“Says the kid who didn’t get snow tires,” Leif says as he sits down.
“It’s just a dusting,” Eric says.
I look out the window to the backyard. It’s covered in white.
That’s
a dusting? That means it could get so much worse, and I have no idea how.
I guess I’ll find out as the winter progresses.
I have no idea why I’m the one who got stuck in the Frozen Northland, but I did. And I was already wondering how I was going to make it through a day.
Snow seems like one more straw, something that’s almost impossible to cope with. And I haven’t even stepped outside yet.
I square my shoulders.
I’ll get through this. I have to.
I have no other choice.
SEVEN
SNOW IS WET and gloppy, like really cold, mushy rain. I pull the hood up on the hand-me-down puffy coat I got from Lise, but too late. My hair is coated with the icy goo, and I’m even colder than I was when we left the house.
Mom’s van fits seven. Eric sits in the very back, arms crossed, looking sullen. Mom took his keys away.
She pulls up in the parking lot near the natatorium. The high school is strangely shaped. It has a ring where most of the classes are held. Between the ring and the natatorium, where the pool is, there’s a huge auditorium that they use for music and plays and stuff.
Mom says I’m really lucky to be here, because Superior pays attention to its schools. Even though Superior is a relatively poor community (especially compared to Duluth, across the lake in Minnesota), the entire community makes a point of getting the best education possible for the kids. Apparently, the adults search for grants and special funding and provide all kinds of extra-curricular activities that schools in big cities don’t even have.
I asked Tiff about her school on the West Coast, and it doesn’t have half the stuff we have at Senior High. Crystal goes to some expensive private school in New York, and it has the same kind of stuff, except some of sports, which are (her word) for “plebes,” whatever that means.
Mom takes the three of us going to the high school first, because our school is closest to the house. She’ll drive to the elementary school next, and end with the middle school. She calls this carpooling, even though I have no idea why.
She drops us off near what I think of as the back door. It’s not, really, because it’s right in front of the natatorium. There’s a big open area when you walk in, but this entire part of the school smells like chlorine from the pool.
When I first came and found out there was a pool, I asked if I could use it. Mom’s been apologizing ever since because she had no idea that I’m part fish. I love to swim, and we missed the deadline to get me on the swim team, although I could join the synchronized swim team if I wanted to. I don’t want to. It looks totally lame to me.
Still, I love the smell of chlorine, even though I know it’ll mess with my hair. I’ve mostly gone swimming in lakes and rivers and natural settings, which, my gym teacher says, makes me a stronger swimmer than people who just learn in pools. But I have grown fond of the pool since I’ve been here. I go swimming here sometimes on open swim weekends, and I just love it.
Lots of kids have shown up. They’re all chattering and carrying books and goofing around. They all seem wider awake than I am, and they all seem completely unconcerned by the snow.
I snuggle into my coat and walk past the wall of windows to the core of the building. My locker is here, away from everything. Eric told me I should get a better locker because I have to walk such a long distance to it, but I figured then (and I still think) that I shouldn’t call attention to myself.
I pull off my coat and get instantly cold. I’m wearing a pink cable-knit sweater—a fisherman’s sweater, Lise called it when she gave it to me—and my thickest pair of blue jeans. I’m also wearing boots that Eric once called “shit-kickers” when Mom and Karl weren’t around.
The boots at least are keeping my feet warm.
I hang my coat on a hook inside my locker. The coat sticks out because it’s so bulky. That’s new. I grab my drama textbook off the top shelf, along with an extra notebook and some pens. Then I shove the coat really hard into the locker and slam the door closed.
The door bounces open and I feel totally stupid. I shove the coat in harder, and it expands like it fills with air.
Five boys whose names I don’t know are staring at me. My face heats up. I know I look terrible, with my half-wet hair and bright red skin. I shove the coat inside the locker, and the door still won’t close. I’m tempted to kick that damn door and see if it dents. In fact, I want to kick the door
and
turn those kids into stone or something. If I still had my magic, they’d understand how terrible it is just to stare at someone.
Then I take a deep breath.
I’m sure Megan would say this is why most kids don’t get their magic until they’re grown. Men get their magic around age twenty-one, but women have to wait until they’re past the age of having babies. I think that’s stupid, especially now that my magic is gone and I’m going to have to wait decades to get it back.
When I do, I’ll snap my fingers at anyone who stares at me and make their stupid eyes bug out of their stupid heads.
The locker door bounces open again. I close my eyes. I can’t just leave it unlocked. I don’t have a backpack and my stupid denim purse only carries a few books at a time. If we lose the books, we have to pay for them.
“Here, let me.” One of the boys who was watching has come up beside me. He’s taller than I am, but just as blond. He’s not in my grade, and I don’t know his name, but I do know he’s on the basketball team because Lise told me (in a whisper one day, like it was important).
He smells of soap and he’s standing just a little too close to me. He pushes the coat inside the locker and makes sure that the edges of the coat brush against the interior edges of the door. Now the coat can’t expand outward.
Then he closes the door quietly, grabs the combination lock, and closes it.
“See?” he says. “Magic.”
Then he smiles.
My skin gets even warmer. Does he know about the magic? Is he making fun of me? Because if he is, and I don’t realize it, I’ll look even stupider than I already do.
“Thanks,” I whisper, because Mom says that
be-nice
covers every situation, even the situations where someone is trying to make a fool out of you.
He hasn’t moved away from me. His smile brightens though. He has lovely brown eyes—not that blue that seems natural to the Johnson Family—and a little bit of stubble on his chin.
