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  Since that night, there seemed to be a sanction placed on me. Angus hadn’t called. I had imaginary conversations with him. I would tell him what was going on and he would reassure me that I could do this, that it would be fine, that I’d come back for Relocation. Within the confines of my pale bedroom, I could barely breathe—my chest hurt so much with shock. I wrote him several texts, then deleted them.

  Liv ignored me. Honestly, I was relieved that she never knocked. I’d only have to shove her away. I tortured myself by replaying events again and again, hating myself that I’d let this happen.

  My eyes flitted from my lap to the bodies passing by the car. Hopefully my white Prius blended in fine. Already I could tell the student body was one hundred times more diverse than at my almost-all-white private school. From the few girls I saw, I knew my clothes wouldn’t fit in. I wore my usual uniform—black and more black Alexander Wang. They wore athletic shorts and baggy T-shirts with flip-flops—the official shoe of Austin, Victoria had once scoffed. More cars poured into the parking lot. I needed to walk to class before there was a crowd.

  The sooner I started, the sooner I could come back. Relocation was set for June, so at the very most I had a school year in front of me. I’d just go on autopilot and this would be easy.

  As soon as I set foot outside the car, it was like a dam broke. A tide of noise and smells overwhelmed me. There were too many people, and I was too nervous.

  I felt the onset of the rash on my arms. Just keep your head down and walk. I tried to ground my senses by taking in small details of my physical surroundings: the broken pavement, LOYAL FOREVER written on the face of the school. To me the high school was depressing in its austerity, a decades-old facility composed of concrete-block buildings.

  I found my first-period classroom. I was the first student there. An African American woman around my parents’ age looked up from her desk and smiled at me automatically, then did a bit of a double take before hiding her reaction. It was obvious she was expecting me, and I wondered what she’d been told.

  She walked only partway over to me, as if she didn’t know whether I minded being approached. “Hello! You’re Julia? I’m Mrs. Bartell.”

  “Hi. Yes, I’m Julia.” I nodded. I practiced not looking at her too long or too intently even though I needed to concentrate on what she was saying and how to make my reply sound normal. After a summer away from school, this type of playacting and slowed-down conversation was taxing.

  Mrs. Bartell had short hair and wore dangling chandelier earrings that almost dwarfed her small shoulders. Her eyes were friendly, and I decided to be open-minded as long as she wasn’t nosy. The main energy coming off her was motherly and sincere, and thankfully my heartbeat responded by slowing. I was safe for the moment.

  “Welcome! You can have a seat wherever you’d like.” It felt to me like she was making a concerted effort to behave normally. I wondered how all the kids were going to act if even the teacher was anxious around me. I looked different from the rest of my family so that bought me some time, but soon enough the kids would know who I was. I felt my cheeks redden and then reminded myself it didn’t matter what these people thought of me. I just needed to try to blend in as best I could, all while not breaking into the rash. And maybe I was being paranoid. There was no way everyone in Austin had heard of us.

  Kids began to walk in, loud and in throngs. This atmosphere felt much more laid-back than at St. Philip’s. I could feel the myriad emotions that came into the classroom with the students, and I tried to hold their noise and feelings at arm’s length. I bent down to my bag to check my phone for no reason other than it kept me from looking at anyone. I noticed conversations halting as the students saw me. At this point they saw only an expensively dressed new girl who had some exposed tattoos.

  “I heard there were a ton of them.” Without looking in their direction, I picked up on the conversation of the two girls across the classroom.

  “No, I heard there weren’t that many. But he told her they all looked exactly alike.”

  “I heard he was in a prison cell with them. Oh, and that he got hurt.”

  They shut up abruptly. The moment I realized who they were talking about, my gaze landed on the doorway. And there he was.

  I’d been told it was called the oddball effect—an evolutionary advantage, the ability to slow things down in order to make decisions in critical moments. It felt like everything in my view came to a standstill. And then inched slowly forward.

