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  Bus 12 squeals and gasps to a stop not twenty yards away from Meghan and she sees the unmistakable silhouette inside: floppy hat, sharp shoulders, moving down the aisle. Meghan panics, gets to her feet, gathers her backpack and presses it clumsily to her gut, and hustles as fast as she can in the direction of the front door, away from Aimee Zorn.

  Aimee peers out the window of Bus 12 just in time to see the unmistakable blue windbreaker slip inside the front door of the school. Aimee’s plan to find Meghan and set up a time to meet and debrief after morning announcements goes up in smoke as she watches Meghan trundle away.

  Inside, in homeroom, Aimee can hardly sit still. The desk is the only thing holding her down as she stares up at the clock, barely noticing the room fill up with kids all around her, willing the minute hand to leap forward from 7:47 to 7:52. 7:48 to 7:52. 7:49 to 7:52. The rest of the world burns away as Aimee focuses her entire being on the sleeping/leaping minute hand of the clock.

  7:52.

  The familiar burst of static.

  “Good morning students faculty and staff. It is my pleasure to welcome you. To Monday morning.”

  “Settle down now, I said settle down now, or I’ll write out one-way tickets to the new in-school suspension for every single one of you. Make your day, right, people? You want me to make your day?”

  Mr. Cox looks bloated and beat up this morning, like he spent the night under a bridge. His whole pink head is a size larger than usual but his eyes look smaller—they seem sunken into the dough of his face like raisins pressed into a cinnamon roll.

  “I got one blank pass for each one of you people and a list of your G.D. names right here, I’ll just transfer ’em right over. Roster, pass. Roster, pass.”

  Mr. Cox demonstrates how he’ll make their day, holding up a sample blank pass and the attendance list for homeroom C23 and pointing back and forth from one to the other. But the room has an irrepressible buoyancy to it this morning—the kids are giddy and silly and can’t be intimidated. Even J-Bar’s in a rare goofy mood, ignoring Mr. Cox and making teasing jokes across the aisle to Shane and Monica Balan. Meghan floats on the warm current of the class’s collective happiness—she knows, even though they don’t, what they’re really waiting for.

  “This morning we have eh special meditation written by eh member of thee student body of Valley Regional High who is thee winner of thee annual Autumn Poetry Competition.”

  Meghan’s pulse begins to flutter in her neck.

  “We are very proud to read her winning poem alongside thee poems by published poets we have been reading. Dr. Dempsey does ask that you please observe thee silent thirty-second meditation period after thee reading as usual.”

  Is it Meghan’s imagination, or is Ms. Champoux speaking in almost complete sentences this morning?

  “‘Shed Love,’ by Cara Roy,” Ms. Champoux intones.

  “The golden basketball boy

  comes to me when he is sad because

  he knows I am the only one who can give him comfort.”

  It seems to Aimee that Ms. Champoux has undergone some kind of radical speech therapy over the weekend. Her voice is clear and calm, every one of her consonants is crisply articulated, and the nasal buzz that made her sound like a Muppet with a head cold has miraculously fallen away from her tone.

  She sounds a little . . . happy?

  “Everyone thinks the golden basketball boy

  feels no pain

  everyone thinks his blond hair and captain’s jersey

  protect him from sorrow.

  But no one knows like I do

  how grief lives in his heart,

  curled up there like a soft, abandoned puppy.”

  C23 is already starting to bubble with curiosity, like a pot just starting to simmer on the burner.

  “The golden basketball boy comes to me when he is sad,” Ms. Champoux reads,

  “because he knows I will never tell

  how he cries when he misses an easy layup

  how he misses his mom when he goes away to camp

  how his puppy means more to him than anything.

  I meet him here in the shed

  behind the old abandoned house

  every afternoon and take his golden head in my lap

  and show him what it means to love.

  He may be number 17 on the team

  but he is number 1 in my heart.”

  A couple of stifled gasps from the kids in homeroom. Kaitlyn Carmigan claps her hand over her mouth to keep from bursting out laughing. Kids are turning in their seats to look at J-Bar, who’s sinking slowly down in his. The big white number 17 on the back of his letterman jacket is half-concealed now by the back of his chair.

