I shake my head at them and go down the stairs to get them their stupid Cokes. As soon as I turn away, they start to bicker about something else. Now that I’m gone, they don’t have any reason to team up. Silly old ladies, I think, affection for them blooming in my chest.
The stands have emptied out, and I’m grateful. I don’t like having to make my way through crowds, pushing myself against them or asking them to move aside, feeling too big and too small at the same time. Watching their eyes go up and down me, trying to figure out what it is about me that is so off. What it is that works so well in Marcus but didn’t quite come out right in me. Same ingredients, different result. Like a cake that came out perfectly one time and a little squashed the next. I know I don’t look like anyone else at this school, or maybe even in all of Atlanta. Hell, maybe in all of Georgia. I know I don’t look like my mom, with her bird bones and silky black hair. I don’t look like LaoLao or Granny Dee either, as Granny Dee will tell you when she tries to do my hair. “Child,” she’ll say, pulling out one of my curls and watching it spring back with a bemused expression. “How can your hair be so fine but so tangly at the same time?” It never stays in braids, wisps of it coming out, but it won’t straighten either. Granny Dee doesn’t know what to do with it. Or with the rest of me. She’ll cluck at my hips and my butt, like I asked to have a big butt, and then she’ll look up at me, because I’m more than just a bit taller than her, and LaoLao and my mother for that matter, like she can’t believe any granddaughter of hers takes up so much space. And even though LaoLao is one of the fattest old ladies I’ve ever seen, even she always has something to say about my size. “You are too big,” she’ll say, all three of her chins wobbling as she shakes her head. “Like a horse. And your skin is so dark!” I don’t know why she sounds so surprised. It’s not like she didn’t know my daddy was black.
Of course, no one ever says Marcus is too big. Marcus couldn’t be too anything. Marcus is perfect.
Marcus. I glance out on the field, hoping to catch a glimpse of my brother, but he’s disappeared with the rest of the team. I probably won’t see him till tomorrow. He’ll be going out tonight with the team to celebrate the win. Out with Monica. Out with Aaron.
Thinking about Aaron makes my heart skip like a little girl with a jump rope.
CHAPTER 3
I’m at the front of the snack bar line and am about to order when someone slips neatly into the narrow space between me and the counter, the way a nickel does in the slot of a gumball machine. Someone fair and small with wavy red hair, mermaid hair. Mermaid hair to match her mermaid green eyes. Someone who reeks of cheap perfume and too much hair spray.
I clear my throat, I can’t help it. It isn’t fair that Heather Parker thinks she can waltz right to the front without even a hint of an excuse me. Heather turns, wavy hair fluttering around her like she’s got an invisible servant fanning her, and glares up at me. It is a special skill, to glare up at someone who is a whole half a foot taller, but it’s something Heather Parker has perfected. She’s had a lot of practice over the years.
“Ew,” she says, her tiny nose wrinkling. “I didn’t know they let the freaks come out tonight.”
You’d think that after hearing something over and over again the blade would dull, but it goes into me every time. Every. Single. Time. Freak. Sinking into me, staining me, like hundreds of invisible tattoos. Freak on my forehead. Freak on my chest. Freak on my arm. Freak on my feet. Freak, freak, freak.
I used to stare at myself in the mirror, wondering what made me so different. I don’t know what it is exactly, but I can’t blend in, and I don’t stand out in a good way like Marcus. I stick out. Marcus, he manages to stand out, to shine when he wants, but he can blend in too. Not me. I can’t blend in but I don’t stand out. And I guess that’s enough for Heather Parker to call me a freak every chance she gets. Enough so everyone else has started to believe it too. Just like when Heather decided that butterfly clips were cool last year, and all the other girls started wearing them. Or when she shunned Lily Asquith for daring to kiss a boy Heather had laid claim to and the next day Lily’s diary was passed around school and the word slut was chalked all over her driveway. It doesn’t hurt that Heather’s father is our local weatherman, which doesn’t sound that glamorous to me, but apparently it’s enough to make Heather practically famous. She says she’s gonna be a news anchor on CNN because she’s got “the face for it” and “all the right connections.” She’s also vicious, but I don’t know if that’s a required qualification to be a news anchor.