  John was flanked by two big guys, but he was the tallest and leanest. They had been laughing, but John stopped in his tracks when he saw me. He recovered quickly, though, and kept walking. To my surprise it appeared he was going to be the one to pretend we’d never met. He took a desk in the back row. His friends kept talking and placed themselves in front of and next to him.

  After Novak seemed to promise to take care of the legal issue, I’d willingly forgotten about John. I hadn’t even considered he might go to school here as a remote possibility.

  He didn’t look at me again, and I felt smug at the thought that he was intimidated by me.

  “John Ford?”

  He raised his hand when his name was called for attendance. I could sense the buzz that went around the room at the announcement of his name, especially from the girls in the classroom—as if it gave them permission to look over at him, which they’d wanted to do since he walked in. One blond girl in particular stared. It was obvious to me that she and John had a history. Thankfully Mrs. Bartell just called out “Julia” when she reached my name on the roster and checked it off without fanfare.

  The class officially started and the first-day-of-school housekeeping—attendance, general syllabus for the year, grading—took up a good portion of the period. As long as I didn’t need to participate in a conversation, I only had to half-listen to get all the information. For most of class, I tried to act unaware that everyone’s eyes were on me, while at the same time trying to tell if John Ford in particular was staring. I wondered which part of the article had bothered him most. Best-case scenario, he thought, like everyone else, I was a member of a cult. I felt embarrassed by the thought.

  “So, All the King’s Men was your summer reading. What’d y’all think?” Mrs. Bartell asked, pretending class was going to have substance on the first day of school. I glanced at the wall clock, surprised to find the period was almost over. John’s presence had distracted me for almost the entire class and at some point I’d begun to calm down.

  Mrs. Bartell was only killing time and there was total reluctance in the air, everyone’s brain still clinging to thoughts of summer. Before she said his name, I felt Mrs. Bartell’s attention shift to John, and I knew she was going to call on him. “John?”

  Startled, John sat up straighter, moving his hands under the desk to hide his eczema from view. I realized I was nervous for him, assuming he was unprepared on the first day. But he surprised me.

  “It was good. Actually, it was great. And that’s the way it works—only a select group of people call the shots and pull the levers. Some we elect—others just use their money.” Ouch. So he did have something to say to me.

  “Was there a scene or chapter that stood out for you?” Mrs. Bartell asked, opening the question to the rest of the class.

  But John answered. “When Jack finds out about Anne and drives nonstop from Baton Rouge to Long Beach and then sleeps for days.” You could tell this had great self-destructive appeal to John. I’d loved that part too.

  Against my earlier resolve, I turned to watch him. You could see remnants of the long scratch from Barton Springs on his cheek. I noticed his full lips, the top lip slightly bigger than the bottom. What struck me were his eyes. He would probably be considered classically handsome, though his almond-shaped eyes were unexpected in a way I couldn’t pinpoint.

  He was not my type. With his brown eyes and his dark-brown hair, he was so different from the more exotic-looking boys in our group. He wore jeans an
d Vans. His T-shirt wasn’t tight but fit him well, in a way that showed he had a hard, well-defined chest, which I’d noticed at the pool. Everything about him was just…not what I was used to. I took all of this in, every detail of him, over the course of one second. When my attention turned back to the whole class again, I was surprised that most of the kids were listening to what John had to say.

  Suddenly John snapped his head to look directly at me, sensing I had been staring. Fortunately that’s when the bell rang.

  I looked away and began to pack up my bag. I needed to fly out of there to my next class in case he attempted to speak to me. I didn’t even want to acknowledge we’d met before. I needed to be very clear. What happened the other day had never happened.

  Walking out of the classroom, I had to cross his path. I picked up on a huge dose of resentment.

  During the first week of school, I watched him try not to watch me. I knew he must be mad at me. So mad, he was pretending I didn’t exist. In addition to being angry that I’d lied to the police, he was probably also angry and confused about what he’d seen.

