He said, "I once got smacked in the head, and to this day don't exactly remember it happening. I kept telling people I was fine, but they could tell I was losing track of what I was saying halfway through and was too confused to even know I was confused. It was only when my trainer felt my head—and made me feel it—that we found this big, bloody bump. It only started hurting after that."
Trainer? I wouldn't have picked Julian as the athletic type. He certainly wasn't on any of JFC's sports teams. Maybe at his old school—since he'd only been here since September. Or at his middle school. "Soccer injury?" I guessed. Everyone plays soccer in middle school. Even I had played soccer in middle school.
He froze, as though startled, and I thought maybe he had been a jock at his old high school—swimming or lacrosse or some sport we didn't have. Maybe he was even insulted that I had fallen back on that old standby, soccer. But then he said, "Um, yeah."
Maybe he'd been considering. Maybe he really couldn't remember anything about it.
Because, of course, there wasn't any reason I could think of why he'd want to lie about playing soccer.
"I'm just saying," he told me, "if you're feeling queasy or something, maybe you hit your head." He added, "Though your pupils look fine. You don't feel sleepy, do you?"
"No more than during any other first-period class," I told him.
He grinned, then glanced at the note on Mrs. Starr's door. "She won't be back till this afternoon," he said, and I had no idea if he was able to interpret her code or was just guessing. "Do you mind?"
I didn't know what he was asking until he set down the papers he'd been holding, knelt in front of me, and set his hands on my head. The sunglasses were in the way and our hands collided as he and I both reached for them at the same time. I hung them from the neckline of my shirt, and he felt all over my head.
"This feels stupid," I said.
"No, it doesn't," he countered.
And actually, he was right. It felt kind of sexy. Like having a male hairdresser massage your head. Except with the guy who cuts my hair, I know he's not interested. Could Julian York be interested in me? And was I interested in having him be interested in me? Maybe. Definitely ... maybe. At least maybe enough that I was glad I'd washed and conditioned my hair last night so that my hair smelled like apricots instead of—heaven forbid—hair.
He was leaning close, his eyes unfocused as he concentrated, his fingers moving slowly and gently over my scalp. "I don't feel anything," he told me.
"Maybe you should keep looking," I said, shocking myself with how brazen I was.
He sat back on his heels, laughing. "You're definitely looking better," he told me.
"I'm okay," I told him. "I really don't think anything smacked me on the head. It's just..." Hmm, maybe I should just open up and tell this sweet guy that I've been seeing dead people, witchy people, and blue people.
Yeah, right.
I finished, "It's just that lady died."
"Probably," Julian agreed. "It didn't look good."
I realized he'd left—everyone had left, except for me and Shelley—before the ambulance guys had covered her up.
I found myself saying, "No. I saw her."
Hard to tell what to make of Julian's face.
Waiting, I guess, to see what I'd say next.
And there was no way I could tell a virtual stranger what had been going on.
I finished, "They pulled the blanket up over her face, and they put her in the ambulance, and they left without turning their siren on."
"Rough," Julian acknowledged, meaning, I think, rough that I had witnessed it, because rough is obviously an inadequate word for dying. "Maybe you should ask to see Mr. Harman?"
Mr. Harman is the school psychologist, whose schedule is tougher to figure out than Mrs. Starr's: He doesn't even leave notes on his door; he's just there or, more often, not.
I shook my head.
"Want to come with me to the office?" He picked up his papers. "Talk to Mr. Rajamani?"
Mr. Rajamani, our principal, is actually a pretty good guy. But that didn't mean I wanted to talk to him. "No," I said. "I'd better be heading back to Mrs. Robellard's class."
He gave a pained expression. "Ah," he said as though that explained everything, "you're coming from Mrs. Robellard's class." Then, more seriously, "Are you sure you're okay?"
I nodded, and he stood, which moved him out of the range in which I could see him clearly. But I could see him extend a hand to help me get to my feet.
