CHAPTER ONE
It’s the kind of day that’s hot at dawn. Don’t sweat, don’t sweat, don’t sweat, I tell myself under my breath. It’s the first day of high school. It’s the first day we have to ride a bus to school. It’s the first day for a lot of things.
“6:45? Really?” Ally says, taking her place beside me at our bus stop in the weeds of the empty field at the end of our street.
“Hey Ally,” I say, fussing with my hair. Tingles shoot out of the spots where my hair gathers in two white sparkly ponytail holders. Nothing says so-not-ready-for-high-school like ponytails. The tingles morph into chills as they travel down my back. Ally and I have our first-day-of-school clothes on. She’s in a new skirt because she thinks jeans make her look fat. I’m wearing my new True Religion jeans. Aunt Suzy bought them for me. Mom wanted to return them because she thinks wearing jeans that cost more than a week of groceries isn’t appropriate. But Oakdale High School is full of kids who spend a lot more money on groceries than we do.
“So it’s just us, I guess,” Ally says.
I look down our deserted street one more time, for what seems like the millionth time.
“When did you see her for the last time?” Ally asks.
I shake my head and get this icky feeling in the pit of my stomach. I never liked Adrianne to begin with, you know that. But, in a weird way, I miss her. Especially after the way she sucked up to me all summer. And I won’t lie to you, it felt good having someone like Adrianne suck up to me. Having someone like Adrianne think I have magic powers, which I don’t. I know I don’t. So, don’t think I do or anything. People with magic powers don’t wear ponytails on their first day of high school. I sigh and kick my new black-and-white converse in the dirt.
“It’s so weird,” Ally says, putting her weight on one foot and then the other and then the other. This habit will be the thing that drives me crazy every morning at the bus stop.
Adrianne’s whole family moved out of town in the middle of the night last Wednesday. “It’s the first day of high school and all you want to talk about is Adrianne?” I quasi-yell, because I’m mad Adrianne disappeared without telling any of us where she was going, especially after she was the one who gave me the present that changed my entire life at my first-ever birthday party last year.
“I just want to know what...happened to her.” Ally’s voice turns into a whisper when we both spot a girl walking down our street, headed for our bus stop. We stop talking. I squint, pouring over every detail of the girl’s silhouette in the way-too sunny morning. At first I think it could be Adrianne. But as the girl walks down the street, closer and closer to Ally and me, this girl is shorter and her hair is different than Adrianne’s, way different. It’s red. She’s super-tan too, which try as Adrianne did, she never could tan. As soon as Mystery Girl walks past my mailbox I can’t take my eyes off her wild hair, like Einstein wild, and she hasn’t done anything to tame it.
“Who is that?” Ally says.
“No idea.” I’m not really in the mood for meeting anyone new so early in the morning, since meeting people is all I’ll be doing today at high school.
The low roar of a bus-sized engine wakes me from my new-girl-induced haze. Epically waking me up like some kind of gigantic alarm going off on my growing-up alarm clock. High school will begin the second I step onto that bus. But, I guess it really started last week when we had to go buy our books. Buying books felt even more epic than the bus coming down the street.
I’d just been swimming. My hair was still wet, pulled back in a ponytail, and the smell of ice cream and suntan lotion was in the air even in the high school cafeteria where all our books were laid out by class. Life still felt like summer until my mom said I’ll have to do extra chores to help pay for all my books. Right after Mom laid the bombshell on me, Hayden’s hand brushed against mine while we were in line. He’d been away for a whole month with his parents at Lake Geneva in Wisconsin. His permanently sunny hair sparkled even brighter than usual and he stood almost a full head higher than me now.
He said, “Roxie, is that you?”
I was freaking out at how he didn’t recognize me. But the smile on his face told me this was a good not-recognizing me, not a bad not-recognizing me.
“Wow, you look so, so...” he said, poking around the books in front of us. My stomach tied in nervous knots with me dying to know what his next word would be.
“I like your dress,” Haden said.
“Thanks.” I think the skin on my face went three shades darker than the reddest rose in Dad’s garden.
“Um, wanna hang out before school starts?” he said.
“Sure,” I said, smiling probably the most ridiculously happy smile I’d ever smiled.
“I’ll pick you up at your house and we can ride our bikes to the pool,” he said.
After that, every time my cell rang I jumped, thinking it would be him. And I kept my extra special swimsuit ready for when he did call. And he did call. The next day. We rode to the pool together. It was the best afternoon of my real life. We played categories in the diving well and had cheeseburgers at the snack shack and we got caught in a downpour on the way home and all of it was so like boyfriend-girlfriend. Except we didn’t kiss or hug or anything. But it felt like we were going to maybe two or three times. I couldn’t stop thinking about him.