  “What I know now about golden basketball boys

  is that they only look tough on the outside.

  On the inside they are as soft as caramels

  soft as kisses

  soft as babies.

  I am the only one J-Bar has ever truly loved”

  At the name “J-Bar” Mr. Cox looks up at the PA speaker, shocked—

  “and I will treasure that love until the day I die.

  I will keep his painful secrets as I keep my own.

  I will never let his golden light go

  out.”

  A pause. Total silence. The first actually silent silent meditation period since the first day of school.

  Nobody seems to have a clue what to do. Mr. Cox turns to J-Bar with an open question on his face. All the kids hang in suspended animation, unsure whether to burst out laughing or save their own butts by keeping quiet. Even Ms. Champoux’s PA silence seems confused.

  Meghan closes her eyes and rides the silence, feels the energy of J-Bar’s humiliation stretching out in all directions around her, flowing from the epicenter—C23—to the four corners of the Earth, washing over everyone in the world.

  Then, as if Meghan had scripted it herself, Ms. Champoux comes back over the PA to make sure no one missed it. “Ahem. That was ‘Shed Love,’ thee winner of thee Valley Regional Autumn Poetry Competition. By Cara Roy.”

  “What in the H?” Mr. Cox demands from the front of the room. “Bartlett, is that you? Is she talking about you?”

  J-Bar’s face is raspberry red, boiling against the starchy yellow of his hair. Meghan can practically see the heat of his body rippling the air around him.

  The whole homeroom begins to laugh, but Meghan barely hears it—the burning of J-Bar is playing out like a silent, slow-motion film across the room from her. He’s trembling now, the sweat on his temples practically steaming off him in wisps.

  “Stud,” says Shane, snarky-funny. He whacks J-Bar hard on the back, flat between his shoulder blades, and suddenly Shane’s head is snapping back, recoiling from the impact of J-Bar’s fist, which has shot out to punch him so fast Meghan missed the movement. Shane’s face registers an instant of shock, a split-second of hurt, before he’s on his feet whaling on J-Bar, who clatters out of his chair to beat on him for real.

  Everybody scatters to the sides of the room, hooting and yelling like Romans at the Colosseum as the varsity gladiators explode down the center aisle, toppling desks, sending books and binders skittering across the floor, grappling, grunting, trying to tear each other’s throats out.

  J-Bar looks like a wild animal who’s escaped from his cage, as if he’s been pent up for years, just waiting to unleash this savage part of himself into the world.

  “Hey hey hey!” Mr. Cox yells, but he’s barely audible above the din of the spectators, Ms. Champoux mooing her way through the rest of the announcements, and the animal growls of J-Bar and Shane. “Break it up, gentlemen, I said break it up!”

  Mr. Cox heaves his way out from behind his desk, shoves both meaty hands into the blur of basketball captains and begins to pry them apart, grunting with the effort.

  It’s mayhem. Nobody’s watching her. Delirious with success, Meghan melts from the room.

  Aimee waits until the bell rings
, grinding the gears of the school forward into A period, then hurries as fast as she can away from her first class toward Music Practice Room D.

  As she rounds the corner into the art hall, she sees Meghan already lodged in the corner at the far end, peering with exquisite focus through the window of the practice room. Meghan looks up as Aimee comes skidding into the hall and puts one finger to her lips in warning, beckons her forward slightly with the other hand.

  When Aimee comes close enough to see through the window she realizes what’s keeping Meghan outside: J-Bar is in there, screaming at someone. The room is so thickly paneled, so insulated against sound leakage that it’s impossible to make out what he’s saying as he yells—still it’s clear that he’s screaming abuse, his arms flailing in the air around him. He paces to one side and reveals Cara, sitting on the piano bench with tears streaming down her face. She looks destroyed, sodden, as if her whole body is sobbing. Her shoulders are slumped. Her pretty face hangs like wet laundry.

  “How did they know about our room?” Aimee hisses.

  “Shh,” Meghan whispers. “No idea.”

