Then, as if my pencil had a mind of its own, it moved over to the fake wood desktop and jotted down the words playing in my head:
Stretch out your wilting petals and let the light in.
I added a drawing of a little sun, its rays touching some of the words. Now, just forty-three minutes left of class.
I was in the midst of writing in my notebook and walking down the hallway—something I hadn’t quite mastered, despite how many times I had done it—when I heard the laughter.
I thought it was directed at me, so I looked up. It wasn’t.
A blond kid—a freshman, maybe—stood in the middle of the hall, books gripped to his chest. Balanced precariously on top of his head was a baseball bat. Cade Jennings stood behind him, holding his hands out to his sides like he had just let go of that bat.
“Toss me the ball,” Cade said to his friend Mike, who was standing across from him and the poor freshman.
Mike did just that and now Cade was trying to figure out how he was going to reach the top of that bat to place the ball. The kid looked too terrified to move.
“I need a chair. Someone find me a chair,” Cade said, and people immediately scrambled to do his bidding. The bat began to wobble, then fell, bouncing across the tile floor and coming to a stop against the lockers.
“You moved, dude,” Cade said to the freshman boy.
“Try it again,” someone in the watching crowd called.
Cade smiled his big, perfectly white–toothed smile. The one he used a lot, knowing its power. I frowned. I seemed to be the only one immune.
As much as I didn’t want to draw attention to myself, I knew I should probably help the cowering kid.
But I wasn’t sure what I could do. Being the center of unwanted attention thanks to Cade Jennings was something I was very familiar with …
I thought back to freshman year P.E. I wasn’t one of those girls who thought she was horrible at everything. But I did know my weaknesses, and P.E. was one of them. And co-ed basketball was the ultimate form of P.E., so I did my best to stay as far away from the ball as possible.
For reasons that I later realized were probably malicious, the ball was constantly thrown to me. By my team, by the opposing team. And I could never catch it. It was like being the only target in a game of dodgeball. I was hit in the shoulder, the back, the leg.
That’s when Cade, who had been sitting on the bleachers, shouted for everyone to hear, “It’s like she possesses a force of energy that sucks the ball straight into her. A black hole. A Magnet. Lily Abbott, the Magnet.”
He’d said that last part in a movie announcer voice. Like he had transformed me into some sort of clumsy superhero. Then all through the gym, everyone copied him. Using that same voice, and laughing.
They’d laughed and laughed, and the laughter had stuck in my ears just as the nickname “Magnet” had apparently stuck in everyone’s heads.
And now that kind of laughter was happening again, in the hall, and it was directed at Cade’s latest victim.
I cleared my throat and said, “Oh look, a game to see who is more thick-headed—Cade or his bat.” I nodded to the side, trying to tell the kid to leave now that I’d distracted Cade.
Cade’s smile doubled in width as he took me in, from the top of my hair—its waves feeling crazier under his scrutiny than normal—to my Docs with mismatched shoelaces. “Oh look, it’s the monitor of fun. Is there too much of it happening here, Lily?”
“I only see one person having fun.”
He glanced around at the hall crammed full of students. “Then you’re not looking hard enough.” He lowered his voice. “I get it. It’s hard to see anyone beyond me, right?”
If I showed how annoyed I was, he’d just be winning. “I’m just here to rescue another soul from your arrogance,” I said through gritted teeth.
Although maybe I wasn’t rescuing anyone at all. The kid hadn’t moved. I’d given him a wide opening to leave and he still stood there. In fact, he opened his mouth and said, “What if you put the ball on the bat first and then put the bat on my head.”
Cade patted him on the back. “Good call. Where’d the bat go?”
I sighed. There had been no need for an intervention. The kid liked abuse, apparently. I resumed my walk.
“Next time, come by earlier. We wouldn’t want things to get out of hand,” Cade called, to more laughter.
Anger surged up my chest and I whirled around. “Have you ever heard of alliteration? You should try it.” It was a lame comeback. An inside argument that he wouldn’t get, but it was the only thing that came out. The kids around him laughed harder. I turned and it took everything in me to walk away at a normal speed.
“I’m going to enter a songwriting competition,” I said.
Isabel’s hand paused while reaching for her pajamas.
It was Friday night and we were at her house about to watch a scary movie. I had held in this announcement since I’d read about the contest the day before, turning it over in my mind. Now I’d said it out loud. That meant I’d have to follow through. I would follow through.
“You are?” Her voice held more than a little skepticism.
I threw myself back onto her queen-size bed and stared at the poster of Einstein pinned to her ceiling. I wondered, like I always did, how she could sleep with him staring down at her like that. I always had a hard time.
But I still loved sleeping over at Isabel’s. She was an only child, so her house was like an oasis of calm for me. We would eat dinner with her parents—tonight it was delicious homemade tamales with rice and beans—and then we’d come upstairs to hang out in her giant room, with its own pullout sofa, TV, and tiny refrigerator for stashing Diet Cokes and ice cream.