“Yeah,” I said slowly. “It was just a total mistake.”
Kelli put her arm around me. “You poor thing. I can’t believe you had to spend the whole morning trapped in a room with the biggest freaks in the school.” She squeezed me to her.
“Even if one of those freaks is a hottie freak.”
From my other side, Traci put her arm around me. “Do you need a cootie shot? Like the old days?” She laughed and then reached for my arm, starting to say the words even before she touched me. “Circle, circle, dot, dot—”
As her fingers reached for my wrist, I realized what was about to happen.
“Don’t.” My voice was sharp, and I yanked my arm away from her as if her hand were a flame.
Traci looked up, a hurt expression on her face. “God, Callie, what’s your deal?”
“I just … I burned myself last night. Making pasta. And my arm’s kind of … it’s still sore.”
“Oh,” she said, suddenly contrite. “I’m really sorry. Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” I was relieved to see that my sleeve actually covered half my palm. “I’m fine.”
“Cool,” said Kelli, ready to move on. “Okay, can I show you guys the cutest lip gloss my mom picked up at the mall yesterday?”
“Sure,” I said, and when Kelli went to put it on me, I puckered my lips and let it roll.
Is it possible for forty-five minutes to last a millennium? I must have looked at the clock over Heidi’s head fifty times between when I sat down and when the bell finally rang to end lunch period.
“Oh my god, is lunch over already?” asked Traci, her face crumpling. “I have double bio now. Kill me.”
“Do you guys want to come over and hang at my place after school? Maybe the guys would come, too,” said Heidi. She’d also sampled Kelli’s lip gloss, and the shiny, bright pink—the perfect color for her—made her supermodel smile even more sparkly.
“Sure,” said Traci.
“Yeah,” said Kelli.
“I can’t,” I said, and my mild irritation with Amanda grew into actual anger in the face of their matching, glossy smiles. My friends and my kind-of boyfriend were going to have a great afternoon together while I spent the hours after school scrubbing spray paint off a car with two social outcasts who had the nerve to ignore me. Great.
“And why not?” asked Heidi.
“I’ve got to clean the vice principal’s car.”
“What? But you said it was just a big mistake that he even made you come into his office.” Traci had been checking her nails for chips, but now she looked at me, completely confused.
“Yeah, why didn’t you just tell him you had nothing to do with that stupid psycho painting on his car?” demanded Heidi. She did not like it when her vision of an afternoon was thwarted.
“I did,” I said. And I comforted myself with the fact that I wasn’t lying. That was what I had told Thornhill.
Kelli pulled a pack of Orbit gum out of her bright green Coach bag. “Can’t you have your parents call and complain or something? That is completely unfair.”
I thought about my dad, who was probably about halfway through his second bottle of wine by now, and tried to imagine his making a coherent case to Mr. Thornhill about my innocence. Not exactly a pretty picture. And it wasn’t like my mom was reachable by phone.
“I think it’s easier to just get it over with,” I said, accepting the piece of gum she held out in my direction. “Trust me.”
After we’d hugged good-bye, I slung my bag over my shoulder and turned to head to English. As I left the cafeteria, I almost walked right into Beatrice Rossiter, a ninth grader who was hit by a car over winter break. The whole left side of her body including her face was totally disfigured—she’s got all of these scars and she wears a patch over her left eye and she always walks really close to the wall, like maybe nobody can see her when she does it. Once when we walked past her, Traci whispered to me, “Every time I see her, I’m thankful I’m me.”
I didn’t say anything to Traci at the time, but what I was thinking was, If you were me, Traci, and if you knew what I know, then every time you saw Bea, you’d wish you were just about anyone but me.
I snuck my phone out of my backpack and turned it on, but there were no new messages.
Bio and English were a total blur except for when Ms. Burger pointed out that today was March fifteenth and warned us to “beware the Ides of March.” Her words created a flicker of anxiety in the pit of my stomach. Could there be some connection between the date and Amanda’s prank? But what? I couldn’t even remember why we were supposed to beware the Ides of March, and by the time Ms. Burger told us to open our books to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 138, I’d gone back to ignoring what was going on around me, just focusing on the clock as I counted the seconds until last period.
I was totally sure Amanda was going to be in math class, so sure that I actually jogged the last fifty yards to the room. Even though I was pretty confused and starting to get more than a little annoyed about everything that had gone down over the course of the morning, it would be such a relief to see her. Was she really friends with Hal and Nia? Why had she spray-painted Thornhill’s car and our lockers? I’d run over in my head what I was going to say to her so many times I practically had it memorized.
It didn’t mean anything that she wasn’t there when I pushed open the door of room S-51 (when was Amanda ever on time for anything?). It didn’t even mean anything that she hadn’t shown up by the time the late bell rang. But as the minutes ticked by and Mrs. Watson took us through the homework problems (problems Amanda and I had just done together the night before), the excitement I’d felt started to morph into frustration. Where was she? It was one thing to cut school; god knows Amanda did that fairly regularly. It was another thing to cut school on a day when you’d pulled a prank that got several other people in mad trouble. Of course, knowing Amanda, she would just respond with a raised eyebrow or a quotation of unknown origins to direct questions she didn’t care to answer.
That was so not going to fly this time.
It’s not exactly a major problem when I can’t concentrate in math class. When I don’t pay attention in history, I know I’m a goner on the next test. But math is totally different. Math is like … okay, you know when you’re shopping for jeans and you try on ten million pairs and each one is just a little too tight, or a little too loose, or it’s got some freaky acid washed thing going on, and then all of a sudden, right when you’re like, Oh, forget it, I’m just going to live without a new pair of jeans, you try on one last pair and as they slide up your legs it’s … it’s like you were born to wear them. That’s what math is like for me, like a language I was somehow born knowing.
Actually, I probably was born knowing it. My mom is one of the best mathematicians in the world. I mean, I might be good at math, but she’s brilliant. Like, if you ask me to multiply two three-digit numbers, I can do it in my head pretty fast, but that’s nothing compared to my mom. If we’re at the grocery store and she’s trying to estimate what everything’s going to cost, she can glance at the cart and figure out to the penny what the total’s going to be. And if you ask her in July how many days until Christmas, she can tell you the answer in less than a second.
For me, it’s more … well, when Mrs. Watson puts a new concept up on the board, like when we learned sine