I giggle, liking her instantly.
“Carey Blackburn,” I whisper, offering my hand like Ryan offered his. “I’m fourteen and I tested as a seventeen-year-old. They skipped me a year.”
I don’t tell her that I’m feeling right better about it, after meeting her.
Courtney grins. “Us geeks need to stick together. Of course, I mean geeks in the nicest way. Another plus is that Delaney despises me,” she says wickedly.
“An added bonus.”
“For sure . . .”
Pixie’s voice trails off as she all-out stares at me.
Is there something on my face? Am I doing something uncool without realizing it?
“What?” I whisper.
“Sorry. I don’t mean to be rude. But you have to be the most beautiful girl I’ve seen outside of a magazine. It’s hard not to stare. Look. Everyone’s doing it.”
I look up and into so many pairs of eyes, I want to shrink myself into a river mink and hide at the bottom of my knapsack. Delaney’s friends quickly look away. She fumes.
“You must be used to it. I bet people have been doing it your entire life.”
I smile weakly.
“Not that I’m gay or anything,” Pixie adds quickly. “It’s just impossible not to notice.”
Gay? Does she mean happy? I make a mental note to ask Melissa later.
Mrs. Hadley clears her throat loudly in our direction and then addresses the students.
“People, please welcome Carey Blackburn to the sophomore class.”
All eyes stare at me openly now. Delaney and her friends feign disinterest, busying themselves with textbooks, notebooks, and pens.
“Class will come to order. Carey, this is both your homeroom and first-period English. Do you have your book with you?”
I ignore the whispers as I dig through my knapsack for The Winter’s Tale, my nervous hands sending other texts skating across the floor. The girls titter. Pixie uses her foot to herd the wayward books, pushing them next to my chair. I hold up my copy, the front cover pressed with the dusty tread of Pixie’s combat boot.
“Good,” Mrs. Hadley says. “Delaney, please read aloud from where we left off.”
“ ‘Now, my fairest friend, I would I had some flowers of the spring that might become your time of day . . .’ ”
Her voice betrays none of the drama and angst she subjects us to at home. As she reads, I pick up the spilled books and shove them back into my knapsack, squishing my bag lunch, but I don’t care. Pixie juts her head toward the knapsack.
“Didn’t anyone point out your locker?”
I shake my head no. I don’t tell her that I don’t know what a locker is. I bet Delaney and her ladies-in-waiting would get a good laugh out of that.
“I’ll show you after class,” she says.
I pick up my book and hide behind it, pretending to follow along, but the words just blur across the page. I try to adjust to the yellowish light humming from the long overhead bulbs. I feel the walls pressing in, the manufactured quiet stifling. I can smell the human animal: breath, hair, perfume, gum, and even cigarette smoke. I can’t breathe. I feel like one of Nessa’s chipmunks pressed to the back of the rusty birdcage while healing from puncture wounds or a snapped leg.
I peek at Pixie. She mouths the words of The Winter’s Tale by heart, eyes closed, her love for someone named Shakespeare more than obvious. Shakespeare’s words sound like a foreign language to me, a language everyone seems to know except me.
“Don’t you just love Perdita,” she says, opening one eye. “Have you ever seen the painting by Anthony Frederick Augustus Sandys? She has flaming red hair, just like mine.”
I shake my head no.
“In a dream, Hermione appears to Antigonus and says, ‘Name your child Perdita.’ It means ‘loss,’ or ‘the lost she.’ They leave the infant on a seacoast, but a shepherd takes her in and raises her. Later in life, it turns out she’s the princess of Sicily. Can you believe it? She grew up thinking she was one person, only to find out she’s another.”
The princess of Beans. Just like me.
“The painting’s in my art book at home. I’ll bring it in so you can see.”
“Thanks. I’d like that.”
No one told me it could happen when you least expect it, without a plan, a map, or a prayer to Saint Joseph.
A friend. I’ve actually made a friend.
This time, it’s Melissa’s voice I hear.
Good things come to those who let them in. All you have to do is take a chance.
After class, I follow Pixie to the office, where she stands on her tiptoes in an attempt to see over the counter, banging her palm three times on a round metal bell. She turns to me, sighing.
“You can see why I nag my mother to let me wear heels. She thinks I’m trying to grow up too fast. I just want to see over counters.”
She’s a piece of work, as Mama would say.
“Courtney Macleod. What can I do for you?”
A sleek woman approaches, looking like what Delaney would call “superhip.” I immediately covet her coal black boots, formfitting and zipped to her thighs.