Don't Expect Magic (5 page)

“Okay, people,” Mr. McElroy says. “Chapter Four. Acid-base reactions. Let’s get out beakers, pipettes and lab trays. I’ll be passing out bottles of HCl.” He pushes a rolling cart from table to table and sets a fat glass bottle on the end of each.

Behind him, the classroom door opens, and two girls come in. One is tall, with long shampoo-commercial shiny black hair and an electric-red miniskirt. The other has her artfully highlighted blond hair up in a ponytail and is wearing a yellow bubble dress. I mentally nail their types immediately: self-centered supermodel and her perky sidekick. They chatter and giggle with a few eardrum-piercing squeals thrown in as they stroll past the tables.

“So I told her, I really, really love the hoops on you,”
Supermodel is saying to Perky, “but, like, if you got a bob, then they would just really pop.” With her long legs and silky hair, she seems to walk in slow motion. Right and left, all of the boys and a few of the girls look on the verge of fainting from lovelorn lust. Unbelievable.

“Oh my God, that was, like, totally the perfect thing to say because it actually sounds, you know, like a compliment,” says Perky.

“I know! And I really meant it!” Mr. McElroy’s staring his dry, expressionless stare right at them, but they’re in airhead oblivion. “She’s going to get it done today at Anton’s at the mall and finally the whole squad’ll be equally gorgealicious.”

“You’re so selfless—”

“Excuse me, ladies,” Mr. McElroy says. “This is not a chat room, it’s a class. And it started ten minutes ago.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry, Mr. McElroy!” Supermodel says, and makes it sound “like
totally!
” sincere. “I have a note.” She hands Mr. McElroy a slip of paper and she and Perky stride off—to the other side of our table. Table 6 has gone from a temporary oasis to the officially worst place in the room to be. Why is my luck
always
so bad?

Mr. McElroy reads Supermodel’s note and for the first time his expression changes, to a sort of mystified disbelief. “ ‘Emergency Pep Council summit’?” He looks over at Supermodel, who shrugs and smiles sweetly, and Mr. McElroy lets it go, of course. Just once I’d like to see one of those popular-perfect girls get detention.

“Hi, Flynn,” Supermodel says, and flashes her movie-star smile at Flynn. There’s a bright bounce in her voice as if finding Flynn at this table is just the
most
delightful surprise
ever
, although aren’t they across from each other every day?

Flynn gives her a “Hey” and a little wave but concentrates on setting up our lab equipment. He’s the one other person in the room besides me who doesn’t seem ready to collapse at Supermodel’s feet and pledge eternal devotion. I give him a quarter of a point for good judgment and vow not to say anything threatening for the rest of the period as his reward.

“Oh, hi! Are you new?” I glance up to see that Supermodel’s got her high-beam smile aimed my way now. “I’m Cadie Perez.” She leans past Flynn before I even realize what’s going on, grabs my hand and gives it an enthusiastic shake, like she really is glad to meet me. “This is Mia.” Cadie gestures to Perky, who offers me a frosty wave. I say nothing, as expressionless as Mr. McElroy, but Cadie goes right on. “You should totally feel free to ask us if you have any questions about school, or, like, where to hang out, or whatever.” She smiles again, my hostility ricocheting right off her friendly force field. Weird.

Mr. McElroy sets the HCl bottles on our tables. “Are we done with the social networking? Or would you four prefer to stay after school and complete the experiment then?”

“Oh, we can’t do that, Mr. McElroy,” Cadie says, apparently
impervious to sarcasm as well as hostility. “We have an away game at Valley Glen.”

“Then let’s get to work.
Please
.”

Cadie grins goofily over at me, like we’re in cahoots. I roll my eyes and she laughs, unaware that I’m rolling them at
her
.

Cadie and Mia pull out their notebooks and fill the airspace with their mindless chatter about cheerleading and some girl’s crush on a drummer in the school band and a new reality show set at a makeup counter that is just
so
educational. Meanwhile, Flynn measures and pours and writes down numbers and equations, completely focused, as if I’m not there at all.

All around me, kids are hunched over, eyes on their beakers or pipettes. This is not the way I wanted to be left alone. This is like I’m invisible. Like I’ve disappeared but I’m still here, stuck, trapped in this candy-colored, pretty-people parallel universe, surrounded by strangers. The feeling I had last night when I talked to Posh returns. The need to escape, to fly out of here, back to where I belong.