The school bus drives right by Ally and me and takes a turn around the cul-de-sac by Mrs. Tekla’s house. The smelly bus squeaks to a stop right in front of us, between us and the new girl walking down our street. The bus doors open. Sitting at the top of the stairs is an odd woman rocking major makeup, all bundled in a parka. I rush to the top of the stairs because I want to get a good look at the new girl. But I get sidetracked because of the driver’s perfume, Emeraude. The scent makes me stop cold. It’s Grandma’s perfume. And it’s weird to think that a young cold-blooded woman bus driver who kicks-butt at applying mascara and eyeliner would wear the same scent as Grandma.
“Maybe the new girl knows what happened to Adrianne,” Ally says, slamming right into my backpack, pushing me into the Grandma-scented bus driver.
“What happened to who?” The new girl says like she doesn’t look like Einstein and has lived in our neighborhood longer than we have. She smiles, slithers past our over-gawky selves and sits in the very front seat. Who does that? Who sits in the front? On purpose. I mean, really.
Ally and I walk to the very last seat in back and sit down.
“Weird,” Ally says.
“Very weird,” I whisper back.
I’m not proud of the silent treatment we give the new girl. It isn’t very nice. I can’t explain it. It just sort of happened. Turns out we’re the very first bus stop on the route to Oakdale High School, which is in the super-rich part of town. When we get to Hayden’s bus stop I giggle. He missed the bus on his first day. I look extra-long out the window.
There are four junior highs that feed into the high school. I’m not kidding, that’s how my mom explained it to me. She said feeds. And I’m not going to lie to you, after my first day at Oakdale High School I thought it would literally eat me alive.
No one sits with the new girl. Not the whole way to school. And that makes me feel bad, so I silently decide to, you know, talk to her if I bump into her at school, which isn’t likely. I mean we had one hundred eighth graders at our middle school and there will be six hundred students in our high school class. I make the pact with myself mostly because I never think I’ll ever actually have to talk to her.
Period one, Honors Geometry. I suck at everything else, but not math. Geometry is my thing. I’m as good as my brothers in Geometry. I like shapes. I can see Geometry problems in my mind. And, let’s face it, of all the math––Algebra, Trigonometry, Calculus––it seems like knowing how to figure out how much stuff can fit into different shapes is something that could actually come in handy. Geometry is something I have an outside chance of using in my life. At least it was going to be my favorite class until the new
girl sits down right next to me.
“You’re very dramatic,” she says, her Einstein hair not quite as weird now that I look at it up close. More curly then frizzy.
I just sort of roll my eyes.
“You have a good look for the stage. You’ve got a good profile,” she says.
I’ve never looked at my profile. Note to self: Check profile when I get home. “The stage?” I say. The new girl has a vibe like she’s acted her whole life, totally self-confident. And, I have to say it makes me curious about her. About why she isn’t super-nervous, like me, at a new school in a new town. And why she doesn’t try and tame her curls.
She hands me a hot pink piece of paper and says, “You should try out.”
I hold the flyer in my hands and only have time to read Fall Play Tryouts before Mr. Brunson says “All right. Let’s get busy. This year it’s all about proofs. What is a proof?”
New Girl raises her hand. She doesn’t just raise it, she jolts it in the air, like she’s stabbing something she’s wanted to kill for a very long time.
“Um,” Mr. Brunson stares down at his seating chart. “Wanda.”
She must have the world’s meanest parents because no one would name their daughter Wanda unless they had something against her. I imagine her family as the meanest family on earth. If I was Wanda, I would never forgive them. Never. Somehow I feel even more awkward around her now that I know her name.
“A proof is something that’s irrefutable. It’s an argument for the truth,” Wanda says with this teeny smile.
“Well, yes. In Geometry, a proof is a convincing demonstration that some mathematical statement is necessarily true. A=B; B=C; A=C,” Mr. Brunson adds.
And that equation makes total sense to me. What doesn’t make sense is how the new girl raised her hand and answered the first question at her first class on the first day of a new school. A new high school. I kind of like her style even though her name is Wanda and her hair is crazy, because she is the polar opposite of me when it comes to all things bold.
The rest of the day I’m on the lookout for Hayden, but I never see him. Of course I keep running into Wanda all day and she keeps looking at me with a little, teeny grin. And it gets to me. By the end of the day, while I’m tearing through my locker to get the books I’ll need for my homework, I think Wanda’s grin is the creepiest thing on the planet. It’s almost like she can see right through me. Like she can read my thoughts. Because of this, I’m almost afraid to think anything bad about Wanda at all because I think she might be able to read my mind.
Ally runs up to my locker and says, “We survived our first day!”
