“I wasn’t looking for it, I swear,” one of them is saying, her voice chock-full of delight. “It was open in his cubby, like he’d left it that way on purpose. I couldn’t not see it.”
“And it’s whose again?” Kelsey asks.
“You know, that one kid. Wes Nolan.”
“Who?” Kelsey repeats.
“You know. That goofy stoner who sits over there.”
“Oh, yeah,” the other pony says. “Buy a new coat once a decade, you know?”
“And he drew all of these?” Kelsey asks.
“There are pages of them.”
The girls are still blocking the sketchbook, which is just as well. I can already imagine the huge mammaries and drooling zombies Wes Nolan has been drawing. This has nothing to do with me, and I’m already turning away when Kelsey says, “Do you think she posed for these? She couldn’t have, right?”
A girl posed for Wes Nolan’s drawings?
“She must have,” the pony with the book says. “He couldn’t have drawn these all from memory.”
“And I don’t want to be mean,” the other pony adds, “but who knows what she might have done? Right, Kelse?”
“Yeah. I guess.”
“Who?” Evan says, trying to hop up to see and then land on the floor in a hover, with limited success.
The ponies fall silent. My mind isn’t silent, though. It’s packed with my own name, shouted in a roar that fills my ears. Me. They’re talking about me. Then one of them shifts, and I can see it.
The edges of the paper are a cloud of blurred lead that clears in the paper’s center to reveal a girl sitting at the base of a tree. She’s slouched in a graceful curl, knees drawn to her chest. Her hair falls in a messy cascade of strands and shadows across a determined jaw and chin. There’s a stick in her hand, and she’s scratching designs in the dirt. Kelsey flips through the other pages, and there the girl is again and again. Always at the tree, always with a stick. In most of the sketches, she’s looking down at the designs she’s drawn, but in a few, her face is turned toward the viewer, her eyes wide and luminous, her lips bow-shaped and touched with a smile. She is much more delicate, more charming, much prettier than I ever could be. She is also, unmistakably, me.
I back away, all the way away, back to Usha’s table and plant myself on an empty stool, Usha’s pencil scratching next to me like a reassuring whisper. My eyes hadn’t met Wes’s, not like that, I think. I hadn’t been waiting there for him. I’m angry, I realize. So angry I might start shouting.
At who? a small voice asks. About what?
At Wes of course, I think. How dare he draw me like that!
I pull in a breath and realize that I’ve been staring blindly at Usha’s hand working across the page. She hasn’t been drawing jellyfish, as I’d first thought, but parachutes. The domes are not made of translucent flesh, but panels of fabric. Not tentacles hanging down, but ropes, a curled skydiver dangling from each one. She’s even drawn harnesses, the tiny buckles holding them to parachutes that lower them gently to the ground.
Evan arrives at my shoulder. “That was something.”
“It was nothing,” I say tersely.
But I look at the door, suddenly worried that Wes will bang through it, tardy as usual, with his stupid crooked grin and stupider jokes. I tell myself that it might not have even been me, the girl he drew. She hadn’t even looked like me. Not really. I didn’t have those eyes. Not that smile.
“Well, at least we found the next rumor about you,” Evan says.
“You see how she is? Who knows what she might decide to say next.”
“Actually, it was her friend who found—”
“The sick thing is she doesn’t even know me. She knows nothing about me. She’s just saying things for . . . I don’t know why. Why do people say things like that?”
I shoot an evil look in the general direction of the ponies, but my eyes land on the table by the door. I hadn’t seen it before, because it is small and situated in the corner and it holds only one student sitting by herself.
Greenvale Greene is looking right at me.
Our eyes lock. Hers are so light they’re nearly colorless. Her clothes—the same jeans and hoodie as anyone else’s—appear somehow ill-fitting and out of style, like wrinkled hand-me-downs. Her hair, lank and unbrushed, falls in her eyes.
Greenvale Greene, I think.
Paige Wheeler, a voice whispers in return.
I glance over my shoulder to see what Greenvale is really looking at, surely someone else behind me. But no one is there except for Evan and the blank wall. And when I turn back, Greenvale isn’t there either. A flash of bony elbow, the sole of an off-brand shoe, and the door to the art room slams shut.
“Who was that?” Mr. Fisk looks up. “Who just left?”
“Harriet Greene,” someone says. This is followed by a ripple of the word Greenvale, spoken almost as a superstition, like throwing salt over your shoulder or touching the points of the cross.
“Maybe she could ask for a hall pass next time,” Fisk says.
“Maybe she really had to go,” someone suggests, which elicits laughter.
I wonder if they’d still have laughed if they’d seen her face before she ran from the room. Eyes wide, mouth open in fear.
It was as if she’d seen a ghost.
8: THE RESISTANCE OF FALLING OBJECTS
“IT’S YOUR IMAGINATION,” EVAN SAYS BEFORE I’VE EVEN FINISHED explaining. We stand in the hallway outside the art room, Greenvale nowhere in sight.
“It’s not. She looked right at me.”
“It’s happened to me before, too,” Evan explains. “You’re just seeing what you want to see. You think they’re looking at you, but really they’re always looking at something else.”
“Trust me. If I wanted someone to see me, it wouldn’t be Greenvale Greene. Besides, there was nothing behind me, just the wall.”
“Maybe she was looking at the wall.” Evan tilts his head. “Who is this again?”
“You know, Greenvale Greene. She was sitting right by the door.”
“I didn’t see anyone by the door.”
“I didn’t see her at first either. She was practically in the corner. She’s pygmy-short, starvation-skinny, bangs in her face, huge eyes under the bangs.”
He shakes his head, no recognition. “Is she a well-rounder or a biblical or—” I’ve taught Evan all of Usha’s and my nicknames.
“No group. She’s . . . well, she’s crazy. Like, certified. Sophomore year she had some sort of breakdown and wouldn’t leave her bedroom. Her parents sent her to a place . . . a facility or whatever you call it.”
Evan adjusts the cuffs of his sweater so that they’re even on his wrists. “Greenvale is a strange name.”
“Her name isn’t really Greenvale. Technically, it’s Harriet. Greenvale is the name of the place where they sent her, and her last name is Greene, so everyone calls her Greenvale Greene.” I frown. “Unfortunate coincidence, I guess.”
Evan looks up from his sleeves. “If the place hadn’t been named Greenvale, they would have come up with something else to call her.”
I think of the nicknames Usha and I devised for our classmates with a tug of guilt. It wasn’t the same, I tell myself, calling someone a well-rounder or a pony or a testo. Besides, I wouldn’t have come up with the names if people didn’t try so hard to fit in their tidy boxes. Except Greenvale, I realize. She didn’t have a category, a group.
The bell rings, and the classroom doors pour out students. Evan and I back away from the crowds, but when Kelsey and the ponies pass us in a coltish, neighing herd, I start after them.
“Where are you going?” Evan calls.
I turn and shrug. “To hear what else she says about me.”
I trail along behind the ponies, listening for Kelsey to mention my supposed suicide again. But the group is caught up in a debate about whether a comment one of their friends made at lunch was intended to be bitchy. All the way to the science hall, the debate rages on, and it isn’t until we reach the classroom door that I remember what Kelsey has last period.