An image comes to me in a flash. I grab my sketchbook and the pencil practically moves on its own as the picture in my mind materializes on the page. Falcon boots. With wings that unfold from the sides and tiny rocket engines in the heels. They’re a total fantasy, of course, but I can’t help wondering if they could really work.

“Ms. Collins.” Mr. McElroy stands at the head of our lab table, arms folded. “In your distant, more highly
evolved culture, they may let you do whatever you want in class, but we simple, backward folk expect students to stick to the subject matter being taught.” I’m not invisible anymore. Now everybody in class is staring. This makes me want to jet away even faster. “You might even find that doing the work helps you feel better.”

An angry heat rises into my cheeks and I snap my sketchbook shut. “I feel fine.”

Mr. McElroy’s flat expression doesn’t change, except that his eyebrows arch a mini-micromillimeter. “Then you’ll feel even better than fine, and who wouldn’t want that?” His brows poke up a little more, then go back in place, and he moves off to bother the kids at the next table.

Flynn peers at me, sideways. I remember my pledge and swallow the urge to snap, “What are
you
looking at?” Instead I say, “You were right. I guess we
do
have to talk.” It’s only fifteen minutes to the end of class. I can hold out that long.

Flynn hesitates, regarding me with caution, but when there’s no sarcastic follow-up, he pushes a sheet of paper over to me. On it, the steps of the experiment are all laid out. “I’m up to number four.”

We get through the assignment with the bare minimum of words exchanged. When the bell rings, I’m the first one out the door. I’m tempted to return to Plan A and abandon ship, but Principal Lee is roaming the halls, bonding and befriending. I’m trapped. No problem, though. I remind myself that I’m the invisible girl. I’ll just mentally check
out, and before I know it, the day will be over and Happy High will be history.

But my cloak of invisibility doesn’t last. In French II, a witch named Madame Kessler has me read aloud from some poem about a giant and then says my accent is “
trop canadien
,” which is “
pas bon du tout
,” sparking veiled smirks from a couple of cashmere-clad French snobs sitting in front of me and snickers from
les autres
losers
dans la classe
.

In world history, I have to sit on the window ledge until an extra chair can be brought in—which happens right when the bell rings. Then the trig teacher, Mr. Nisonson, who must’ve been the hazing king at his college fraternity, makes me come up to the board and determine the range and domain of an inverse sine function, even after I tell him we were only up to reciprocal functions in my school. “I’ll talk you through it,” he says, but the way he does it is so confusing that I end up seeming like a math-impaired moron. So now, on top of all the wary and freaked and unfriendly looks I’ve already been getting, I have to suffer through a bunch of pitying “it’s sad she’s so stupid but why did they put her in this class?” ones too.

Gym is bizarre. Instead of the usual deadly bullet sports like volleyball and basketball, they teach
yoga
here. Ms. Byrd’s got everybody down on blue mats, doing
supta padangusthasana
. Everybody except me, since I don’t have the proper “yogi-wear.” Ms. Byrd gives me a business card for the Tranquility Den, where the school gets a discount,
and then makes me sit in the bleachers and practice my breathing. Right. Like I need to practice when I’ve been doing it since birth.

I figure that at least lunch will be a break from the torture. A chance for me to find some empty corner where no one will pay any attention to me and I can sketch and listen to music and be alone. Ha. First of all, the lunchroom is
outside
. The “cuisine stations,” which is what they call the food lines, are inside, but then you have to carry your food through these tall sliding glass doors to a fancy tiled patio. Around the perimeter, there’s a roof frame, with a rolled-up tarp for the one day every other century that it rains. A squadron of heat lamps stand guard against the wall, for those chilly below-eighty-degree days.

You bring your food outside—if you
have
any food, that is. I forgot to bring money, and Hank didn’t bother to give me any, of course, so my lunch is a tiny bag of pretzels that I stuffed in my backpack on the plane and forgot about until now. There’s nowhere for me to sit and eat them, though. There’s no far end of a half-populated bench that I can slide onto and be left alone, because there are no benches, only big backyard-barbecue-type round tables. This wouldn’t be so bad if there were at least an Island of Misfits table, but no luck. At East Lombard, there was always a table where the cliqueless sat. The smelly kid, the aggressively ugly girl, the boy who talked to himself, the girl who looked like a walking corpse, and other assorted
untouchables. They didn’t interact, but they were bonded by their lowest-of-the-low misery.