We high-five. I wince inside because I kind of think Ally’s acting like an eighth grader. I hope no one hears her. I dig deeper in my locker to try to hide. I was all over the place on my first day of high school. I didn’t like to go all the way back to my locker in between classes just to pick up and drop off my books, but they are so freaking heavy I had to. Besides I was sort of hoping that in making all those extra trips, I’d bump into Hayden. But, no luck.
“Um, just give me a minute,” I say I look around for Hayden one more time. He won’t be on the bus home. He always stays after school for stuff.
“We can’t miss the bus,” Ally says, staring at her cell phone.
I’m late, as usual. I just sort of throw everything in my backpack and when I grab a hold of Wanda’s hot pink flyer I stuff it in there too because of her creepy, teeny grins. Because for a split second I guess I actually think it would be kind of cool if I turned into a completely different person and could actually walk on stage and remember lines.
On our walk out of the high school, on our way to catch our bus, Ally and I pass this model of a T-Rex outside of the science lab. The T-Rex reminds me of pterasaurs and pterasaurs remind me of peacocks and peacocks remind me of eighth grade. The year I was going to chameleon. A year I was going to eagle. I was going to finally become a peacock...popular. That was so last year. I don’t care about peacocks or pterasaurs anymore mostly because it all got me into a ton of trouble. It almost killed me and my brother and I’m not going to obsess about peacocks and popularity ever again. I want a boring year, one where I don’t have to worry about life and death.
Ally and I take our seat in the back of the bus again. It’s the same seat that we sat in this morning and so it makes it our seat for the rest of the year. Wanda isn’t anywhere around. I crane my neck out the window to look up and down the sidewalk when Parka, the bus driver lady, starts the bus.
“What are you doing?” Ally says.
“I’m...” I catch a look in Ally’s eyes, one that says you better not say that you’re looking for that new girl. So I swallow my words, wondering why I care so much about Wanda anyway, wondering how she got in my head so quick. I zip up my half-zipped backpack when the flyer peeks out.
“What’s that?” Ally grabs the hot pink piece of paper and examines it.
“Oh, nothing,” I say, grabbing the paper out of Ally’s hands so fast she doesn’t really have time to read much. I jam it back into my backpack.
Ally smiles the what-the-heck-are-you-from-a-different-planet smile, and tilts her head just a little bit before asking our standard first day of school question, “So, who’s hot? Who’s not?”
I shrug my shoulders.
“I give Hayden a 9,” Ally says.
Hayden is the most gorgeous guy I’ve ever seen and not seeing him for so long over the summer sort of makes him even more gorgeous. Add to that the fact I haven’t even seen him all day on our first day of high school and how we almost kissed last week and, well, Hayden’s got to be a 9.5. I remember how epic it felt when Hayden brushed his hand over mine when we stood in line for our books, right before he said he liked my dress. I didn’t know my heart could beat so hard, so fast. I almost keel over.
“We’ve got World History together. Hayden sits right in front of me,” Ally says.
Now I look at Ally in the way I do when she knows I don’t want to hear any more. It’s so not fair that she has a class with him and not me. Last year we had almost every class together. “This school is too big,” I say, slumping down into my seat, my body wiggles with every bump in the road and my stomach growls. I’d give anything to turn the clock back to last year when my biggest problem was how I was going to have my first birthday party ever, without my parents knowing. I’ve got bigger problems now. Like how I’m ever going to fit into this sea of high school strangers. The hot pink paper still peeks out of my back pack. I sigh.
“You’re so quiet,” Ally says.
“I guess I’m, I don’t know, exhausted!”
“You know what?” Ally says.
I can’t take my eyes off the corner of hot pink paper.
“Roxie, you know what?” Ally taps me on the shoulder and I kind of jump like a scaredy cat.
“What? What’s going on?” I say.
“I saw a 10,” she says with an ear-to-ear smile.
“No way,” I whisper like she’s solved one of the seven mysteries of the world. I think there’s seven mysteries in the world, I think that’s one of the shows on The Discovery Channel. I don’t remember all of them, but for sure finding a real live 10 would be one of them.
Ally’s grin gets bigger and her eyes get all sparkly.
“There’s no such thing as a 10. We decided that a long time ago,” I say.
“We were wrong,” she says.
“10s don’t exist.”
“Yeah, they do,” she says.
I blow my bangs off of my face knowing we’ve gone through all of this before. A million, gajillion times before. And the whole thing seems so middle school, not high school at all.
“He’s a junior. And he’s perfect,” Ally just keeps going on and on. As she rambles, I’m sort of getting the idea that she really believes it.
“A 10? A real, live 10?” I ask, breaking into her commercial for the perfect 10. I can’t help it. Because wheneve
r she gets like this, which really isn’t that often, it always leads to a guy who isn’t. Besides we decided a long time ago that The 10 is an ideal, not actual reality.