He hauled me up to a vertical position, then asked, "Still okay?"
"Absolutely."
"Tell someone if you're feeling poorly," he said, sounding like an adult, and an old-fashioned one at that.
I saluted him, trying to be spontaneous and playful, only realizing just as my hand went up what a geeky move that was. But he saluted back, making the gesture cute rather than geeky. Then he picked up his papers and started walking away from me down the hall.
Why didn't I leave well enough alone?
But he'd been so nice, I wanted one more glimpse of him.
So I plucked the sunglasses off my shirt and put them on.
He turned back once more, which was sweet, as though wanting to make sure I was all right, and I waved. He waved back, though hesitantly, probably wondering about the sunglasses, since he wasn't in Mrs. Robellard's first-period class and hadn't heard about my breaking my regular glasses.
Wow, I thought. What's the matter with me? He really IS good-looking.
He faced back around and headed for the office, and that was when I noticed: His ears were long and pointed. I would have seen them—I would have had to have seen them—if they'd been there before, while he'd been kneeling in front of me feeling for evidence of a cracked skull.
So these glasses let me see dead people still walking and talking, they let me see the gorgeous Tiffanie Mills looking like a century-old crone, they let me see blue guys who delighted in mayhem, and they let me see Julian York looking better then he did when I wasn't wearing the glasses, if you didn't mind ears that made him look like he was a refugee from a Star Trek convention.
All in all, I would have felt better if I'd really had a concussion.
7. Conspiracy
I decided I'd been mature about this long enough: It was time to call my mother and ask her to come pick me up right away on account of my blindness. Best not to mention the possible mental aberration. Not wanting to catch sight of any more weirdness, I took off the glasses and felt my way to the pay phone, down by the gym.
When I dialed my mother's work number, her voice mail came on and told me she was in the Syracuse office for the day. Syracuse is slightly over an hour and a half away. She probably hadn't even arrived there yet. I tried to picture myself leaving a message for her to please turn right around and drive another hour and a half back to pick me up from school because I'd broken my glasses.
Hmmm. Naw, that wasn't something I wanted to picture.
The recording went on to tell me that if this was an emergency and I needed to speak to someone in person, I was to dial Paula at extension 335.
Considering I'd never met Paula, I decided she wasn't likely to pick me up, either.
I was desperate enough to call my mother's current husband, Bill. The guy who answered said Bill was away from his desk and asked, "Is this his daughter?"
Geez, a trick question. I said, "Uhh, this is Wendy." Let this guy make up his own mind about the relationship.
He said, "Wendy, he's doing performance appraisals in building fifty-four. Do you need me to get him?"
I remembered Bill obsessing about this at dinner the last couple nights. Performance appraisals are like report cards for the workers at his company, and Bill—being a supervisor—is like the teacher handing the report cards out.
Probably not exactly a good time to interrupt him.
"When will he be through?" I asked.
"One o'clock," the guy told me. "Then he's meeting our supervi
sor for lunch and to get his p.a. So, probably around two o'clock. Should I have him call you?"
School would be almost over by then.
"No, it's nothing important." Surely the lie came through in my voice.
If so, this guy didn't have kids or wasn't good at picking up nuances—someone should probably mention that in his p.a. "Okay," he said, and hung up.
I wouldn't meet up with Shelley till lunch, but I worked out a plan: Without explaining why—just in case I was simply losing my mind—I would have her try on the glasses while Julian and Tiffanie were in view. If they looked to Shelley the way they looked to me, that would prove something ... though what, exactly, I wasn't sure.
Of course, Shelley would need convincing to even try the glasses on. She would point out that she didn't wear glasses. I would tell her: "Just put them on." But what if she couldn't make anything out through the lenses? After all, they fit my prescription. So didn't that mean everything would be a blur to her? And—come to think of it—how come they just happened to fit my prescription? Was that just a coincidence? Or had someone meant for me to find them? Had they, in fact, been made specifically for me?
