“Maggie Mae, you look beautiful!” Mrs. Carpenter said as I walked into the living room the next morning. “Red suits you. Makes your black hair look thick and glossy.”
“Thanks,” I answered, grinning. I put on my new jacket and grabbed my backpack. Mrs. Carpenter handed me a brown paper bag.
“Your lunch,” she said. “I apologize again for forgetting to send you with something to eat yesterday. I hope you like peanut butter.”
“Sounds good.” Peanut butter was definitely not my favorite, but beggars can’t be choosers.
I walked the half mile down the lonely country road to the bus stop and groaned. I was the oldest student there. Probably the only senior who had to ride the bus to school. The students filed onto the waiting bus. I followed and sat in an empty seat.
Nervous jitters zipped around in my stomach as the bus approached Silver High. I kept telling myself that since I looked nice and my hair was clean and dry, today would be better than yesterday.
I made my way through the busy halls more or less unnoticed, arriving at the locker room as the tardy bell rang. The other girls on the track team stopped talking the minute I entered, eyeing me warily. They dressed in silence and hurried out before I had my jeans off.
“Good morning, Miss Mortensen,” Coach called as I strode out onto the track. “Why don’t you go and warm up with the other kids.”
I nodded and headed toward the bleachers, studying my track mates as I approached. And then I copied.
Heel resting on the bleacher, I leaned over my shin and placed my hands to either side of my shoe. With my eyes closed, I breathed out and deepened the stretch. I’d never made a point to stretch before and was shocked at how good it felt, almost as relaxing as stepping into a hot bath. The image of a cat stretching its long, flexible body jumped into my head. My eyes popped open and I backed a step away from the bleachers.
“Did you pull a muscle?”
I spun around. Bridger stood behind me, morning sun gleaming off his black hair. He smiled. I stared at him and tried to think of something intelligent to say. A whistle blew, saving me from my momentary inability to speak.
“All girls line up for hurdles,” Coach called.
I stepped past Bridger and trotted over to the start line with the other girls. Three of us were seniors, the fourth a junior. Esponita was a short, muscular Hispanic girl; Danni Williams was dark haired, tall and lanky, with legs as long as a horse’s; and the third girl, short and wiry-thin like she didn’t eat enough, was Ginger, a junior from my math class.
The whistle screeched and I was off. The three other girls were left in my dust, but as I reached the hurdles, the noise of feet slapping the ground and heavy breathing was creeping up behind me. I glanced to my left. Danni leaped over a hurdle right beside me. It was her long legs—they gave her a huge advantage. I looked forward again and focused, pushing myself to go faster, run harder, jump quicker.
My muscles responded. I began to pull ahead of Danni, gliding over each hurdle. But then something happened. I could see everything perfectly, down to the tiniest detail, as if looking at the world through a microscope—each blade of grass, the splintering white paint on the hurdles, a grain of sand on the track, an ant carrying a crumb on an anthill across the field. Then my ears changed. I could hear the ticking of Coach’s stopwatch—from the other side of the track. The sound of Danni’s pounding heart almost matched my own. In fact, I could hear the heartbeats of everyone on the field, mixing and meshing into one noisy throb.
Then my nails began to grow, pricking sharp against my palms. I panicked. Midleap over a hurdle I froze and my toe collided with wood. I tipped forward and soared through the air before crashing to a painful, bloody stop.
Instantly, my claws shrank back into short, blunt nails, my ears heard nothing but my own heart, and my eyes were squeezed shut against pain. Fear was holding me on the ground. This sort of thing had never happened to me during the daytime, and if anyone saw …
My eyes flew open and stared straight into a pair of hazel eyes, brownish with a circle of green around the pupil.
“Are you hurt?” Ginger asked. She touched my chin and I gasped. Her fingers felt like acid.
“You have road rash on your chin,” she explained, showing me the glimmer of blood on her fingertips.
“Maggie Mae! Are you hurt?” Coach yelled as he ran across the football field. I rolled onto my side and started to push myself up, but groaned and fell back to the track. My palms looked more like raw hamburger than human flesh.
Coach knelt at my side, forcing me to my back as he looked me over, paying special attention to my ankles, rolling each in his hands and asking if it hurt.
“I’m just scraped up,” I said shakily, noting the hole in my new track pants and the bloody knee beneath.
“Good. Scratches won’t slow you down. But these ankles are a secret weapon. I’m glad they survived the fall unscathed. O’Connell,” Coach barked.
I looked at Bridger in time to see the smile slip from his face.
