I raised my eyebrows. “So … do I get presents?”
“Presents!” Tina exclaimed. “Of course!” She ran to her backpack and pulled out a brightly wrapped box. Other kids dug into their packs and reached under their desks.
“Mine first,” Arnie said, plunking down a lumpy package tied with yarn.
“I don’t think so,” Tina said. She bumped him out of the way. “Jane asked me, remember?”
“Wait,” I protested. “I was kidding. I was completely kidding!”
The stack of presents grew on my desk. I tried pushing them back into their owners’ hands, but they wouldn’t have anything to do with it.
“Open them,” Tina insisted.
So I did. I got the new Spayed CD, a pocketknife engraved with my name, a framed picture of Arnie. Four pairs of earrings. From Tina, a sky blue container of stress therapy bath beads (“Not that you need them. What do you have to be stressed about? But they’re so cool, because the water gets all fizzy when you put them in!”). A leather bookmark, a mauve feather boa. A tiny tub of lip balm.
“Thanks, you guys,” I said. I fingered the lip balm, then pushed it behind the boa. “I mean it. I was having a really crappy day—”
“You were?” Hannah said. “Poor Jane!”
“—but you guys totally made it better.” I smiled at them, so easy to do because they all smiled back. “And I love my presents. Thank you so much.”
A chorus of “aww”s filled the air. Arnie gave me a hug, then Hannah did, too. Melina, who was shy, just touched my hair.
“Now cake,” Tina announced. “Oh! Shit! And I completely spaced the band! Arnie, run to the hall and see if they’re there!”
The cake was delicious. The band, decked out in full red-and-black Crestview regalia, was awesome. In addition to the school’s alma mater, they played a fabulous jazz piece composed in my honor, with an amazing solo on the flageolet.
“Have you gotten it yet?” Mary Bryan asked the next morning.
“Gotten what?” I asked.
She looked at me in a not-fun-and-games kind of way. “You know. To give to Lurl.”
A sick feeling clutched my stomach. I fiddled with one of my new earrings, which were shaped like tiny doves.
“Do you like my earrings?” I asked. “Hannah Henderson gave them to me.”
“Yeah, they’re great,” Mary Bryan said impatiently.
“My whole class threw me a party. It was so sweet.”
“Terrific. And if you want them to keep doing stuff like that—”
I cut her off. “I know, I know.”
“Then just do it.”
“Fine,” I said. I sighed and leaned against the row of lockers. I gazed down the hall. “Will this be the last time?”
Mary Bryan snorted, for a second sounding almost like Bitsy. “Hmm, let me think. This’ll be the last time until next week. And then that’ll be the last time until, let’s see, the next week.”
“What?!” I said. I vaguely remembered an “every week” clause from the day of my induction, but it was all so blurry.
“Jane. Keisha told you all of this already.” She raised her eyebrows. “And it’s not just you, you know. We all have to do it, so you can quit acting like such a martyr.”
I went back to staring down the hall. I watched a girl try to shoo a feral cat from her locker, where it perched placidly on a thick blue notebook. The cats were everywhere these days. During homeroom, one had coughed up a hairball on Trish Newman’s backpack, and rumor had it that a pack of three had killed a swan and deposited the carcass on Mr. Van Housen’s desk. Of course, nobody had been there to verify it, and some claimed that Mr. Van Housen had made it up. Still, the fact remained. The cats were getting more brazen.
“Hey,” I said. “Once I … you know. Will that mean Alicia’s off the hook? She’ll go back to the way she was?”
“Back to her usual charming self, you mean?” Mary Bryan said.
I faltered. I got the sense that maybe she was being sarcastic, only I wasn’t sure. “Well … yeah. She’s really not that bad when you get to know her.”
“Which is why I was the only one who was nice to her, that day at lunch. Which is why you’ve basically treated her like a leper since the moment you hooked up with us.”
The surprise of it tightened my lungs. “But that’s because … I mean, come on. That’s because—”
“Because we’re all just walking bags of shit, waiting to unload?”
I drew back. Mary Bryan, I was finding, was not all sweetness and light.
Down the hall, the cat leaped nimbly from the locker onto the girl’s shoulders. The girl crouched and cried out.
Mary Bryan watched, then pushed her fingers against her forehead. After a moment, she dropped her hands. “But yeah, Alicia will go back to the way she was.” She half laughed. “Cats will stop pissing on her stuff. The world will adore her.”
Our eyes locked. Her expression was weary, despite her glittery eyeshadow and rosy cheeks.
The girl stumbled our way, the cat still lodged on her shoulders, and I had to step to the side to avoid being bumped. Before I could stop myself, I snapped at her to watch where she was going.
She halted and turned around. “Oh god, I’m so sorry,” she said. “Are you okay?”
“You about made me trip,” I said.
The cat meowed, digging its claws into the girl’s shirt. The blood drained from her face. She gestured at her back and said, “Do you … do you think you could … ?”
Irritation mounted inside me. I yanked the cat off her shoulders, using my hand to free its claws.
“Thank you,” the girl babbled. “Thank you so much.”
“Yeah, whatever,” I said. The cat squirmed to the floor with a thump.
I turned to Mary Bryan, but she was gone.
Lunch with the drama kids—no Alicia, where was Alicia?—and then PE. Not my favorite class on the best of days, but today it was horrible. Sure, Coach Shaw exempted me from doing the rope climb, and sure, Anna Maria and Debbie, who were total soccer studs, told me I should try out for the team. Never mind the fact that I sucked at soccer, and that just two weeks ago Anna Maria had shoved me accidentally on purpose with her shoulder during a game of battle ball. I’d gone sprawling, and Anna Maria had hissed, “Stay down, you idiot. Tell the coach you sprained your ankle.”
But today they’d loved me. Great. So really, class itself was fine. It was what happened afterward that screwed with my mind.
Everyone except me was changing out of her gym shirt and shorts. I was still in my normal clothes, since Coach Shaw hadn’t made me dress out. But I’d filed into the locker room with the others so they wouldn’t think I was a snob.
“Hey, Jane,” Anna Maria said, pulling a blue-and-white rugby down over her head. “You going to the Fall Fling?”
“Yeah,” I said. I lounged against a wooden bench. “You?”
She stepped into her jeans. “Hell, yeah. Jodi’s mom is on the planning committee, and she says there’s going to be all kinds of cool shit like bungee cords and climbing walls. You know I’m going to be there.”
“Cool,” I said.
“Some of the girls will be, ‘Ooo, it’s too scary,’ ‘Ooo, I’ll break a nail,’ right? It’ll be hilarious. But the people who matter will be, like—” She broke off and turned to Debbie, who’d come up behind her. “What?!”
Debbie jerked her chin toward the end of the locker room. Camilla, a towel wrapped around her waist, was heading from the showers to the nearest row of lockers. Water dripped from her hair onto the back of her T-shirt.
Anna Maria’s face hardened. “Whore.”
“Why is she even here?” Debbie said. “She’s not in our PE class.”
“Bet she’s been using the weight room again, fucking ballerina princess,” Anna Maria said. “Stuart Hill can’t use it, noooo. But our fucking little Camilla can.”
I frowned. The girls’ weight room was separate from the boys’, which meant that Camilla doing her weight training wouldn’t take anything away from Stuart. But I, too, felt a surge of repugnance at the sight of Camilla, and it scared me.