“You’re welcome. You’re Lise Johnson’s sister, right? The one that grew up overseas?” His smile fades and now he just looks intense. “I’m Jake Krueger. I have AP English across the hall from your Modern World History Class.”
My flush travels down my face to my neck and into my chest. I must look like a giant blonde tomato.
He clearly expects me to say something.
I manage, “I’m…um…Brittany.”
I forget about the last name for a minute because I’ve never had one before, and Johnson doesn’t feel like me.
“And you’re Lise’s sister?” he asks.
“Stepsister,” I say, hating the word. That makes me sound like those idiots from the Disney movies, the ones that Cinderella’s Wicked Stepmother loves and no one else does. (I’ve heard that the stepsisters are actually nicer than the real Cinderella, but I heard that from Lachesis, one of the original Fates, and I’m not sure I can trust her.)
“That explains why you look different.” He’s still too close, but I’m pressed against the locker and can’t move away without being impolite.
Still, I slid toward the middle of the corridor. “Thank you for the help.”
“Looks like you needed it,” he says. “Sometimes there’s a trick to the simplest things.”
Don’t I know it. And I don’t know any of the tricks.
“What do you got now?” he asks.
It takes me a minute to realize he’s talking about classes.
“Drama,” I say.
He smiles. “I bet you’re good at it.”
I shrug. I don’t say anything in drama class. I just listen. I took it because the principal and Mom thought it would be both familiar and easy for me, since the other classes are so different from anything I had back home. (Except math. Thank you, Athena.)
“I’ll walk you there,” he says.
I don’t move. I’m not sure I like the attention. “What’s your first class?”
“Study hall,” he says. “Stupid way to start the day. And today, I have an excused absence because I’m trying out for the basketball team. Maybe this year, I’ll make varsity.”
I know that varsity is a big deal, although I don’t know why. Leif talks about varsity all the time. He plays a bunch of sports.
“I don’t want to keep you from it,” I say.
“You’re not,” he says. “First bell hasn’t even rung yet.”
Dang.
“Do I make you nervous?” he asks.
I shrug. “I’m just not used to talking to people here. Usually, no one notices me.”
“Oh, people notice you all right,” he says. “They just can’t get up the nerve to talk to you.”
He glances over his shoulder at the other boys, who are still standing down the hall. One of them gives him a thumbs up, which makes me even more uncomfortable.
“Did you win a bet or something?” I ask, maybe a little too pointedly.
“I just figured I could help you.” His smile no longer reaches his eyes, and he’s still a little too close.
“Well, thank you,” I say again. I step sideways to get away from him.
“I’ll walk—”
“I’m okay,” I say. “Really.”
I put my head down and head toward the drama room, walking faster than I usually do. That whole experience made me uncomfortable, and I’m not sure why.
It didn’t feel like he was interested in me. It felt like he (and those other boys) have been watching me and waiting for the right moment to talk to me.
And they only seemed interested because they saw me around, not because I said something witty or they thought I seemed smart in class.
I round a corner, and finally look over my shoulder. He hasn’t followed me, thank heavens. Or if he has, I can’t see him, because there are like two dozen kids crammed into the hallway.
I’ve been concentrating so hard on getting away from him, I hadn’t even noticed the other kids and the noise and the laughter and the slamming lockers.
I feel really weird because he was just being nice, but the
nice
felt wrong somehow. Like the
nice
was a cover for something else. Plus he stood too close, and Artemis always says you should protect your personal space. Although her solution—elbowing someone who is too close (or stabbing them with a knife that she says you should carry at all times)—is probably too extreme.
Besides, he was
nice
. And why should anyone complain about
nice?
I’m beginning to think there’s a lot more to
nice
than I’ll ever figure out.
I duck into the bathroom closest to the drama room. I comb my hair, which doesn’t look as bad as I expected it would, and pinch my cheeks, trying to put some color in them. I don’t wear makeup because Mom doesn’t approve. I doubt I would anyway, because I don’t know how to put it on. I used to spell it on, and I used to use magic to pile my hair on top of my head too.
All those things were easy once, and now they’re so hard I can’t even figure out how to do them half the time.
After I finish, I glance out the door to see if Jake Krueger followed me. I’m not sure why he freaked me out so bad, but he did. I just can’t put words on it.
I don’t see him, and the number of kids in the hall is getting pretty sparse. So I head to the drama room.
It’s behind the theater, near the music room. There are two elective drama classes every year. One’s for the real theater kids. They have to audition to get in. The other’s a “lunch class,” which I didn’t understand until Anna explained it to me. A lunch class isn’t a class held over lunch; it’s an easy class—as easy, I guess, as eating lunch.
I’m in the lunch class version. I thought it would be lame, but I like it. I never raise my hand to read out loud or anything because my accent makes me sound weird and everyone looks at me. But I do my drama homework first because I love reading the plays.
My seat is to the back on the door-side of the room, so I can escape as fast as possible. When I first got here, I picked seats like that in all of my classes because I was afraid I’d get lost in this big weird building. But now that I know my way around, I use the extra time to find different routes to my classes. I’m still trying to learn this place, and learn things about the people here, and going different directions instead of on the same path helps.
I’m almost to my seat when Mrs. Schmidt, the drama coach, pulls me aside. She’s a thin, dark-haired woman who wears her black hair in a bun on the top of her head. Today, she’s wearing a black sweater over black pants and ballet slippers. I know if I look, I’ll see boots underneath her desk. She wears the ballet slippers most of the time, and they allow her to move quietly through any room.