“Hey.” She waves again, this massive kind of wave, like when you’re trying to hail a taxi on a busy street. But this is a hallway, not a street, and it’s nowhere near busy.
“Hi.”
I put my oh-so-exciting, brand-new Spanish textbook into my pack. Then I snap it shut. In passing I notice that one of the snaps is missing.
“I like your pack. Did you get it at an army-navy store?” She bounces on her toes when she talks like she has way too much energy for her body and just has to do something with it.
“Yep.”
“In Bangor?”
“No, Charleston.”
She smiles super wide. “Are you Zara White?”
I step back, swinging my pack over one shoulder. “How does everybody know that?”
“Small town.” She smiles an apology. “News travels fast. We get all excited when someone new comes. I’m Issie.”
“Oh, so you knew I didn’t get my bag in Bangor.”
“Sort of.” She pushes her teeth together and smiles big. She makes big eyes to go with it and then blurts, “I love Bangor, though, so I was hoping. ’Cause I love your bag too. Oh, I am babbling. I hate when I babble. Devyn says it’s cute, but I know it’s not, it’s super annoying. So, is your name really Zara?”
I try to calm my nerves and be friendly. I smile back. “It’s really Zara.”
“Like Sara but with a Z. That is much cooler.” She bee-bops her head up and down. “Cool. Cool. Cool. Good to meet you. Where you going next?”
“PE.” I smile again. I like PE in Charleston. It’s always outside. There are no books involved. You don’t have to talk to anyone except to try to annoy them. You can blend in.
She bounces up and down on the back of her feet. Her skirt flits around her legs. It’s super long and flowy, like her hair. “Cool. That’s in the gym. Of course PE is in the gym. Duh?”
She bonks her forehead with her hand so hard I want to get her an ice pack, but she seems fine and she bounces out, “I’m going there too. I’ll show you.”
“Oh.” I stop in the hall and look around for Ian. I don’t see him. I’m not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing. Suddenly, I feel sort of abandoned.
“Are you looking for Ian?”
I shrug. “Um . . . yeah. I guess so. He’s showing me around.”
She has been beaming at me but now she frowns.
“What?” I ask.
“He must like you. I’ll tell him I’ve got you from here. He’s very overachieving. He’ll be your escort all year if you let him.” She grabs her phone and sends him a text telling him that she’ll take me to PE. “There. All set.”
She is efficient, this girl, and I like that. She links her arm in mine and says conspiratorially, “It’s hard being new. I was new once too.”
“Really? When did you move here?”
“First grade.”
I smirk at her and she laughs. “It was still hard. I still remember it. Totally uncool. Everybody looking at me, sniffing me out, because I was the new girl, trying to decide if I was worthy to be in their pack or not. It was awful. Nobody played with me at recess for an entire month. Swinging by yourself is not cool, not every day. Not when everyone else is playing tetherball or tag.”
She sounds so sad; I pull her closer to my side. I want to take care of her. “It was a long time ago.”
She shrugs and smiles at me. “Yeah. And it didn’t last forever, right? But I remember how hard it was.”
She lowers her voice to a whisper as we walk by Megan Crowley and her little posse of girls trying to look hip in the high school hallway, which is a ridiculous thing to even try to do, because it is a high school hallway. “Megan Crowley hated me too.”
“Is it that obvious?” I ask.
Issie nods. “She hates everyone she thinks is a threat.”
“Why am I a threat?”
She pulls her arm away from mine and uses it to bash me with her notebook. “Don’t even play that game with me.”
She giggles again, and pulls open the door to the locker room. I smell baby powder and stinky running shoes and I smile. It smells so familiar. If I close my eyes, I think I could almost pretend I’m home.
But I’m not.
“That Megan girl,” I whisper because Megan’s flounced into the locker room with her posse, “do you think she’s kind of weird?”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know . . .” I remember the way she didn’t seem real for a second. “It’s silly. It’s nothing.”
“Nothing is ever nothing,” Issie says, and then she staggers backward. “Oh my God!”
“What? Issie, what is it?” I look around for a spider on the floor or something. Maybe Issie has a spider phobia. Those are pretty common.
Issie turns panicked eyes on me, swallows, and then gushes out her words like they have a life of their own. “We’re running today. They’re testing our mile. Oh God, this is so uncool. This is yabba-dabba bad.”
I almost jump in midair and hug her. “The mile! Great.”
“Great? Running a mile? You are crazy.” She opens a locker and pulls out gym clothes. “Maybe you’ll fit in here after all.”
I yank my old, gray U2 War concert shirt on. It is excellent to run the mile in, all soft and faded. My dad got it at a concert back in the eighties. “You don’t want me to fit in?”
“It’s nice to have someone different,” she says, gesturing toward Megan’s gaggling crew putting on their spaghetti-strap camis. “Someone not like them, you know?”
Megan hoists her hair up into a new ponytail for PE. She adjusts her perfect breasts beneath her perfect cami and gives me a perfect glare.
“I’m not like them, Issie,” I say, sticking my finger through a hole at the bottom hem of my T-shirt.
“Cool.”
“I just like running.”
She hauls on a Snoopy shirt, baby blue and cute. “Why? Why would you like running?”
“It makes me feel safe,” I tell her as we tie our shoes. I do not tell her that it makes me feel closer to my dad.
As I stretch, Coach Walsh, the gym teacher, nods and takes my name, then blows the whistle and we all take off around the track for a warm-up lap.