Yeah, right, I told myself. I was becoming a paranoid conspiracy nut.
The end-of-first-period bell rang, and those girls who had phys ed second period started streaming down the stairs. I had phys ed second period. I put the glasses on so that I wouldn't get run over, then I kept them on for class because I'm bad enough at volleyball even when I can see. I kept them on even though Tiffanie Mills is in my class.
Coach Roycroft blew his whistle at me and said, "Lose the sunglasses until after you win the Olympics, Selmeyer."
Tiffanie, my team's captain, called out, "They're not a fashion statement, Coach. She lost her regular glasses."
"Broke," I corrected, though I was amazed she'd been paying enough attention to know my personal troubles, much less intervene on my behalf. She was probably worried about a delay-of-game penalty. I tried not to look at her, with her warts and wrinkles and all, and her upper arms flapping every time she bounced the ball. At least her gym shorts didn't reveal any more than her skirt had, and I felt personally indebted to whoever it was who'd invented the sports bra.
I was sure the little blue guys would show up—that they always hung around the gym, and that they were the explanation behind my total inability to make actual contact with the ball whenever it came at me. But either they'd gone totally invisible or I simply have no athletic talent at all: No little blue guys, no dead guys, no more guys with pointy ears. The only weird thing was Tiffanie jiggling, wiggling, and flapping all over the court. It was hard to concentrate. Kaylee Shipperd returned a serve right into the side of my head, sending my glasses flying off my face and onto the floor.
Of course, without the glasses, I couldn't see well enough to find the glasses.
But I could make out Tiffanie bending down. "Amazing," she said. I wondered if, holding the glasses, she had caught sight of something dead, blue, or pointed, but then she added, "They didn't break."
By then I'd reached her. "Thanks," I said, trying to lift the frames out of her hand.
But she didn't let go.
"You realize," she told me, "these are the ugliest glasses I have ever seen in my entire life, barring only the goggles Mrs. Spagnola wore after her cataract surgery."
Even though—to my bare eyes—Tiffanie was back to looking straight out of a fashion magazine's pages, I didn't feel she was one to talk about ugly. Still, I didn't say so. "Can I just have them back, please?" I tugged a bit harder—but carefully, not wanting to rip the arm piece off.
Coach Roycroft blew his whistle so that we would hurry up, and Tiffanie, with her wrinkled-nose little smile, released the glasses.
But she glanced down just as she did, and I was close enough to see her startled expression. I was also close enough to see what she saw: her hand, seen through the lenses, gnarled and spotted.
Except by then I had a firm hold on the glasses, and I popped them back onto my nose and around my ears.
Through the lenses, Tiffanie once again looked like the witch out of Hansel and Gretel. I saw her clawlike hand extend toward my face, ready to rip the glasses away, and I stepped back, tripping over Merilee Penzak's big feet. I didn't fall, but bobbled backward so that Tiffanie's hand closed on empty air.
She glared at me. I knew she could see her reflection in the mirrored surfaces, but I could only presume her image there looked normal—otherwise she would have noticed back in biology.
Coach Roycroft blew the whistle yet again. "Did we come here to play?" he demanded.
Well, no. Most of us came because it's a state requirement.
Tiffanie backed off.
I went up to the coach and said, "I broke my regular glasses, and these are prescription lenses, but they're making it too dark in here for me to see well enough to play." That was an out-and-out lie, because the tinted lenses did not make the windowless room any dimmer—though they should have.
Coach Roycroft looked skeptical. He'd had me for two years of gym classes and he knew I wasn't an enthusiast. But he jerked his head toward the bleachers, and I sat out the rest of the period.
In the locker room, I made sure I was always in the middle of a cluster of girls so that Tiffanie couldn't corner me.