She nods like she’s got the best secret ever. “Roxie, you have to trust me. I so can’t wait to show him to you.”
Okay, now things are getting kind of weird because there’s this whole world that Ally knows about that I don’t. The high school world. And that never happened in middle school. She’s seen a 10 and I haven’t. But I still don’t care because they don’t exist. I know this. She never had to ask me to trust her in middle school. About anything. We always trusted each other.
“You’re just in love with a 9. That’s why he’s a 10,” I say.
“Yeah, I’m in love all right. But not with a 10. He is amazing though...” she says smiling.
Trying to avoid the fact that Ally’s just sort of told me she loves my brother Brian, I ask, “So this 10 have a name?” Expecting a popular-name answer like Ethan or Blake or...
“Andy. I didn’t catch his last name. He doesn’t need one!” she says. We both crack up. I’ve got this super dry kind of laugh that makes me cough and Ally wheezes. It’s like an orchestra of laughter and the bus is so loud with people talking that nobody really notices but I think that everyone does anyway. That’s just how I am.
“I’ll believe in him when I see him,” I say.
“Yeah. I can’t wait to see your face. We were so wrong. I think we were wrong about a lot of things in middle school. High school is so much cooler than we ever thought. I mean, Andy actually smiled at me! Me, a 6. A 10 smiled at a 6,” she shakes her head and stares out the window all smiles.
We had both decided this summer, after we made ourselves dizzy from spinning in summersaults underwater for a million, bajillion times that we were both 6s. After we determined our hot factor we sat at the side of the pool with our towels wrapped around us flipping our feet in the water, staring at the gorgeous lifeguards.
“You got homework?” Ally says her smile faded now.
“Yeah, I guess.” I think I wrote my homework down somewhere. Now I look out the window. With every house we speed by, summer seems farther and farther away, just after one day of school. High school is so disorienting. I spent half the day thinking I’d been transported to The Land of The Giants. All the senior guys are so big and some of them have beards and stuff. It’s freaky. I feel like a teeny, little four-year-old next to those guys. And now Ally’s talking about A 10, a real live 10. And I don’t think she’d lie about something like that. Although if he had a beard I think she would have said something. I’m not even sure that a guy with a beard would ever be A 10. And now I’m obsessed with things I never was before. I’m obsessed by Wanda and The 10 and everything Ally does at high school that I’ll never know about.
Finally, after a bajillion stops, after everyone else gets dropped off at their bus stops, Parka Bus Lady stops at our street and says, “Aren’t we one short, girls?”
“I guess the new girl didn’t make it on time,” Ally says.
We take the stairs slow because we’re super groggy by the time the bus drops us off.
It’s just as hot as it was this morning. I break a sweat on the walk to my driveway and check the mailbox on the way. There are a ton of letters and magazines and stuff. I’m the first one home. I pile everything into the crook of my elbow. “See you tomorrow,” I say.
“At least I don’t have to walk the rest of the way with the weirdo,” Ally says.
“Yeah.” But the only thing really weird about Wanda was how she wasn’t all that weird, even with her strange hair. And what was weirder? I kind of like that about her.
Ally waves with the biggest smile on her face, still dreaming about her 10.
I wave back and walk up my driveway. No one’s home and that’s the way I like it. No twenty questions. I key in my code on the garage and run up the stairs to my room, slam my door and collapse on my bed. And I have the weirdest dream. Parka Bus Lady is in it and The 10 is in it, but I can’t make out his face, and Hayden is in it and we’re all dangling from this weird rope bridge by a waterfall and I can smell the forest all around us. And it’s like I’m in some scratch-and-sniff movie where everything around me has a pulse, even the plants. And there’s this snake. A hissing snake. But it just ends up being my mom, waking me up for dinner.
“Roxie, you okay?” Mom flicks my bangs back and feels my forehead.
“Yeah. Just super tired, epically tired.”
“I was the same way after my first day of high school. Here, I bought you a little present.” Mom takes it out of her J.C. Penny shopping bag and holds it out in front of me. And as random as it is to get a robe as a first day of high school present it’s super-cool too. Because it’s super soft and I just want to curl up in super softness and fantasize about The 10 and becoming a star in the school play.
After dinner, which is still kind of weird because we all sit at our same places even though one of us is always missing since Mitch is at college, I think about the night Mitch and I escaped from Planet Popular. The night he doesn’t remember, but I do. I miss how close we were there in the shadow world. I miss Mitch, even though after we astral projected back home, he totally went back to blowing me off all the time, as usual. And after I eat all my chocolate ice cream for dessert I run upstairs and unzip my backpack and take out the flyer Wanda gave me.