  I should have thought it was funny that he ignored me, given that everyone else in the school stared at me and whispered now that they’d heard who I was. I couldn’t believe I was bothered by John’s anger. His parents sweating the expense of a lawyer stuck in my head. My family would consider it a major flaw that I had any concern about an outsider. I was letting it distract me, when my job here was to feel nothing at all.

  Every day at school, time ticked by slowly since I had to be vigilant, staying in an almost meditative state so as to remain composed and not fuel the rumors.

  I took long, hard runs the first week to see if that helped to relieve stress. Then I told myself I’d just do a few small tricks in my bathroom, that the release was what I needed in order to manage myself at school. That small release turned into more than a few tricks—exploding bottles of shampoo and soap in my shower, sitting on the bathroom floor while moving my phone hypnotically back and forth across the tiles. It helped me stay rash-free.

  The few times I couldn’t resist, I tried to read John’s mind again by focusing only on him, shutting out everything else around me, wanting to relive that feeling of oneness I couldn’t forget. I tried multiple times, but nothing. After each failure I told myself I’d stop trying.

  It shouldn’t have felt like some major achievement or ego boost when I caught him looking at me once. So he wasn’t totally oblivious. It almost made me smile outright. I loved that I knew how he initially felt about me at Barton Springs. He had been fascinated by me, not Liv. And not fascinated like I was a spectacle, but actually attracted to me. I’d never felt that before. I had hoped Angus was attracted to me, but even if he or any of the boys in our group had felt that way, they were too hard to read.

  Every English class, John would saunter in with just his binder, and he always sat with his same two friends. They were soccer players; I knew this because one of them wouldn’t stop talking about being a soccer player. The other always wore cowboy boots.

  “Ford! Next weekend,” one of them said. “I heard there’s a party at Robertson’s. Are you allowed to go out, or are you grounded?” He laughed mockingly, a total shit-talker.

  Unfortunately I’d been early to class that day, not knowing if it was easier to slip in with less attention that way or to come later. But John and his friends were five minutes early too. They usually walked in from the parking lot together just as the bell rang. I felt off-balance, since it was just the four of us in the classroom.

  “Shut up” was all John said, though not unpleasantly. It was awkward; the boys sat at desks too close to me even though the entire classroom was empty. I’d seen John pause when he first saw me and then reluctantly follow his friends to their chairs. Now he was doing his best to ignore everyone, looking at his new iPhone intently.

  As I studied John’s two friends, I was happy to feel something close to the revulsion I was supposed to. After a week of being at the school, I was now comfortable enough to look up and observe the dynamics. These were the male athletes who were at the top of the food chain. In the parking lot they were magnets for everyone—the cool kids, the high-functioning stoners, other athletes of both sexes. I saw John with them, but he always seemed to keep himself a bit apart.

  “Dude, when you were gone last year, Robertson had a party”—inside-joke laughter—“and Hannah took our friend here to the bathroom, and they—”

  “Tom!” John interrupted sharply and looked over at me as in, Not in front of her. I’d looked up at his sharp tone and our eyes met involuntarily. Again, that electricity. Those placid, hard-to-read eyes looked away quickly, his resolve to ignore me back in place.

  “What? Jesus, Ford. God knows what they do for fun. I’m sure all this is nothing to her.” Was Tom really talking about me as if I weren’t right there? Then he was cocky enough to do the thing no one had done yet—address me directly. He made a dramatic show of slowly turning in his seat to face me. It was easy for me to channel Victoria after all these years and look at him with complete lack of interest. Besides our obvious differences, there was something I didn’t like about this guy.

  “Sorry. It’s rude to talk about parties in front of people without inviting them. Do you want to come to a party with us this weekend?” He looked at me with pretend ease, giving out his fake invitation.

