and pens. “Oh, and one more thing — as you grab the truth and splash it on your page . . . do so quietly, okay? Don’t get me in trouble.” He smiled. “Twenty minutes! Go!”
I settled myself on the floor in a quiet corner of the school, at the intersection of the English and history hallways. The floor was cool under my legs. A freshman girl walked past, her boots squeaking against the polished linoleum. I thought about the painters, slapping on their paint to capture the truth of a moment. I thought about Mr. Tremont, encouraging us to write what we saw, what we heard, what we felt.
I feel . . .
It’s cold on the floor, and dark in the corner. In the room behind me, I can hear Mrs. Bailey talking about the Treaty of Versailles. She wants people to understand its importance. Across the hall, they’re watching a video on the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. A girl with long red hair strides down the hallway in tall black boots. Her footsteps squeak loudly in the quiet hum of the halls. She sees me looking at her and looks back, probably wondering what I’m doing on the floor in this dark corner. The second someone sees me, I’m aware of nothing else but being seen, and all my attention is taken up by what I look like and how I hold myself. It’s not until she disappears into a gray classroom that I can go back to watching the world, and forget about being watched. I let myself relax against the wall, relax like the first time Jake kissed me under the cool green trees. I sank into him, and every kiss said you are important because I choose you, you are precious because I want you, you are safe because you are with me. With every kiss he said here you are and here is home, and our bodies matched together, each curve and concave fitting together like we were meant to be that close, like we’d been invented merely to belong to each other . . .
The pen paused in the middle of the line, hovering. Down the hall, they were both in film appreciation together, watching some art film as Lacey flipped her hair around and flirted with Jake until he agreed to rub her shoulders in the classroom’s cool darkness, as she planned the next step in her campaign to make him forget me entirely.
Slowly, methodically, I drove long lines through the sentences, one after another.
After class, Jake was waiting for me. “Paige.”
“I’m late.”
“You don’t even have a class this period,” he said, and smiled, as if pleased with himself for proving how well he knew me.
“Well, you do. You should go.” Jake didn’t move. I sighed. “I have homework.”
He pulled a gift from behind his back, a slim rectangle wrapped in his mother’s signature silver paper. “Well then, you’ll have to open this later, I guess.” When I didn’t reach for it, he slid it onto the stack of books in my arms. “Paige, about Friday —”
“I really need to go.”
“I’ll walk you to your locker,” he said, catching up with me. “A little bird told me you went to a poetry reading this weekend?”
“It was homework,” I said. “For creative writing.”
“You like that class, huh?”
“You’re going to be late for gym.”
He stepped in front of me, cutting me off. “Hey.”
I stopped.
Jake reached out to put a hand on my arm. “Look, I just want you to know, okay, that even though everyone else says that that class is really gay, I know you’re a really good student, and I totally respect that. And maybe it’s a good thing you ended up in creative writing, you know, because you are a good writer, like when you helped me with my history paper last year. And I just —”
“Who told you where I was this weekend, anyway?”
“Your mom.” He said, and laughed, like it was the punch line to a raunchy joke. God. I pushed past him and headed toward my locker.
“Paige, wait. I’m sorry. It actually was your mom. When you wouldn’t answer your cell, I called your landline, and she said you went to Iowa City with your sister.”
“Fine,” I said.
“Nothing happened, babe. I know what it looked like, but I swear, I was just . . . Lacey just needed a friend. The divorce . . . And her mom is still really screwed up about the accident. . . .”
I bit my lip, wanting so badly to believe him. He was a good guy, and he and Lacey had basically grown up together. Was it possible that he was just being a friend? Just trying to do the right thing?
“Hey,” he said softly. “I missed you.” He moved in and kissed me on the cheek. His scent washed over me, the familiar blend of warm and clean and skin, and I closed my eyes, wanting to erase everything else.
And then the bell rang, and the hallways were full of running kids and closing doors. “I have to go,” I said, and turned away, leaving him standing in the middle of the hallway.
It was a book of poetry, a slender edition of the complete sonnets of William Shakespeare. Even though I was fairly certain that Stella had picked it out for him — and obviously had wrapped it for him — I was still touched. I opened it in my car in the parking lot, idly flipping through it and trying to make sense of the sonnets. They didn’t have much to do with the kind of writing we were doing in Mr. Tremont’s class
, but still. Jake had noticed, and he made an effort. That counted for something. It wasn’t enough, not nearly, but my anger, like the pain in my ankle, had faded over the weekend. He was a good guy. He was probably just trying to be nice when I caught him with Lacey. It wasn’t his fault, it was hers: she was the one manipulating him. We’d talk later, get everything out in the open. Work through it. It wouldn’t be the first time.
I didn’t drive out to my secret springs hoping to run into Ethan. I went because I craved the peace of the lapping lake and the silence of the afternoon woods. It was the only place I could escape from everyone else in my life, the only place I could think of where I wouldn’t be watched, scrutinized, studied. Judged.
Somehow, though, I didn’t mind when his feet appeared at the top of the path, hesitating before scrambling down the hill to the tiny clearing. “Am I intruding?”
I was perched on a thick tree root, dangling my feet in the water. My notebook sat closed in my lap. “No.”
He half ran, half jumped the last thirty feet. “You have to tell me how you do that gracefully.”
“I’m very talented.”
“Obviously.” He stretched, turning to crack his back. “Are you sure I’m not interrupting you? I was just running, and I thought I saw you down here — or I thought I saw someone, and since the only person I’d seen before was you, I guessed it might be you again. And — well, it is.”
I surprised myself by gesturing to the roots of the tree next to me, an invitation. “It’s okay. I wasn’t doing anything to interrupt.”
He stepped from rock to rock, making his way across the pool to the far shore where I sat. “Sometimes you need to do nothing, just to recharge. Especially writers. We really need to do nothing.”
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