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  “You didn’t,” Cara says softly. Meghan feels her heart collapse in an implosion of guilt. She wants to offer a thousand apologies, to fall to her knees in front of Cara, but she can’t move a muscle.

  “I asked her to help me,” Aimee interrupts. “It was my idea.”

  “How could you.” Cara locks eyes with Meghan. “I would never have thought you could do a thing like that. That’s not you.”

  Meghan stands frozen, unable to respond.

  “I just think you should know,” Cara gulps, welling up with a fresh wave of weeping, “that even though you stopped being friends with me a long time ago I still care about you. You’ll always have a special place in my heart. And I would never do something horrible like that to you. Ever.”

  At this Meghan feels the throb of remorse that has been growing in her heart shut off abruptly. The feeling just dies. Cara has no memory of what she did to Meghan. She’s rewritten their history with herself as the victim.

  One perfect tear slips down each of Cara’s pink cheeks. Her face is a soft-focus portrait of innocence betrayed.

  Meghan runs the possible things she could say to Cara through her mind:

  I never stopped being friends with you, you left me alone when I needed you most.

  You chose J-Bar over me even after you saw how he treated me.

  I don’t have a special place in your heart. You haven’t even looked at me in over three years.

  Cara whimpers and hiccups, clears her face delicately of tears with the tips of her two first fingers. “Don’t you have anything to say to me?” she demands.

  It’s too much—Meghan’s exhausted, and the challenge is too huge. She can’t make herself say the words.

  “You have everything,” Aimee says, inserting herself into the silence where Meghan’s response would be. “You have friends and awards and everybody loves you. All I have is my poems.”

  Cara pivots to turn a withering look on Aimee.

  “I guess now you have her,” she snaps, jerking her head in Meghan’s direction. “You two deserve each other.”

  They stand for a moment in the empty art hall after Cara leaves, looking at each other almost shyly.

  Meghan thinks, I wonder what she wants to do now. Aimee thinks, I wonder what she thinks we should do now. Neither of them says what either of them is thinking.

  The project is over. They don’t need each other anymore. They never have to speak to each other again if they don’t want to.

  “You want to meet here after school?” Meghan says finally.

  “Okay,” says Aimee. “What are we gonna do?”

  Meghan shrugs. “You’ll think of something.”

  19

  They meet at the bench outside the front doors, blue windbreaker and red velvet hat. Every morning now.

  They go inside together every morning, side by side, keeping a careful distance between them but walking almost in unison, like a brace of soldiers.

  They weave through the crowd in the entrance hall. They separate and come together and separate again, drift off slowly in different directions.

  They meet in the sophomore hall during passing period, in the sickroom when they need a break from classes, in the art hall during lunch, in the music practice room after school. When they meet they lean their heads toward each other a little, murmur things to each other only they can hear.

  Look from one of them to the other.

  Look how different they are. Look how one is huge and one is narrow, one billows out and one sucks in, one is like a sea creature and one is like a spear. Look how when they walk together they make no sense.

  Look how the same they are. Look how they both drop their heads when they walk through a crowd. Look how they both grip the shoulder straps of their backpacks with one hand like that. Look how neither one of them looks like anyone else in school.

  Look how the fat one is like the answer to the question the skinny one asks.

  Look at how no one looks at them as they pass. No one follows them down the hall anymore, no one stops them at their lockers. No one corners them in the gym or the stairwell or the parking lot. No one notices them as they wait for the late bus or eat their lunch together on the floor in a corner.

  Look at the new way they’ve invented to be invisible.

  Look at how they look at each other. Hard to see from a distance, but it’s there: a deep, searching look. A look that notices everything it falls on. The look each one of them gives the other seems to make the other one real.

  See how every second they’re together, every second they’re apart, someone is looking out for them now.

  See how they don’t need you to look at them anymore.

  Lift up. Lift up so you’re floating up by the ceiling of the front hall as school lets out for the day. Take in the whole mass of kids rushing like a flash flood toward the doors. See—they’re in there, the two of them, bobbing along. Two heads in a rush of heads: velvet hat and mousy hair. Follow them until they blur, blend in completely with everyone around them.

  Now pull back farther: the pebbly school roof, the parking lot, the football fields and soccer fields and the track. The multicolored flow of kids out the front doors, dispersing into the yellow tubes of buses, the rectangular tiles of cars. Trees on all sides turning brown, orange, gold. The breeze getting crisper and chillier up here.

  Look up, look out: the town, the university, the valley deepening and darkening in advance of winter. A last wash of color before the snows come.

  Now forget what’s below you.

  Look around you now: the sky is perfect blue up here, cold and pure and bright.

  Float up here for a second, where it’s flawless.

  Now take a deep breath, and disappear.

  Acknowledgments

  For her wisdom, patience, and vision, I’m grateful first of all to my extraordinary editor, Joy Peskin.

  For their support and generosity, both emotional and material, I thank my family: Katie and Steve George, and Jenny George and Kate Carr.

  For leisurely time and exquisite space to write in, I thank Madeleine and Tim Plaut.

  For their camaraderie, commiseration, and constant encouragement, I’m particularly grateful to Pam Cobrin, Rob Handel, Philip Kain, Nicole Wallack, Anne Washburn, Abby Weintraub, and Aaron Zimmerman and New York Writers Coalition.

  A thousand blessings upon Carley Moore and Matt Longabucco for the giddy fun, good food, and challenging collaborations they share with me.

  And for friendship that has spanned the years since seventh grade, love and thanks to Lorelei Russ and Nikola Smith, there from the beginning.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Acknowledgements