Which didn't prevent her from smacking me on the back of my head with her geometry book as we all funneled out in the hallway. She tried to make it look like an accident, like she was just waving her book around while simultaneously walking, talking, and looking for her journalism homework paper. I knew she'd been hoping to knock my glasses clear off my face. Luckily her aim wasn't as good as Kaylee's had been. If there hadn't been all those other people around, I suspected Tiffanie would have tackled me and ripped those glasses off.
Third and fourth period, Tiffanie and I had different classes, though I kept alert in the hallways. And, as the morning wore on, I tried to convince myself that whatever was up with the glasses had worn off because everything looked as it should.
But then when I went to the cafeteria for lunch, I saw the tiny blue guys again—pushing the long serving spoons so the handles would fall into the vats of soup and rigatoni, loosening the shaker cap on the bottle of Italian dressing, sitting on the pats of butter—I can only hope simply to melt them with body heat.
And then there was Tiffanie—which did nothing for my appetite, because she still looked like the poster child for Dr. Frankenstein's Nursing Home for the Terminally Ugly. I hung so close to Shelley that when Nancy Jean, Anna, and Lisa—our usual lunch crowd—joined us, Nancy Jean asked, "You two a couple?"
I spotted Julian paying for his lunch. I was all for getting a boy to join our table. Especially a gorgeous boy. Even if he only looked gorgeous through my lenses. I was just raising my arm when Tiffanie flounced up to him.
Look out, I wanted to warn him.
I don't think I'd ever seen the two of them even notice each other before, but now I saw her witchy fingers clutching his sleeve. She stood on tiptoe and he leaned down so she could get closer to his ear.
Tiffanie Mills whispering something to Julian York?
He looked up.
Right at me.
Then, as though that had been coincidence, he continued to glance around the cafeteria, his gaze stopping at the table where he usually sat, like, Oh, yeah, THERE'S my table.
Tiffanie drifted away as though she'd never stopped him.
The whole thing couldn't have taken more than five seconds.
My arm fell back to the table. Nancy Jean, who'd started a story about Mrs. Robellard's fourth-period class, was still talking. Nobody seemed to have noticed anything amiss.
They know each other, I thought. All this year, they've been pretending to be strangers, but as soon as she realizes I can see her as she really looks, she goes to HIM—the one other person who looks different through my glasses.
I remembered how nice Julian had been outside of Mr
s. Starr's office, worrying about a concussion, feeling my head for bumps.
But then I remembered that I'd had the glasses up on top of my head. I remembered our hands knocking against each other as he, helpfully—casually—tried to remove my glasses.
Had his kindness all been a ploy? Had he, too, realized—before Tiffanie had—that I could see things differently through these glasses?
Had he simply been trying to get them from me?
I realized he and Tiffanie must somehow be in this together. Whatever this was.
And I wasn't in this with anyone.
8. School Bus Madness
"Earth to Wendy," Nancy Jean said. "Earth calling Wendy."
I turned from gawking at Julian York and saw that my friends had all been watching me watch him.
Shelley told the others, "Wendy has developed a sudden fascination with Julian."
"No, I haven't," I protested. I didn't want Lisa, who can be helpful to the point of being annoying, to decide that it would be a friendly thing to wave Julian over to our table.
But I didn't need Lisa to complicate matters.
"Hi, Julian," Anna said.
Let her be teasing, I hoped.
I turned around, and there he was.
"Hi, everybody," Julian said. "How're you doing, Wendy?"
My friends all wore that ooo-a-boy expression that we should have outgrown after first grade.
When, before, had Julian ever approached a tableful of girls and tried to strike up a conversation? Fortunately, we weren't the only ones there: Besides the five of us, five ninth graders had taken over the other half of the table, and they'd unrolled a huge posterboard chart that they were frantically writing on, coloring in, and gluing stuff to, all at a level of frenzy that indicated they needed to have it finished by next period, if not sooner. With their stuff spread out, there was obviously no way for Julian to squeeze in.