  They watch as J-Bar rants back and forth in front of the window, offering them brief glimpses of Cara, who never moves, never says anything or shifts position, just sits there facing forward and gushing tears as J-Bar’s anger rains down on her from all sides.

  It’s a mirror moment.

  Time splits as Meghan watches Cara implode under the impact of J-Bar’s rage. It’s seventh grade, the crowded hallway outside homeroom, and Meghan is Cara, standing outside the circle of boys, looking past their huddle of haircuts into the center where Cara is Meghan. Meghan/Cara can’t tear her eyes off Cara/Meghan. Cara/ Meghan undulates in the shock waves of J-Bar’s anger, sways away from him in slow-motion ricochet every time he leans into her face. She covers her eyes to protect herself against him, shakes all over. She is dangerously alone. He is dangerously angry. If no one comes to her rescue, she could be eaten alive.

  For a long minute Meghan just sinks into the revenge. She can taste it in her mouth, brassy saccharine sweet. Traitor, she thinks quietly. You brought this on yourself. You deserve to feel what I’ve felt every day since you abandoned me.

  Then a new numbness starts to spread through her. It’s not the blurry numbness of invisibility, or the buzzing numbness of eating herself unconscious. This is a perfect hollowness, the zero feeling of watching someone get tortured—someone who is not you. Meghan feels the cool safety of standing outside. She feels the space between herself and the violence, dry as a breeze against her skin. She can sense every inch of the distance separating her from this scene—this scene that she dreamed up and set in motion and made real.

  J-Bar heaves to one side to pound the wall with his fist, and something makes Cara look up through her fingers and meet Meghan’s eye on the other side of the door. Cara’s face flies open—a look of wild desperation—and her mouth opens slightly to say Meghan’s name.

  “She sees me,” Meghan whispers to Aimee, her lips barely moving, her voice constricted. She’s riveted to the ground, staring into the practice room as if entranced.

  “So duck,” Aimee whispers back, but Meghan doesn’t move. “Hey!” Aimee tugs at Meghan’s sleeve, trying to pull her out of sight. “Get down!”

  “We have to go in there,” Meghan murmurs, her pupils dilating.

  “What are you, crazy? What are we gonna do?”

  “She needs our help.”

  As Aimee watches, Meghan straightens her shoulders, shakes the hair out of her eyes, crosses the art hall, and yanks open the practice room door.

  “—your idea of some sick freaking joke?” J-Bar’s furious yell pours out as the door falls open. “What did I ever do to you, bitch?”

  J-Bar perceives that something has changed behind him and spins around to face the door.

  “Stop,” Meghan tells him. Another Meghan voice Aimee hasn’t heard before—hard and smooth as a slab of granite.

  “Butter Ball, what the—get the hell out of here or I’ll beat you to within an inch of your sick life.”

  “I said leave her alone,” Meghan commands.

  “Did you hear me?” J-Bar pulls his great height up to loom over Meghan. Aimee stops breathing and flattens herself against the art-hall wall. She winces, bracing for what will come next. But Meghan looks up at J-Bar with pure fearlessness, as if she’s never even heard of the idea of fear, never been afraid a moment of her life. Aimee watches, transfixed, as Meghan seems to expand, to widen and grow taller, as she refuses to back down.

  “I’ll scream,” Meghan says, so so quietly.

  J-Bar’s mouth splits into a wolfish smile.

  “Right,” he scoffs. As if she had just said, “I’ll fly.”

  Meghan opens her mouth.

  In a fraction of a second, Aimee realizes that it’s going to be the loudest scream she’s ever heard. She claps her hands over her ears just in time for the piercing sound to soar out of Meghan’s body, a sharp, singing blade of noise. J-Bar recoils as it razors through him. He wraps his long, tanned arms around his head, knocking his maroon baseball cap to the floor, and screws shut his eyes. J-Bar curls away from Meghan, who seems to be growing even larger as she screams, and presses himself against the cinder-block wall. The scream detonates around them like a sonic boom, surging through the air of the art hall, barreling into the lobby and through the door of the main office and out the front doors of school and into the parking lot, louder and louder and louder and louder . . .

