Chapter Three

Silence was never comfortable when I was alone with my mom in the car. If she wasn’t on the phone with her campaign manager, she was staring bullets at the road with her lips zipped. The radio was tuned to the Top 40 station on her assumption that I was like any other stock teenager with a bad taste in music. I glared at the dial and turned the volume up on my iPod, hoping in vain that Massive Attack would drown out Lil Wayne’s offbeat crooning.



Mom deftly plucked an ear bud out of my left ear. “So run this by me again. We’re taking a tour of the school, listening to the AP courses assembly, and finishing up registration for your classes. Is that it?”


“You got it.” At least she had bothered to remember the agenda.


She sighed as if undergoing a great labor. “This better not go longer than noon. These sorts of things are designed for stay-at-home parents, and they honestly take much longer than necessary. The administration needs to consider people with actual jobs and careers.”


Sometimes I wondered how I managed to grow up without contracting her ridiculous vanity.


We approached the green and white FOLLOWILL HIGH SCHOOL sign, which was lettered with an announcement for the Open House as well as football conditioning. As we entered the gates, I looked around and saw the anxious parents and even more terrified new freshmen walking through the doors. This was the place I would be spending the next four years sitting in airtight classrooms and acquiring a mediocre education. The football stadium loomed over me threateningly, forcefully reminding me that these stands were soon to be the nucleus of my social life. Upperclassmen littered the place with fake tans and pumped up biceps.


“Now I want to make one thing clear as we’re going in.” She stopped the car and looked me straight in the eyes. “You’re not to take one step out of line. Any bad decisions you make will not only hurt your first impression to the school; it’ll ruin our public image and severely hurt my chances at the elections.”


“Of course,” I muttered, watching a girl with ass-riding shorts as she pounced on an eager fellow in a football jersey. Mom followed my eyes and shuddered with disgust.


“Those are not the types of people you want to be grouped with,” she continued. “So, no texting during the assembly, no laughing obnoxiously with your gal pals, no sneaking around corners with your boyfriend—”


“Mom, I don’t even have a boyfriend.”


She down her nose at me and gave me a look, disbelieving and haughty; the pretentious bitch as always.


“You could have at least chosen a more presentable look,” she noted disapprovingly. “Your hair is sticking up in tuffs, and those clothes make you look like you fell out of a smoking hippie van.”


I opened the door of the passenger seat without replying. Thankfully, the wind was outside to welcome me with unassuming friendliness. My skirt, white and brushing my ankles, was caught in its playful frolicking. I stretched my hands to the sky and spun in the sunlight, drinking in my last bits of freedom before I had to take my first steps into prison. Some of the upperclassmen packs stopped in their pointless ambling to watch me. I saw their snickers but didn’t mind one bit. My mom rounded the back end of the car and gave me one last warning look before leading me into the school.


It was even more crowded when we got inside. There was something about new and unusual places that had a way of paralyzing people into traffic jams of sweaty bodies and anxiety. Impatient, Mom grabbed me by the wrist and pushed her way through the confused crowd at the door. I craned my neck over and around people. Todd was supposed to be here, too, and I hoped I could catch a glimpse of him and pass him a look that showed how relieved I was to see him here to ease the pain of this long-drawn torture. He wasn’t anywhere in the hall that I could see, though. We walked into the auditorium and sat through twenty minutes of an old bat fumbling through a PowerPoint, all the while explaining to the group of inept freshmen that we were brave to try AP in our first year of high school but were doomed to fail and might as well prepare for the letdown ahead of time.


“Not my daughter, she will,” Mom protested under her breath. “If you’ve inherited any sort of sense from me, it’s your refusal to fail.”


I kept silent, hoping this meant she’d finally gotten off my back about the C- I got on an Algebra quiz last year. I peered around at the seats and couldn’t find Todd anywhere. He was supposed to be in here—we were going to be taking AP World History together this year. Perhaps he was coming with the next group.


But I still hadn’t spotted him by the end of the tour around the school. The school was big, but not so big that he could hide from me this well.


“I have to use the bathroom,” I told my mom and sprinted off before she could protest.


I slammed my body into the door, and it flew open to a vacant restroom. I locked myself in the farthest and largest stall with a tiny window near the ceiling and pulled out my cell phone from my skirt’s pocket. When I stretched it up toward the window, it caught a bar of signal; his number was dialed in a heartbeat.


It took him four rings before he finally picked up. “Hello?”


“Todd!” I was absolutely breathless. “Where the hell are you? I’ve been looking for you all over the school, and I haven’t seen you anywhere.”


“The school…?” He sounded confused.


“Yes, the school! Quit acting like a dumbass. Did you forget there was an open house today or something?”


At last he finally seemed to catch up. “Oh, right! I couldn’t go to that today.”


I wanted to chuck my cell phone at the wall. “I scour every inch of this whole school for you, and you’re not even here! You could have called me last night to tell me, at least.”


“My plans changed sort of last minute…”


“What’s that supposed to mean?”


He was no doubt scratching his head on the other side of the line. “Well, you see…I’m not going to Followill for this school year…or any school year, really.”


