“Ow,” she says. “You always do that too hard.” She pushes me off her. “People might like her more if she didn’t have such a chip on her shoulder.”
“Who?”
“Libby Strout.” She has been talking about Libby all night—at dinner, during the movie, on the ride home.
I laugh because, coming from Caroline, this is hilarious.
“Why is that funny?”
“It’s not. But you know, pot. Kettle.”
“No, I don’t know.” She crosses her arms. “Tell me more.”
Smooth it over. Tell her what she wants to hear.
But I don’t because suddenly I can’t do it anymore. She’s exhausting and I’m exhausting, and we’re exhausting. I’ve been telling her what she wants to hear for the past four years.
I say, “You know what? I’ll talk to you later.”
“If you walk away, Jack, don’t come back. You don’t get to do that and come back.”
“Thanks. Got it.”
I feel this weird nervous energy, like I’m doing something big and life-altering. I tell myself, You need her, as I get back into the Land Rover and drive away.
I head straight to the scrap yard, where I jump the fence and wander through and no one bothers me because it’s late and dark and I’m the only one here. It’s amazing what you can find—old license plates, old screws, a metal bumper. For me, the greatest item of all is gears. Whether they’re small or big, it doesn’t matter—gears are like the power source for almost all machines, the thing that decides their force and speed.
I dig for a while, and it’s peaceful, like I’m the only living soul for miles. But my mind’s not in it. My heart’s not in it. Too much of my life feels like this already—trying to recycle something old into something new and better, disguising someone else’s trash as some fresh, shiny thing.
In the driveway of my house, I pull out my phone. Thirteen texts and one voice mail from Caroline, sent over the past hour. A text from Kam. Another from Seth. I open my email and wait for it to load. I’m thinking about Libby Strout when I see it. The email. Delivered at 6:35 p.m.
A reply from Brad Duchaine of the Prosopagnosia Research Centers at Dartmouth.
MONDAY
* * *
Before first period, Heather Alpern and the Damsels are running drills on the football field. I stand on the sidelines and watch them, and I can’t move because there they are. I’m starstruck. The Damsels are sixty-five years old this year. They were originally created by two students who loved to dance, and the first-ever team was made up of twenty girls. They wore skirts to their knees, which some people found shocking, and white gloves, and they performed with pom-poms and flags. Now there are forty members, thirty-nine without Terri Collins. At the end of the school year, everyone in Amos will turn out for the Damsels Showcase, which is held in Civic Auditorium, the town’s performing arts center. And I want to be on that stage.
I’m in a good mood until third period. After all, I have faced Moses Hunt without the sky falling. I’ve made up my mind to be a Damsel. And I’ve walked around in Jack Masselin’s skin and been, yes, the bigger person.
I’m practically whistling as I go to my locker. Iris follows me, wanting to know why I’m so happy. And then I open the door.
The letters fall out like confetti. They are everywhere, across the hallway, like a carpet. People are trampling them as they pass, and I’m on my knees trying to collect them before anyone can see them and connect them with me.
Iris bends over, helping me. She opens one up and reads, “ ‘You aren’t wanted.’ ” She opens another. “ ‘You aren’t wanted.’ ” I grab the letters from her so she won’t stand there reading every single one. There must be a hundred of them. “Are these for you?”
“That’s my guess, Nancy Drew.”
“Who would do this?”
But I know it’s rhetorical because Iris Engelbrecht, more than anyone else, knows what people are capable of.
When I don’t answer, she says in her matter-of-fact Eeyore voice, “You need to tell someone. Take them to the principal. Come on. I’ll go with you. Let’s go right now. They can write us a pass for next period.”
I’m stuffing the letters into my backpack. “I’m not going to the principal with this.” And I sound as hurt, angry, and upset as I feel.
“Weren’t you the one who told me to be brave?”
“I never told you to be brave.”
“You told me if I didn’t speak up, Dave Kaminski would think he could go on doing things like that to me.”
“This is different.”
“No, it’s not. You have to let them see they can’t do this to you. Let’s go.”
I can feel the fluttering in my heart start to steady itself. This is another effect Iris has on a person. She’s the human equivalent of Valium.
I slam the locker door closed, shoulder my backpack, and start walking, the weight of all those letters drilling me into the ground. Iris trudges along behind me, still talking. “Okay, I get it. I guess you can look on the bright side instead. It won’t last forever. Eventually they’ll find someone else to focus on, and then this whole Fat Girl Rodeo thing will be forgotten.”
As if on cue, a group of boys goes by, hollering in my direction. Things like “Saddle up, fellas! Who wants a turn?”