In the halls, though, they walked right past her.
I had news for her. I wrote it on a note, which I passed to her when the stack of worksheets came gliding down our aisle one afternoon: I don’t care what they’re saying about you and Mr. G. It wasn’t that I wanted to defend her—we’d never been friends, we’d never been alone in a room together—only that her name had somehow gotten yoked to Mr. Grierson and I wanted to know why. But Lily never wrote back. She didn’t even turn around to look at me, just hunched up in her seat and pretended to understand square roots.
So I was surprised to find her waiting for me by the back door that day when school let out. She wore an elaborately wound scarf, a red one, and a strange kind of jean jacket that buttoned like a sailor’s slicker from knee to neck. I was caught off guard. As casually as possible, I took out a cigarette and lit it—but when I handed it to her she shook her head and stared out at the glistening, glittering, melting world.
“What a mess,” I said, to say something.
She shrugged—very Lily-like, very sweet—and I felt a twinge of exasperation.
I could see her long white throat peeking from beneath folds of red. It made me glad to see that her jacket was shabby up close, the hem torn and dragging in a puddle behind her. For all her experience, Lily had always struck me as inexplicably innocent. And now she seemed inexplicably superior, drifting just past everyone. Say Mr. Grierson, and up she went. Like a balloon.
I took a chance. I whispered, “What’d he do to you?”
She shrugged again, eyes widening.
“Where?”
“Where?” She seemed confused.
I took a step closer to her. “I knew something was up. I could have warned you.” She wasn’t looking at me, and I could see that her hair had been barretted back so one ear was exposed. That ear was bright red in the cold—shiny and strangely lip-like. I had a new thought. “You made that stuff up.”
Though she didn’t say anything, I knew by instinct I’d hit the mark.
“About you and him.” I swallowed.
“Yep.”
We might have been merely standing next to each other on the curb, waiting for the traffic to pass to go our separate directions. We might have been carefully ignoring each other: me with my cigarette, she with an open can of Coke, which she lifted delicately from her jacket pocket. Still, for the moment, I felt very close to her, and it seemed unnecessary to say anything else. The silence between us filled with possibilities. We could hear the trickling of unseen streams, rivulets coursing down the street and sidewalk. We could hear the salt crystals crunching under car tires. Then Lily shook out her Coke in the snow, and it occurred to me that she’d spoken without any sense of occasion at all. It occurred to me that she’d only told me because I had no one to tell. It was like dropping a secret into a snowbank.
My lips felt clumsy around my cigarette. “It’ll pass, you know. People’s talk.”
She shrugged a third time. “You think so? I don’t think so.” She crushed a lump of slush with her boot, pulled at her scarf till she was pretty as anything, long bent arm cutting geometrical shapes in the sky.
She sounded so satisfied, almost smug about it.
I followed her the next day. After eating my peanut butter sandwich in the last stall in the bathroom, I came out and caught sight of Lily going into the counselor’s office. The back of her head, the blue hump of her backpack. She didn’t show up for English that afternoon, but I saw her at the drinking fountain afterward, dark hair fisted in one hand as she bent for a sip. I trailed her when she started up the stairs. On the landing, I watched her eyes move to the second-story window, out of which you could see a few purplish crows towing trash from the school Dumpster. She paused for a second to take that in. I could see the whites of her eyes when she turned her head. Then, as the last bell rang, I watched her walk the length of the fluorescent-lit hall, which was emptying out around her.