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She opened her mouth to . . . to what? To scream? To say something?

Suddenly, in the mirror, the door to the bathroom popped open. The skinny girl, her locker neighbor, poked her head in. Isobel whirled around.Advertisement

“Talk about crash and burn,” the girl said. “You all right or what?”

Isobel stared at the open space where she had seen the man. Behind her, she gripped the cold sink. Her eyes darted to the girl and then, her head whipping around, she looked back into the mirror. In it she could see her own face, drained of color, and the stall behind her—empty.

Her lips formed words. “Did you . . . ?” The question withered in her mouth.

“I . . . ,” the girl started, “well, I thought I’d better, I dunno . . . check on you?”

“You didn’t just see . . . ?” Isobel turned, pointed at the stall.

The girl shrugged. “Well . . .” She gave a quick glance over one bony shoulder back into the hall. “Hate to break it to you, but I think it’s pretty safe to say everybody saw.”

15

The Power of Words

“All right, ladies, take five!”

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The shrill blast of Coach Anne’s whistle pierced through Isobel’s head, ringing in her brain like a fire bell, sending her headache officially into migraine status.

Without turning to talk and stretch with the others like she normally would, Isobel broke away from formation and trudged to the bleachers, where she’d left her gym bag. She tugged down on the hems of her blue practice shorts and plopped onto the bottom-most bench. She grabbed, opened, and drained the rest of her Gatorade in one smooth motion, then screwed the cap back on and stuffed the empty bottle into the bag between her street shoes and jeans.

Sitting there, she couldn’t seem to bring herself to form a single coherent thought. Not since she’d had to order her brain to stop its relentless attempts to assign a rational explanation to what she’d seen in the girls’ bathroom earlier that day: the dark figure that had stared her down and then vanished.

Deciding that she would do better to wait until after she’d had more than ten cents’ worth of sleep, Isobel tried to think of something else. That, however, only left room for her brain to play and replay the agonizing scene from lunch.

Again and again she saw Varen look up at her from the crowded lunch table, those stony green eyes fixing on her, at first in mild surprise, then slowly melding into two pools of nothing

—until he was looking at her with only vague recognition, like he might have seen her on a milk carton somewhere.

And that girl. Lacy.

Isobel thought back to the way she had glared at her—territorially.

She pictured them together, hands linked, and she couldn’t help but wonder what kind of boyfriend he was.

He could be so cynical. So dry and acidic. As blank as a page. Could he be tender, too?

She flinched at the thought, angry at her mind for letting it venture so far beyond what she already knew to be true. He wasn’t any different from the people he pretended to be above.

He’d proven that much at lunch.

She sighed, keeping her eyes closed, trying to release some of the day’s stress in one long exhale.

To top everything off, she was now doomed to be kicked off the squad, too.

And she would be. As soon as next Friday zoomed by and left her with a big fat zero on Mr. Swanson’s English project.

She would be a Trenton High cheerleader nevermore.

Not showing up for today’s practice, though, would have been admitting defeat.

If nothing else, it would have been her way of personally paving a path and rolling out the red carpet for Alyssa to take over her spot as center flyer. And despite the fact that nobody on the squad liked her anymore, Isobel still loved cheerleading. She was good at it, and in spite of everything, she was not prepared to make it easy for Alyssa, or anyone else who wanted her little slice of sky, to take her place.

“All right there, Iz?”

Isobel popped one eye open to see the whistle around Coach’s neck swinging back and forth on its yellow lanyard like a clock pendulum.

“Yeah,” she said, blinking slowly, putting on a smile until Coach passed. “Headache,” she said. At least it wasn’t a lie.

“You looked good out there today, Izzy,” Coach called over her shoulder.

Isobel watched Coach’s back as she stepped into the hall, where she stopped to fill her water bottle at the fountain. Normally she would have welcomed the encouragement. Especially after a day like today. With the rest of the squad standing by, however, watching and listening, she wished Coach hadn’t said anything, because now they’d started to whisper. pqdm.com