I fought the urge to look over my shoulder at TJ’s empty chair, only now beginning to understand the strange shift in the school’s collective mood. “Ten? Why ten?”
“No one knows. Probably someone’s jersey number.” She waved it off. “A bunch of the players were in the store this morning and my brother heard them talking. The Hornets’ captain is number ten, but he’s pointing the finger at Vince DiMorello.” “Wait. Our Vince DiMorello? Vince-Who’s-Overly-Fondof-His-Middle-Finger DiMorello?” Vince was number ten for our team, but I couldn’t imagine him pulling a stunt like this.
TJ and Vince were best friends. “Why would they think Vince had anything to do with it?”
Anh pushed a fresh pencil toward me, as if to remind me to get my head back in our own game. “Apparently, Vince and Emily have been fighting a lot lately.” I remembered the look on his face before the pep rally, when she’d smacked the back of his head in front of all his teammates. “But it doesn’t matter anyway. The rest of the team is standing by him. They told the police Vince was with them after the game. And everyone on North Hampton’s team was accounted for.”
Of course they’d say whatever they needed to in order to protect their star player. But this sounded like more than a prank. Getting drugged, stripped, and marked, and left under the bleachers was a lot worse than stink bombs in your locker or marker on your lab table. Even worse than a dead cat on your porch.
I shook off the news and concentrated on helping Anh, but my mind had a slippery unfocused feeling. The nagging kind that slinks around behind your thoughts like a word on the tip of your tongue. My brain stuck stubbornly on the image of Emily. Her blue cheerleader uniform. Her limp body under the bleachers.
Under the bleachers.
Newton was wrong. We clash with yellow. Find me tonight under the bleachers.
I eased into my chair as the colors of Newton’s wheel spun in my mind. Isaac Newton’s color theory was based on a wheel.
Colors that appear opposite each other on the wheel are complementary. But if we were talking about school colors, like in the case of Friday’s game, the opposing colors wouldn’t complement. They would . . . clash. Our school color was blue.
The color directly opposite blue on the wheel was . . . We clash with yellow.
“Their school colors . . .” I muttered, a prickling curiosity creeping through me. I reached for a beaker and kept my voice as matter-of-fact as I could. “Do you know what colors they painted her?”
Anh slipped off her gloves, the lab completed before I’d even had a chance to start. “One side of her was painted blue and other side was—”
Yellow, I thought. Only I must have said it out loud. Anh looked at me, analytical eyes asking all kinds of questions. I turned away. Began clumsily collecting up the tools, knowing I was stuck with the dishes since she’d done all the work. I shrugged as if I wasn’t at all surprised before I answered the question on her face. “Just a hunch.”
? ? ?
That afternoon, I was still thinking about Emily when I felt the light tug on my sleeve.
“Hey, are you okay?”
I withdrew my arm. I didn’t like being touched, but Marcia Steckler was an “artist,” and they tended to be touchy-feely like that.
“Yeah, I’m fine.” I pushed my glasses up my nose for the six hundred and ninety-seventh time. They slid back down again. I thought about taking them off, but I was unfocused enough as it was. “I’m sorry, what were you saying?” “It’s okay.” Marcia stretched gracefully. “I’m distracted too.
Opening night is this weekend. Algebra is the last thing on my mind.”
She looked like a dancer. Her loose cotton tank drifted over pale willowy limbs. How was she so comfortable exposing so much skin?
“Algebra needs to be on your mind for another fifty-three minutes.” I glanced pointedly at the clock.
She leaned close as if she was ready to confess a secret and I pressed back into my chair.
“I’ve got a sixty-nine percent in algebra. If I don’t get it up to a passing grade, the principal can pull me from the show.
And if Principal Romero doesn’t, my mother will.” “So we’d better get to work.” I flipped through the textbook, eager to put a pencil in her hands to keep them away from me. She seemed nice enough, but you can’t always judge a person by the parts they choose to show you. Touching someone, getting close, always reveals the darker parts they don’t want you to see. And I really didn’t want to know any of Marcia Steckler’s deep, dark secrets. “You know, the play’s the thing and all . . .” I mumbled.
“Hey, you know Shakespeare?” She beamed, spine pulled straight as though someone had tugged a string at the back of her head. “No way!”
I answered with a sour smile. Why did everyone assume that because I was good with equations, I was only onedimensional?
“Methinks thou doth protest too much, Ophelia.” I rolled a pencil across the desk. “No more stalling. Time to do some algebra.”
6