I glanced around the room at the other students packing their bags and heading for the door and thought about pretending I hadn’t heard her. But since I knew it’d only create twice the hassle tomorrow, I dragged my feet over to her workstation. “Did I do something wrong?” I asked. I had done so many things wrong in the last few weeks I wouldn’t know where to begin.
She rested her pointy elbows on top of a pristine desk calendar. “Is everything okay, Tor? It’s been a week since you last raised your hand in class, and I don’t think you even bothered turning the pages of your text today. You’re usually one of my brightest students”—I chafed at the phrase “one of”—“so I hesitate to say anything, but so much has been going on, and I want you to know we have resources here to help you process anything that might be upsetting you.”
“You mean about Knox?” I asked, relaxing my posture. “We weren’t exactly friends.”
“Knox … and the other boys.”
“Right, them,” I said absently, kicking my shoe on the classroom floor. “I’m fine, but thanks. Was there anything else?”
She frowned. The corners of her eyes crinkled. “No, that was it, Victoria.”
*
SOMEHOW IT HAD wound up Thursday. Or maybe it was Wednesday. I couldn’t remember anymore.
“Watch it.” Billy Ray’s arm caught me in the shoulder, and my books sprayed onto the floor. I kneeled down to collect them. A sneaker stepped right across the spine of my physics workbook. I pinched the cover and wriggled it back to safety.
For a moment I stayed near the ground, watching the pairs of legs pass by. Worn jeans, tights, boots, tennis shoes, wedges. Part of me wanted to give up, to stay there. What difference did it make, anyway? Knox was dead, and I was in some ways worse off than dead. I was invisible.
I crawled to my feet. No one offered to help. I passed by Cassidy’s locker. She wasn’t there, but I’d seen her yesterday collecting her assignments after math. No sign of Paisley yet.
I met Owen at the cafeteria entrance. “Want to go see that Stan Lee documentary at the cineplex after school? It’ll be over before curfew.”
I yawned. “No, Owen, not really.” Only, I couldn’t remember if I’d bothered to say that out loud.
*
WAS IT FRIDAY already? God, how did that happen?
I stared out the window of the chemistry lab. Dark clouds were beginning to congregate over the school’s campus and beyond the forested blanket of the Hollows. Below the windowsill, zebra grass bowed in the wind. The American flag beat wildly. It had been almost a week since I’d set foot in the cellar, but I imagined the mercury in my father’s glass barometer plunging with the pressure. The Doppler radar, which I’d been studying so intently up to this point, would be electric now with orange and red beginning to spread toward Hollow Pines.
“Tor.” The voice felt far away. “Tor. Hello? Tor.”
I jumped when I felt a hand on my shoulder. “What?” I snapped.
Owen jerked back. His face looked longer, leaner. It was impossible to miss the purple bruises under his eyes that gave away that he hadn’t been getting much sleep. They reminded me of Adam. The amused smile always brimming just at the surface of Owen’s eyes was gone. And that reminded me of Adam, too. “Are you going to help?”
There was nothing clever in Owen’s delivery. He didn’t try to make me laugh. He just pointed to the small lab prep of our would-be science fair project. Set up in the empty classroom was a test tube fitted with a rubber stopper, a piece of glass tubing, and a two-liter soda bottle.
I sighed and turned from the window, where the first droplet had splashed the pane. Owen and I had agreed to abandon Mr. Bubbles. The experiment had already failed. I’d played God and created a monster. Besides, the lower mass and muscle density with that level of voltage would probably never work, anyway.
My lip curled at the sight of our new project, an archaic production of sulfuric acid from sulfur and saltpeter. I dropped my elbows onto the table and looked over Owen’s equations for balancing the reaction:
KNO3(s) + S(s) -----> K2S + N2(g) + SO3(g)
It was all painfully unoriginal. “Have you done the stoichiometry calculation yet?” I asked, my cheek pressed into my palm.
“Not yet,” he said, rinsing the walls of the soda bottle using the small sink in the center of the lab table and leaving them wet.