Still at the classroom door, Alice wiggles her fingers. Her nails are painted glossy red. “Hi, dear.”
Mr. Frederics walks halfway to the door. “Mrs. Sawyer. What can we do for you?”
“Alice, call me Alice.”
“All right, Alice.”
She turns her bright smile to me. “I know you’re all trying to watch your carbs, but what’s life without a few treats now and then?”
Melanie’s shocked expression doesn’t change, but several people cheer. The box with the cake starts to slip but Alice catches it before it drops. “Oh!”
Mr. Frederics hurries the rest of the way to Court’s mom. “Er, let me help you with that.” He sets the cake and Alice’s plastic bag, through which forks are sticking, on a bookshelf.
Alice, still standing in the doorway, beckons him back. Mr. Frederics waves his hand at me, carry on, then follows her into the hallway. We all watch them leave.
Standing at the white board, I break into a cold sweat. The elixir has kicked in. I’m too late.
Everyone’s eyes shift to me. I turn back to the problem on the board, which suddenly looks like hieroglyphics. How do I do this again?
“Your mom’s hot, Melanie,” calls one of the smart mouths in the back of the room.
The guy next to him chortles. “Yeah, does she do home deliveries?”
“Shut up,” says Melanie.
From the front row, Valerie, who prefers Val, probably because she fancies herself the future valedictorian, stabs her perfectly sharpened pencil toward the board. “Could you finish the problem?”
I start writing numbers while I run what-if scenarios in my head. If I don’t PUF Alice soon, no amount of elixir will stop her crush from developing. Like a car with balding tires on black ice, she’ll careen out of control.
“Um, wrong,” says Val.
The string of numbers I wrote on the board are as random as a lottery draw. Mr. Frederics is still out in the hallway chatting with Alice. What could they possibly be talking about for so long?
“Mr. Frederics?” I call loudly.
He reappears in the doorway. “Yes, Mimosa?”
“I’m just not sure what to do here.” Probably it’s the easiest problem on the planet. From behind Mr. Frederics, Alice stretches up on her tippy toes to see me.
Someone snickers, probably Vicky. I do my best to block her kumquat smell from my nose.
“Ah, well, I stumped you.” Mr. Frederics chuckles.
“Yes, you sure did.” My knees threaten to buckle under the weight of thirty pairs of eyeballs.
“Just sit down,” Val mutters.
Mr. Frederics swivels his head back and forth between Alice and me.
“Oh, I don’t mean to keep you,” says Court and Melanie’s mom. “Please, go back to your work. Enjoy the cake. Good-bye, Melanie.”
Melanie’s gone as white as the board. It’s hard to say which of us is more horrified.
A trail of black scuff marks leads out the classroom door and into a marble hallway, ringing with the noise of the eight hundred kids who attend SGHS. I keep myself even more closed off than usual, eyes peeled for signs of pollen-induced crushes from everyone who passes too close. I’ve infected more people than I realize, more people than I have enough BBG for. My chest seems to squeeze my heart like a fist, and I can’t help wondering if my being here is causing more harm than good.
Everything feels more acute when the body is stressed, and it’s the same with my nose. All the smells barrel down on me, noisy as an orchestra of ten thousand instruments tuning up. As I walk, I identify them one at a time, an exercise that relaxes me.
Pictures of homecoming courts from years past line the walls, hairstyles broadcasting the decades. I stop in front of last year’s photo, in which a taller and prettier version of Vicky smiles back at me. On her head is the tall, dazzling crown that marks the homecoming queen.
“That’s Vicky’s sister, Juliana.” The student council president Lauren’s voice causes me to jump. She shakes her hair, throwing off glitter, and pops the tab off her diet soda.
“Did you know her?”
“Yeah, she was a senior when we were sophomores. We all wanted to look like her. She was smart, too. Got into Oxford. And a nice person.”
A trifecta of talents. Vicky has some pretty high heels to fill. Maybe that explains why homecoming is so important to her, because as far as I can tell, she is neither a nice person, nor valedictorian material.
Lauren’s braces twinkle. “So you got your candy grams?”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
“No, thank you. You boosted our sell-through rate by 10 percent.”
“Oh wow.” Nothing more original comes to mind.
“I got one and it said, ‘You have nice buns.’ Pascha thinks she’s funny.”
“I’d take one good friend over a hundred admirers any day.”
She grins. “Me, too. Hey, Pascha and I are getting froyo after school. We used to do ice cream, but I need to lose some weight.”
“You?” I eye her five-foot-two frame with its normal-size everything except for a larger-than-average chest.