  The scream wipes through every cell of Aimee’s body. It lasts for a day, and then a month, and then a year.

  Finally: abrupt silence, ringing with reverb. Staring dead ahead at J-Bar where he’s cowering against the wall, Meghan opens her mouth and breathes in to do it again, a great gathering inhale.

  J-Bar looks, squinty-eyed, from openmouthed Meghan back to openmouthed Cara—and runs.

  He takes the art hall in five leonine strides, pounds through the doors at the end of the hall, and escapes.

  His maroon baseball cap lies where it fell, on the tile floor at Meghan’s feet.

  The noise Meghan made is still echoing around them—J-Bar’s crackling energy is still rippling around them in the air—when Cara gets to her feet. She smears the tears off her cheeks with the backs of both hands and takes a shaky step toward Meghan.

  “You saved me,” Cara says. Her voice is thick with crying.

  Meghan doesn’t move. On her wobbly legs, wiping at her eyes, Cara looks like a lost child. She looks for a flash like the Cara Meghan remembers from her haziest long-ago moments of happiness. Cara reaches out tentatively to Meghan, a half-gesture, and says again, “You saved me.”

  Meghan manages to shake her head, ever so slightly.

  “Yes you did,” Cara insists. “He was so, he came and found me out of homeroom, he was so mad, he practically dragged me here, and then he was yelling terrible things at me, and I tried to tell him I didn’t know what happened—I don’t know what happened, I didn’t write that, I don’t know who put that on the announcements, did you hear it? It wasn’t me, though, I would never—who would ever do something like that? Who would ever do a horrible thing like that to someone else?”

  Meghan feels the edges of her body start to shimmer in an unfamiliar way. It’s not that she’s becoming invisible—she can feel Cara looking at her, right at her, for the first time in years—but what Cara’s seeing as she looks at Meghan isn’t real. She’s seeing a savior, and Meghan’s a saboteur.

  “Did you hear it?” Cara asks again, coming another step closer to where Meghan is lodged, motionless, in the practice room door. “Do you know what I’m talking about?”

  At her left elbow, Meghan feels the air eddy. Cara shifts her gaze to the space beside Meghan, and her eyes narrow.

  “What are you doing here?” Cara says tightly. Meghan turns to look at Aimee, who has come to stand beside her. Aimee folds her stick arms across her chest—all points and corners�
�and doesn’t answer, just stares Cara down. Meghan looks back at Cara and watches the figuring-it-out play on Cara’s face like a silent movie, a gradual morphing of her expression from grateful damsel-in-distress to wounded martyr to outraged avenger.

  “You . . .” Cara’s petal-pink mouth works to form words, comes up empty. “You . . .”

  “You shouldn’t have copied,” Aimee says, emotionless.

  “You did this? To punish me?” Only two feet away from Meghan, Cara begins to vibrate with rage. Meghan slides an inch to the side, and another inch, trying to extract herself from the center of what she fears is about to be a shattering confrontation.

  “I didn’t want to punish you, I just wanted my poem back. It wasn’t yours and you knew it.” Aimee’s careful, controlled voice gives Meghan a slight chill. She drifts another couple of inches to the right, so she’s half in and half out of the practice room doorway.

  “Why didn’t you just talk to me about it?” Cara is almost screaming. “Why didn’t you just tell me you were mad?”

  “I did tell you—in the parking lot after the Photon meeting I talked to you about it and you wouldn’t listen. You said I didn’t own hungry.”

  “Well you don’t!”

  “You copied,” Aimee says flatly, shrugging her knobby shoulders as if that settles it.

  “You humiliated me in front of the entire school! How am I supposed to go to class when everyone—and you—you don’t even know J-Bar, why would you bring him into it? And how did you even know about that stuff, the shed and the—”

  With an almost audible ping the last piece of the puzzle falls into place in Cara’s mind; she flinches as if someone has flicked her on the forehead, and turns a startled look on Meghan, who has floated so far out of the doorframe by now that she can only see Cara with her left eye.