“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