This time I did throw the phone at the wall. Miraculously, it stayed in one piece. I heard his panic from the phone, buzzing with worry. I ignored him for a good two minutes before I picked it back up.


“When did you decide this?” I hissed. “Yesterday? Or have you been neglecting to tell me this for the whole summer?”


“I couldn’t help this, Joelle,” he protested feebly. “I…I found a good school. It’s a great school, actually; their AP program is ten times more versatile than Followill’s. It’s a little far from here, but I’ll still be able to call you and stuff on the—”


“You’re avoiding the question.”


He sighed. “I’m telling you the truth, Joelle. This honestly didn’t…strike me until today. This morning I was all ready to go and see you, but then…I had to find an alternative, Joelle. Followill just isn’t suited for me.”


“Well, I’m glad one of us came to our senses in time,” I muttered.


“…So does this mean you’re not mad at me?”


I hung up on him without replying and threw the stall door open. It hit the back with a deafening rattle and startled a woman who had just walked in. I couldn’t even think of coherent words to express how flaming mad I was. All I could think of doing at that moment was destroying this phone and hope some of the pain and ruin it would feel would transfer to him.


But I left it whole and close to my hand in my pocket. Just in case he decided to call back.


Outside the restroom, the crowds were starting to clear. I felt my phone vibrate and whipped it out—it was a text from my mom. Disappointed, I opened it to read that she had already left the school, the registration was taken care of, and I needed to wait for my dad to pick me up at the front. She hadn’t even bothered to ask me if I was all right after having been in the bathroom for a whole fifteen minutes.


I walked out to the front of the school and sat on the curb. I squinted up at the sun, daring it to burn my eyes out of their sockets. What was the point of sight if I would only have this eyesore to look at for the next four years? There was too much cookie cutter cement and not enough trees, in my opinion. Todd would have liked to see more trees…


I buried my face in my knees. If I still believed in God, I would have blamed him for this. Instead, all I could do was admit defeat. He had chosen a path separate from mine. At least one of us had our priorities straightened out after the mess we’d made over the last two years of our twisted relationship. I should have been happy for him. But I wasn’t.


Would u believe her clothes?


I sat up abruptly and looked around, expecting to find somebody standing behind me, but there was nobody there. It was definitely too noisy outside for me to have heard such a low voice so clearly. The only people near me were two girls on opposite sides of me, but they were still a good four yards away, and they were only texting each other.


Does she think she’s in some 60s revival? Tlk about weird.


ikr!?


I was pretty sure that they were texting about me. But how was I able to tell? Maybe I was reading their minds, I thought sardonically, and Lisbeth was right all along about me finding my affinity. Something was off about this, though. The girl on my right, strawberry blonde with light freckles, put her phone down briefly and waved over at a dashing, roguish boy passing by. Except for the obvious attraction to him that she was showing through her hollering, I couldn’t tell what was going through her mind. But then her phone buzzed, and when she picked it up, I felt another tug.


I think she’s staring @ u.


Her phone. It was like I could read her phone. How strange.


Ew, she digs girls, 2? I thought she was with that 1 guy. Tom?


Todd, I’m pretty sure. I think she broke up with him.


Who would be stupid enough to do that?? He was soo hot!


Maybe he wanted to do it with her and she wasn't "ready" or something.


My heart ticked faster in ferocity.


If he’d asked me, I would have done him in a HEARTBEAT!


I felt a different sort of tug then, deep in the nerves of my fingers. They were jittering out of control, like an itch I couldn’t get rid of. Something about the strawberry blonde’s phone burned in my eyes like a red hot neon sign. It pulsed with a feverish throb; I felt the currents running through it as if it were the blood of my own veins. And the longer I looked at it, the harder it seemed to pulse, until at last I pulled my eyes from it and I heard a destructive crack.


“Ow! What the f—?!”


“Katie!”


The other girl, a brunette bob slathered in purple eye makeup, ran up to her bewildered friend. Peripherally, I saw that the strawberry blonde’s phone had cracked into a pile of pieces and had made a gash in her hand. A smile played on my lips in impish satisfaction. I don’t know how I did it, but it served her right, the bitch.


The brunette bob tried to calm her strawberry blonde friend, Katie, down. “Hey, what happened to your—?”


“It was her!” Katie screeched and pointed in my direction. “She—she blew up my phone! She’s one of those goddamned—!”


This time, I stood up. “If you want to tell me something, tell it to my face instead of referring to me in the third person.”


It took her a moment to understand what I had told her, but after a while she said hoarsely, “They have institutions for your kind, don’t they?”


The prickling feeling in my fingers started acting up again. “You’re being awfully vague. I’m not sure what you mean.”


“I’m talking about your damn superpowers, you freak!”


I couldn’t see the girl’s freckles anymore; her face was so red with fury. She stepped closer to me, evidently thinking that she could beat the freak out of me, and her hand came down on my face. But rather than a sting, the impact kindled a charge underneath my skin. The charge shocked the girl and threw her onto the concrete road. She kicked and shrieked in fury and indignation and demanded that I approach her so she could obtain her revenge, but I held no further interest in her.


My dad’s SUV pulled into the parking lot just then. I climbed in and shut the door before the commotion bubbling forth from the school found me standing around.