“Yes, sir?”
“Help Maggie to the nurse’s office.”
Bridger rolled his eyes, but came over and helped me to my feet, pulling me up by my wrists.
He strode across the field. I followed a shaky pace behind, and he neither looked at me nor said a single word until we entered the school. Inside, he slowed his pace and eyed my chin.
“So, why’d you freak out like that?” he asked.
“What are you talking about?”
“Right before you tripped on the hurdle, you freaked.”
I ran my finger over four tiny punctures in my palm and was glad the skin around them had been shredded, masking them. “I didn’t freak,” I lied. “Just didn’t jump high enough.”
“Does your face hurt?”
He reached toward my chin and I pulled away before he could touch it. “I’ve had worse.”
“Like that scar in your eyebrow,” he mused, studying my face.
“Yep. That hurt.” The scar, a crescent through my left eyebrow, had come from the big, fat class ring on Mr. Simms’s pinky finger. It had split open my skin when he’d backhanded me across the face—I was twelve years old.
“Well, we’re here,” Bridger said, holding the door to the nurse’s office open. I stepped past him and breathed in his cologne. “Maggie.” I paused and looked at him, thinking how unfair it was that some people were born as gorgeous as Bridger O’Connell. He grinned. “If you need a ride home, I could …” His voice trailed off. I stared at him for a long moment but he left his offer incomplete.
“I don’t want to ruin my reputation,” I finally replied, wondering if I’d heard him right. Had he just offered me a ride home? Maybe, unlike his friends, he had a conscience.
By the time I got out of the nurse’s office and changed into my new outfit, Algebra II was more than halfway over. No big deal since I was repeating the class. I sat through the end of a lecture and pretended to listen.
Instead of hearing the teacher’s voice, though, I kept reliving the incident on the track—not the fall, but what led to it. Even though the damage to my hands should have hidden them, I could see the four pinprick scabs, where my nails had punctured the skin when they turned into …
“Ms. Mortensen,” someone said and I snapped back to the present. Mrs. Tolliver was staring at me from the front of the classroom with that annoyed look teachers get when they realize they’re being ignored. An unanswered problem was written on the dry-erase board. I did the problem in my head and spit out the answer.
Mrs. Tolliver’s satisfied eyes sought out her next victim.
I sat through the rest of the morning as an anonymous presence. No one acknowledged me in any way—not even the teachers—as if I didn’t exist. It was a lonely feeling, almost worse than being outright picked on.
At lunch, I ate my peanut butter sandwich with my back pressed against the brick wall by the girls’ bathroom, staring at a prom announcement taped to the opposite wall.
“So, are you going?” Yana sat down beside me and opened a can of Coke.
I shook my head.
“I’m not going, either. Every school dance I’ve ever been to ended in disaster. And I have to work.”
“I’ve never been to a school dance. I got invited to homecoming last September, though.”
“What happened?” Yana asked.
“He never showed up,” I lied.
The date had lasted five minutes because the instant I got into his car, he tried to tear my dress off. I slapped him and jumped out of his car. We never even made it out of the driveway. And then I had to do chores to pay to get the stupid dress fixed because I’d rented it.
Yana laughed. “Wow. That’s brutal.”
“I know.”
She studied my face, her eyes lingering on my scraped chin. “If you put piñon sap and calendula on your chin, it will heal better.”
“If I put what on it?”
“Piñon sap and calendula. Navajo herbs. Naalyehe mixes them into a salve and sells it. I’ll bring you some tomorrow.”
“Thanks.” I smiled. Yana hardly knew me. Was she a friend? Did I dare have friends? I wondered. I’d never stayed in one place long enough to have friends.
The bell rang and we went our separate ways.
My three afternoon classes were just like the morning. Aside from Yana, no one in the school talked to me; no one said hi. And only one other person noticed I existed at all. Every time I passed him in the hall, Bridger stopped talking to his friends and stared as I walked by, making me antsy in my own skin.
It lasted the whole week. By Friday I felt like a ghost in a school filled with the living, like I had learned to disappear completely unless Bridger or Yana was around. Even though I was dressed like the other students, I was still different.
6
Saturday afternoon, six days since I’d moved to Silver City, Mrs. Carpenter had me out in her future vegetable garden, hard at work tilling the dry earth, with her dogs keeping me company. A cool breeze blew, forming a halo of gold pollen around the ponderosa pines, and milky clouds hid the sky. Even with the breeze, sweat glistened on my skin, making my threadbare T-shirt cling to my back.