  I couldn’t figure out if he thought he was being daring by talking to me or if he was disrespecting me. “No, thank you,” I said, hoping my cold attitude would put him in his place and he’d turn back around. I felt John look up from his phone and watch our exchange.

  “So, what’s your deal?” I have to admit I was taken aback when Tom continued.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Why are you at this school?” Tom was trying not to smile, so now I knew he was holding back nervous laughter. Knowing this made me relax and so, Angus-like, I toyed with him.

  “I scared people at my old school.” I crossed my legs, stretched my arms over my head, and yawned. I kept my gaze direct and dead.

  “How?” chimed in the other boy, Hudson, but I continued to look only at Tom.

  “Because I knew about bad things they’d done.” I’d said it just to sound scary so they would leave me alone, but I saw real paranoia in Tom’s eyes, and he backed off and turned around. He had something to hide.

  Hudson reluctantly turned around too, as people began walking into the classroom. My gaze slid back to John’s.

  Just then a girl with luxurious glossy black hair dashed into the room. Her clothes were casual and messy, but she had some style. She looked around for a second, and her eyes landed on the boys and then me. The bell was about to ring, and she wasn’t in our class. As she beelined in our direction, John sat up straighter in his seat and held out his hand like he was going to touch her when she reached us. When she squeezed between the desks, John put his arm around her waist, but she looked past him and, with wide eyes, quickly passed a phone to Tom. Because her tank top hung long and loose, you could see the sides of her black bra.

  “Megan said you left it in her car. I’ve got to go.” She turned from Tom and squeezed John’s hand while she untangled his arm from her waist, and I saw she wouldn’t meet his eyes. Hudson looked over at Tom with ill-concealed worry. John missed it all as he watched her walk out. John’s girlfriend.

  Immediately John was back to wearing his normal impassive, prove-it-to-me expression. Because he always seemed so detached, I was pretty floored by his affectionate gesture.

  My impression of him shifted. What was he like with her? What was he like when he let down his guard? I should have known right then that it was competitiveness that led to my fascination with him. That, and my desire for him to discover his girlfriend was cheating on him with his friend.

  The court was scorching, and it was my serve. I was good enough after years of playing sporadically that I had already kicked ass—too much ass—so now I had
to start missing shots and throwing matches, which was exhausting. The black outfit of the day had been exchanged for white tennis clothes. Needless to say, I didn’t feel like myself.

  The tennis-team girls weren’t friendly. They were a close-knit clique who resented my displacing people at the top of the ladder. They didn’t speak to me but they did watch me closely, trying to catch me doing something odd they could gossip about. The freshmen on the JV team seemed to be ostracized too.

  My second week at the new school was coming to a close. I had my feet under me and was beginning to trust that I could handle most situations being thrown at me. I could self-regulate a whole lot better than I’d been able to the first couple of days.

  My life was almost unrecognizable now. It was as if I’d been in this routine for ages: wake up early, run for an hour, and then get out of the house to avoid watching Liv live her same life while not quite meeting my eyes. I’d barely seen Victoria, and nothing of my dad, for two weeks now. I’d spend the early morning at the same coffee shop, filling up on food I could never get at home, finishing my homework in minutes and still getting to school early.

  English class was my favorite because of John. Trying to figure him out was the only thing that was interesting in the least. I finally admitted it to myself. Covertly, I watched his every move, attempting to reconcile two different people I had seen—the one from Barton Springs who had some depth, and the one who appeared to be a distant, popular, one-dimensional jock, however smart. But I couldn’t glimpse the John I’d seen at Barton Springs or even at the police station—the one who was curious, intent on me. Whenever he did look in my general direction, his eyes revealed nothing—not any sign that he found me attractive or even interesting.

  Our only interaction had been when I struggled with my assigned locker one day outside the English classroom. I hadn’t used it yet and was fumbling with the completely foreign mechanics of the handle. Passing by, he reached out, opened it, and kept right on walking before I could say a word.