“Uh, yeah. Lizzie. Disappeared.”
From the front of the room, a painfully shrill voice asked, “Lizzie Lovett is missing?”
The voice belonged to Mychelle Adler, who I hated not just because of her nails-on-a-chalkboard voice, but also because she spelled her name with a y, though I guess that wasn’t really her fault. Also, I hated Mychelle because in our four years of high school, asking about Lizzie was possibly the nicest thing she’d ever said to me.
I shrugged. “Yeah, I guess so.”
Everyone kept staring, and I was getting more uncomfortable by the second. Sometimes at school—and by sometimes, I mean a lot of times—I feel as if I’ve turned invisible without realizing it. This makes me a bit panicky, and I get the urge to be outrageous—like jump on a table in the middle of the cafeteria and tap dance—just so people will look at me and prove I still exist. But that morning, being the complete focus of everyone’s attention, I started to think maybe being invisible wasn’t so bad after all.
“What exactly happened?” Mr. Bennett asked.
“Um, I don’t really know. Something about Lizzie going camping, which if you ask me, sounds pretty far-fetched, but whatever. I guess she was with her boyfriend, and he woke up this morning, and Lizzie was gone.”
Then everyone started talking and pulling out their phones to send texts, and there was this totally typical and boring moment where Mr. Bennett tried to regain control of the class. I took the opportunity to slip into my seat. Which was, unfortunately, right in front of Mychelle’s.
Mychelle leaned forward as soon as I sat down. I could smell her strawberry lip gloss and expensive coconut shampoo she always bragged about. Though I had to admit, she did have absurdly glossy hair, so maybe the stupid shampoo worked. “What do you think happened to her, Hawthorn?”
I shrugged and didn’t turn around. “I don’t really care.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“But she might be lost,” Mychelle said.
“She might be.”
“Or hurt.”
“Or both,” I said.
“What if she’s dead?”
That’s when I started to think bad thoughts. Like how I wished someone would replace Mychelle’s fancy shampoo with a drugstore brand. I wished she would suddenly forget the name of her five favorite songs. I wished every time she microwaved a frozen burrito, the center would stay cold.
“Hello? Hawthorn? Don’t you even care that a girl might be dead?”
I spun around in my seat and stared at Mychelle. “She’s not dead. And even if she was, you don’t care any more than I do. You’re just looking for an opportunity to be melodramatic. Leave me out of it.”
The dumb jock who sits next to Mychelle and whose name I could never remember scowled at me. “What’s your problem, Hawthorn?”
“Yeah,” Mychelle echoed, “what’s your problem?”
This was a good question. What was my problem?
• • •
Likely, part of my bad attitude was due to the fact that I really hated Lizzie Lovett. I’d always hated Lizzie, and her vanishing didn’t change that.
“But is it just because I hate Lizzie?” I asked.
Emily Flynn, my best friend for the past million years, took a bite of her sandwich and got a serious look on her face—possibly because she was taking my situation super seriously, but probably because Emily looked serious most of the time.
It was lunch period, and we were sitting on the stairs that lead to the back entrance of the gym, which is where we always eat. Lunch is when social interaction happens. Since the back staircase isn’t really the place to be seen, no one goes there much. Exactly why Emily and I like it.
Emily still hadn’t commented, but I plowed on anyway. “I mean, at first, I thought I was just in a bad mood because it’s Monday and I’m tired and I’m the only person in the school who didn’t go to the dance—”
“I didn’t go to the dance,” Emily interrupted.
“But it’s not just that, is it?” I went on. “And it’s not just that I hate Lizzie. So why am I so bothered by this whole thing?”
“Because you’re jealous.”
For a second, I was too stunned to speak. “Because I’m what?”
“Jealous. You’ve always been jealous of Lizzie,” Emily said, as if it was the simplest, most reasonable explanation in the world.
Obviously, aliens must have abducted Emily and thought she was such a good specimen that they couldn’t bear to part with her, so they took her to their planet and put a pod person in her place.
I was wondering how I might contact the mother ship about returning my friend to her earthly body when a new thought occurred to me. “I think what’s bothering me is that everyone is making such a big deal over nothing.”
Emily tilted her head and looked at me strangely. “I don’t think a girl mysteriously disappearing is nothing.”
“It’s nothing, because it’s Lizzie Lovett.”
“What are you talking about?”
I opened a bag of potato chips, only briefly considering how disappointed my mom would be if she caught me consuming empty calories. She’d probably rather find me with drugs. “It’s like this, Em. Nothing bad will ever happen to a girl like Lizzie. The world doesn’t work that way. The biggest problem she’ll ever have is, I don’t know, whether to match her shoes to her eyeshadow.”