“They messed up my schedule and I didn’t have an English class,” she was saying. “I had U.S. History for two periods, and I already took U.S. History at my old school.” She sounded frustrated, and I tried not to smile. She’d never had U.S. History, not the way Mr. Lee taught it.
“Of course. Take any open seat.” Mrs. English handed her a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird. The book looked like it had never been opened, which it probably hadn’t since they’d made it into a movie.
The new girl looked up and caught me watching her. I looked away, but it was too late. I tried not to smile, but I was embarrassed, and that only made me smile more. She didn’t seem to notice.
“That’s okay, I brought my own.” She pulled out a copy of the book, hardback, with a tree etched on the cover. It looked really old and worn, like she had read it more than once. “It’s one of my favorite books.” She just said it, like it wasn’t weird. Now I was staring.
I felt a steamroller plow into my back, and Emily pushed through the doorway as if I wasn’t standing there, which was her way of saying hello and expecting me to follow her to the back of the room, where our friends were sitting.
The new girl sat down in an empty seat in the first row, in the No Man’s Land in front of Mrs. English’s desk. Wrong move. Everybody knew not to sit there. Mrs. English had one glass eye, and the terrible hearing you get if your family runs the only shooting range in the county. If you sat anywhere else but right in front of her desk, she couldn’t see you and she wouldn’t call on you. Lena was going to have to answer questions for the whole class.
Emily looked amused and went out of her way to walk past her seat, kicking over Lena’s bag, sending her books sliding across the aisle.
“Whoops.” Emily bent down, picking up a battered spiral notebook that was one tear away from losing its cover. She held it up like it was a dead mouse. “Lena Duchannes. Is that your name? I thought it was Ravenwood.”
Lena looked up, slowly. “Can I have my book?”
Emily flipped through the pages, as if she didn’t hear her. “Is this your journal? Are you a writer?
That’s so great.”
Lena reached out her hand. “Please.”
Emily snapped the book shut, and held it away from her. “Can I just borrow this for a minute? I’d love to read somethin’ you wrote.”
“I’d like it back now. Please.” Lena stood up. Things were going to get interesting. Old Man Ravenwood’s niece was about to dig herself into the kind of hole there was no climbing back out of; nobody had a memory like Emily.
“First you’d have to be able to read.” I grabbed the journal out of Emily’s hand and handed it back to Lena.
Then I sat down in the desk next to her, right there in No Man’s Land. Good-Eye Side. Emily looked at me in disbelief. I don’t know why I did it. I was just as shocked as she was. I’d never sat in the front of any class in my life. The bell rang before Emily could say anything, but it didn’t matter; I knew I’d pay for it later. Lena opened her notebook and ignored both of us.
“Can we get started, people?” Mrs. English looked up from her desk.
Emily slunk to her usual seat in the back, far enough from the front that she wouldn’t have to answer any questions the whole year, and today, far enough from Old Man Ravenwood’s niece. And now, far enough from me. Which felt kind of liberating, even if I had to analyze Jem and Scout’s relationship for fifty minutes without having read the chapter.
When the bell rang, I turned to Lena. I don’t know what I thought I was going to say. Maybe I was expecting her to thank me. But she didn’t say anything as she shoved her books back into her bag.
156. It wasn’t a word she had written on the back of her hand.
It was a number.
Lena Duchannes didn’t speak to me again, not that day, not that week. But that didn’t stop me from thinking about her, or seeing her practically everywhere I tried not to look. It wasn’t just her that was bothering me, not exactly. It wasn’t about how she looked, which was pretty, even though she was always wearing the wrong clothes and those beat-up sneakers. It wasn’t about what she said in class— usually something no one else would’ve thought of, and if they had, something they wouldn’t have dared to say. It wasn’t that she was different from all the other girls at Jackson. That was obvious.
It was that she made me realize how much I was just like the rest of them, even if I wanted to pretend I wasn’t.
It had been raining all day, and I was sitting in ceramics, otherwise known as AGA, “a guaranteed A,”
since the class was graded on effort. I had signed up for ceramics last spring because I had to fulfill my arts requirement, and I was desperate to stay out of band, which was practicing noisily downstairs, conducted by the crazily skinny, overly enthusiastic Miss Spider. Savannah sat down next to me. I was the only guy in the class, and since I was a guy, I had no idea what I was supposed to do next.
“Today is all about experimentation. You aren’t being graded on this. Feel the clay. Free your mind.