Skylar shuddered. How had this photo ended up with her things? She looked up and saw herself in the mirror. Nothing about her glowed. Her forehead was crinkled in concentration, her shoulders tight, hair limp. She could find none of Lucy’s confidence in her own reflection.
No. The memory of that life was not going to follow her to Maine. Lucy couldn’t cast a shadow on her now—not this far away.
Things would be different here.
Skylar walked to the trash can in the corner of her new room. Calmly and deliberately, she began to tear the photo apart. She ripped it into tiny pieces, and then she shredded even those, until there was nothing but a pile of glossy confetti in her hands.
It felt shockingly good to destroy the photo, in the same way that losing fifteen pounds, painstakingly, over the past year, had felt good; in the same way that the flight from Alabama to Maine had given her a guilty sense of relief. While she’d been flying through the air, her mother had sat behind bars.
Skylar gulped back a lump in her throat as she started laying out her outfit for the morning: a pretty white peasant blouse from Free People, a pink cardigan, her favorite dark-wash jeans, and gray ankle boots.
She had a chance to rebuild her life—no, to build a life, period. To be accepted. To be loved. Her eyes fell on a long silver necklace, and she smiled as she placed it next to the white blouse. Yes. At Ascension High, she would sparkle.
? ? ?
It wasn’t like she’d never walked up stairs before. But the next morning Skylar’s coordination was off, and at 9:18, between first and second periods, Skylar made her first big mistake: She tripped up a flight of stairs. Boom.
She launched forward, catching herself on her palms but practically face-planting. She looked behind her—nothing but a sea of nameless faces, moving together toward their next class. Somebody’s boot struck her bag, and she scrambled to retrieve it before it tumbled down the steps. She got up and brushed herself off, trying not to make eye contact with anyone, her face burning with embarrassment.
Not that things had been going great before that. Her short meeting with Aunt Nora and the Ascension High principal had been less than reassuring. Principal Noyes had seemed doubtful that Skylar would be able to catch up in some of her classes; she’d suggested Skylar might have to take summer school. Then Skylar had gotten lost trying to find math, first period. And now stairwell humiliation. She could have been wearing an invisible cloak and she still would have felt like she was being trailed by a spotlight.
After second period—French—Skylar found herself speed-walking through an otherwise empty hallway in what she thought must be the science wing, based on the fact that she’d just seen a portable skeleton dangling in one of the classrooms. The bell had sounded more than ten minutes ago, but she’d gotten lost making her way through the hallways. She was late for Honors Biology, if she could ever find it. She pulled out her crumpled class schedule, comparing the information there with the numbers on the doors. Finally she made her way to room 209. She opened the heavy wooden door with an apologetic expression, only to be greeted by twenty quizzical faces—and no indication that this was a biology classroom.
“Can I help you?” The teacher, a distracted-looking man with glasses and chalk on his wrist, turned away from the equation on the board to face her.
“Um, yeah, I’m looking for . . . is this . . . I think I’m in the wrong place,” she stuttered. The symbols scrawled on the board made it clear that this was a math class. She’d already had geometry first period.
The teacher didn’t say anything—he seemed to be waiting for her to leave. The other kids—who, Skylar noticed to her embarrassment, looked older than her—kept staring at her blankly. Well, not just blankly. The girls looked her up and down. She was frozen with humiliation, and her cheeks were burning. She was sure they matched her pink sweater.
“Okay, thanks, sorry to interrupt.” She knew that she should ask for directions. If this wasn’t the science wing, then where was she? But she couldn’t stand the idea of being on display even a second longer. She felt as exposed as the skeleton she’d seen just a minute ago, as though she’d been cut open straight through the gut. She turned to go.
And then a perky voice rang out across the classroom. “Where are you supposed to be, anyway? Maybe I can help. Right, Mr. Marshall? May I be excused for a few minutes? I really get this section anyway.”
The voice came from a girl with a head of tousled blond curls. She looked just like an angel, Skylar thought, with a perfect, round face and sparkling blue eyes. The girl gave her a little wink, and Skylar breathed for the first time in what felt like minutes.