was weird. One minute I'd be listening to the teacher, and the next I'd be completely tuned
out, looking at Juli.
It wasn't until Wednesday in math that I figured it out. With the way her hair fell back over her
shoulders and her head was tilted, she looked like
the picture in the paper. Not just like it — the angle was different, and the wind wasn't
blowing through her hair — but she did look like the picture. A
lot like the picture.
Making that connection sent a chill down my spine. And I wondered — what was she thinking?
Could she really be that interested in root
derivations?
Darla Tressler caught me watching, and man, she gave me the world's wickedest smile. If I
didn't do something fast, this was going to spread like
wildfire, so I squinted at her and whispered, “There's a bee in her hair, stupid,” then pointed
around in the air like, There it goes, see?
Darla's neck whipped around searching for the bee, and I straightened out my focus for the
rest of the day. The last thing I needed was to be
scorched by the likes of Darla Tressler.
That night I was doing my homework, and just to prove to myself that I'd been wrong, I pulled
that newspaper article out of my trash can. And as
I'm flipping it over, I'm telling myself, It's a distortion of reality; it's my imagination; she doesn't
really look like that….
But there she was. The girl in my math class, two rows over and one seat up, glowing
through newsprint.
Lynetta barged in. “I need your sharpener,” she said.
I slammed my binder closed over the paper and said, “You're supposed to knock!” And then,
since she was zooming in and the paper was still
sticking out, I crammed the binder into my backpack as fast as I could.
“What are you trying to hide there, baby brother?”
“Nothing, and stop calling me that! And don't barge into my room anymore!”
“Give me your sharpener and I'm history,” she said with her hand out.
I dug it out of my drawer and tossed it at her, and sure enough, she disappeared.
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But two seconds later my mom was calling for me, and after that, well, I forgot that the paper
was in my binder.
Until first period the next morning, that is. Man! What was I supposed to do with it? I couldn't
get up and throw it out; Garrett was right there.
Besides that, Darla Tressler's in that class, and I could tell — she was keeping an eye out for
wayward bees. If she caught wind of this, I'd be the
one stung.
Then Garrett reaches over to snag a piece of paper like he does about fourteen times a day,
only I have a complete mental spaz and slam down
on his hand with mine.
“Dude!” he says. “What's your problem?”
“Sorry,” I say, tuning in to the fact that he was only going for lined paper, not newspaper.
“Dude,” he says again. “You know you've been really spaced lately? Anyone else tell you
that?” He rips a piece of paper out of my binder, then
notices the edges of the newspaper. He eyes me, and before I can stop him, he whips it out.
I pounce on him and tear it out of his hands, but it's too late. He's seen her picture.
Before he can say a word, I get in his face and say, “You shut up, you hear me? This is not
what you think.”