Here at Happy High, however, there are no true outcasts. There are a few geeks with bulky glasses and skinny ties, some mopey girls with braces and bad hair, and a handful of boys in acne purgatory, but none of them are alone. They sit together with members of their own kind, at their own tables, laughing and chatting and slurping their sodas blissfully.

The cheerleader types take up two tables, pushed together to form a bulky figure eight. Cadie sees me and waves to an empty chair sitting at the crack between the tables. Mia shoots me a “you better not” glare. She doesn’t need to worry. Even with no lunch, I’d end up gagging from the bleach-brained conversation and designer shampoo fumes.

Flynn’s at one of the neither-outcast-nor-popular tables, with a couple of equally oddball-looking guys, plus a trio of hypersmiley girls with matching Hello Kitty backpacks. He glances toward me, like he’s debating saying something. It’s not an invitation to join them, because there’s no room at their table—not that I’d sit there if there were.

I could find some shady space around the side of the building, but I’d still be outside and the sun would still be shining, and I’m really not in the mood. Instead I slip back inside, past the food lines, through the door to the empty hallway. There’s a girls’ bathroom at the far end of
the school, with a window ledge big enough for me to sit on, and a screen that filters out the sun and makes the sky look gray. It’s the one place I’ve found in the school that has fluorescent lights.

It’s dim inside, and echoey and depressing, and there’s no room to sketch, but at least I get my wish to be left alone. I can almost imagine, as I eat my tiny stale pretzel twists and gaze out through the dusty screen, that I’m back home in New Jersey. Soon I will be, I tell myself, and the thought cheers me up a little and makes me forget, for a second, where I am.

Unfortunately, it’s a smash cut to reality for sixth period: Brit lit, Ms. Sandor. The stares from the other kids are endless; the whispering is nonstop. It’s like the whole school has formed a pact against the invader. Cadie’s in the class, but even she’s turned against me. No attempt to say hello, no smile, nothing. Ms. Sandor has us read a bunch of Elizabeth Barrett Browning poems with titles like “The Cry of the Children” and “A Thought for a Lonely Death-Bed.” Just what I need to cheer me up. The fifty minutes drag on like fifty hours before the agony finally ends.

I still have to get through seventh period: electives. I’m on the way to the library when I notice that, for once, the halls are Principal Lee–free. Hmm. There’s nowhere I officially have to be. There’s no attendance sheet with my name on it.…

“Bell’s about to ring, you know.” I turn around and see Flynn at the far end of the hall, watching me. He’s lost
the wariness and is back to the curious look he gave me this morning, when I first saw him outside school. I almost say, “Take a picture, it’ll last longer,” but then I realize he probably would.

“Thanks for the update.”

“Seventh period is electives, you know. Did you pick an elective?”

It’s probably best not to tell him that I’ve elected to leave early. “I’m going to the library. I better hurry, because rumor has it the second bell’s about to ring.”

Flynn grins to let me know he gets the joke, but I didn’t say it to amuse him, I said it to get rid of him. “Okay, then. See you tomorrow, partner.” He tips an imaginary hat, slips into the classroom behind him and closes the door. Then the second class bell does ring. It’s the final bell for me. I’m free. I head down the hall, away from the library, away from Flynn, away from the hell that is Happy High.

I spot a side exit and two seconds later I’m back out in the crushing sun, but the brightness doesn’t bother me now. Wheels down, I barely touch the ground, and I can almost feel the tiny engines in my heels ignite. In my mind my boots have sprouted wings and I am flying.

Away.

My luck has changed at last: Hank’s car is gone when I get back to the house. Inside I make a quick detour to the kitchen, because I need food. I’m even desperate enough to eat one of Hank’s nasty broccoli and barley frozen feasts.

I open the fridge and, oh my God, he
did
pack me a lunch. It’s in a paper bag, not a lunch box, but it does have “Delaney” written on it in Magic Marker. He must’ve forgotten to give it to me, or been too embarrassed to. I dump the contents out on the counter: a neatly wrapped PB&J, crustless, cut on the diagonal, a bag of mini-carrots and a box of raisins. It’s a kiddie culinary cliché, but I’m starving, so I dig in.