The animal kingdom has crazy names for animal groups. A zeal of zebras. A murder of crows. An unkindness of ravens. And, my favorite, an embarrassment of pandas. What would this group be called? A horror of students? A nightmare of teens? Just for fun, I scan the faces going by, looking for my brother. But it’s like trying to choose your favorite polar bear out of an aurora of them.
I sit for thirty seconds, enjoying the solitude: 30. 29. 28. 27 …
This is it for the day until I’m home again. In this thirty seconds, I let myself think all the things I won’t let myself think for the next eight hours. The song always starts the same way.
I have a fucked-up brain.…
Twenty minutes into class, no one is staring at me. Our teacher, Mrs. Belk, is talking and so far I’m able to keep up. Mick is whispering clever commentary just for my benefit, which makes him either my new best chum or my future boyfriend, or possibly the boy who will sex the rest of this weight right off me.
You belong here as much as anyone. No one knows who you are. No one cares. You’ve got this, girl. Don’t get ahead of yourself, but I think you’ve got this.
And then I laugh at one of the things Mick says and something goes flying out of my nose and lands on his textbook.
Mrs. Belk says, “Settle, please.” And keeps on talking.
I superglue my eyes to her, but I can still see Mick in my peripheral vision. I’m not sure he notices the thing I shot at him, and I don’t dare look. Please don’t see it.
He goes right on whispering as if nothing happened, as if the world is not about to end, but now I only want to close my eyes and die. This is not the foot I want to start on. This is not what I envisioned for myself when I was lying awake last night imagining my grand reentrance into teenage society.
Maybe he’ll think this is some weird American tradition. Like, some bizarre custom we have for welcoming foreigners to our country.
I spend the rest of the class period focusing hard on what Mrs. Belk is saying, my eyes on the front of the room.
When the bell rings, the two familiar-looking girls turn around and stare at me, and I see that they are Caroline Lushamp and Kendra Wu, girls I’ve known since first grade. After I was rescued from my house, they were interviewed by the press, referred to as “close friends of the troubled teen.” The last time I saw them in person, Caroline was a homely eleven-year-old who wore the same Harry Potter scarf every day, no matter how hot it was. Her other distinguishing factors were that she’d moved to Amos from Washington, DC, when she was in kindergarten, and she was self-conscious over her feet, which had these very long toes that curled like a parrot’s. The thing I remember about Kendra is that she wrote Percy Jackson fan fiction on her jeans and cried every single day over anything—boys, homework, rain.
Caroline, of course, is now eight feet tall and beautiful enough to be a shampoo model. She wears a skirt and a tight little jacket, like she goes to private school. Kendra—whose smile appears to be tattooed on—is dressed all in black, and is just pretty enough that she could hostess at the Applebee’s on the good side of town.
Caroline says to me, “I’ve seen you before.”
“I get that all the time.”
She stares, and I know she’s trying to place me.
“I’ll help you out. Everyone gets me confused with Jennifer Lawrence, but we’re not even related.”
Her eyebrows shoot up like rubber bands.
“I know, right? It’s hard to believe, but I went on Ancestry.com and double-checked.”
“You’re the girl who was trapped in her house.” She says to Kendra, “The fire department had to cut her out of there, remember? We were on the news?”
Not You’re Libby Strout, the girl we’ve known since first grade, but You’re the girl who was trapped in her house and was the reason we got to be on television.
Mick from Copenhagen is watching all of this. I say, “You’re thinking of Jennifer Lawrence again.”
Caroline’s voice goes soft and sympathetic. “How are you doing? I was so worried. I can’t even imagine what that must have been like for you. But oh my God, you lost so much weight. Didn’t she, Kendra?”
Kendra is technically still smiling, but the upper half of her face is pinched into a frown. “So much.”
“You look really pretty.”
Kendra is still smile-frowning. “I love your hair.”
One of the worst things a pretty girl can say to a fat girl is You look really pretty. Or I love your hair. I realize lumping all pretty girls together is just as bad as lumping all fat girls together, and I realize that you can be pretty and fat (hello!), but it’s been my experience that these are things girls like Caroline Lushamp and Kendra Wu say to you when they’re really thinking something else. These are pity compliments and I feel my soul die a little. Without a word, Mick from Copenhagen gets up and walks out of the room.
Caroline Lushamp is the closest thing I have to a girlfriend. This used to be because she was geeky and sweet, and, most of all, smart. When I first fell for her, she was the kind of smart that didn’t make a show of it—that came later. She would just sit back and soak things up like a sponge. We’d get on the phone after everyone else had gone to sleep, and she’d tell me about her day—what she saw, what she thought. Sometimes we talked all night.
The Caroline of today is tall and gorgeous, but her biggest identifier is that she can part a crowd. She intimidates the hell out of everyone, even the teachers, mostly because she speaks up now—always—and tells it like it is. The main reason we’re still at all on-again is history. I know she must still be in there even if there’s no sign of her. This new Caroline arrived without warning, sophomore year, which means the old Caroline could (possibly) come back at any minute. The other reason is that she is generally easy for me to recognize.