Invisible i

“Oh my god,” whispered Nia, and we crossed the threshold from the lobby into the office.

CHAPTER 6 (#ulink_af3d8c12-758b-5cd1-a2ae-b9b03caf92a3)

"Have a seat,” said the vice principal, gesturing to three empty chairs outside of his office. “I have a meeting, so, Mrs. Leong, I’m going to ask you to keep an eye on these three. I want them sitting here silently until I come back.”

“Yes, Mr. Thornhill,” said Mrs. Leong.

“Now.” He turned back to the three of us. “While it is true that, historically, Amanda has felt that her attendance at Endeavor was … optional, this is different. Today as part of her absenting herself, she chose to send me directly to three people to ask about her whereabouts.”

“If you want to know where she is so badly,” snapped Nia, “why don’t you just call her house?”

Mr. Thornhill’s eyes flashed with irritation. “I’ll thank you not to tell me my job, Nia. You can rest assured that I’m handling things on that front. Meanwhile, I want the three of you to think very, very carefully about everything you’ve just seen.”

My heart was beating hard enough that I could barely hear him, so it was a relief when Hal took it upon himself to answer for all of us. “We certainly will, sir. We certainly will.”

Despite Mr. Thornhill’s instruction of silence, I thought for sure we’d have a chance to talk about our tattoos, but the one time Hal started to whisper something, Mrs. Leong jerked her head up and stared at us so fiercely I was actually afraid. Two periods passed while I tried and failed to make sense of what was going on, and by the time Mr. Thornhill walked back into the office and asked if we were ready to talk, I was so tangled up it was all I could do not to tell him everything I knew about Amanda just so he’d help me make sense of it.

But after Hal had answered, “I’m just as confused as you are,” and Nia had said, “Has it not occurred to you, Mr. Thornhill, that we, too, are simply victims of a troublesome student’s practical joke?” I couldn’t start spilling my guts. When he looked at me for an answer, I just shook my head.

“Well, I’m sorry to hear that. Very, very sorry to hear that. Perhaps you’ll feel differently after you wash my car this afternoon after school—”

“But—” began Nia.

“And, if not, I’m sure a month of Saturday detention will change your mind.” “That’s—” said Hal.

“That’s final,” finished Mr. Thornhill. “Unless you can convince your friend Amanda Valentino to come by my office and explain everything herself.” The bell rang right then, as though Mr. Thornhill had planned it. “You may go to lunch.”

I’d expected Nia, Hal, and me to start dishing everything we knew as soon as we stepped into the corridor, but once the office door closed behind us, Nia clutched Hal’s arm and pulled him into the sea of humanity that fills the hallways during period changes. It was like I hadn’t been with them in Thornhill’s office, hadn’t shown them my tattoo. I didn’t know what to do—was I supposed to trot after them like some kind of desperate puppy? Take me with you! I want to talk about Amanda, too!

Um, no. If they thought they were too good to include me in their little powwow, let them think that way. I’d go straight to the source.

Cell phones are totally forbidden in school, so I had to slip into one of the stalls in the bathroom to dial Amanda’s number.

“Life is too short to wait. Except for the beep.”

Beep. "Okay, wherever you are, you have got to get back to school. What is the deal with Thornhill’s car and the lockers and everything? Call me as soon as you get this. Okay, bye.” When I hung up I wished I’d said something about her knowing Hal and Nia. But what? I happen to know for a fact that you’re good friends with two other people at Endeavor besides me. It wasn’t exactly like I didn’t have friends other than Amanda. I mean, a table full of people was waiting for me right now in the cafeteria. So Amanda had other friends, too. What was the big deal?

But as I made my way to the lunchroom, I couldn’t deny that it did feel like a big deal. After Amanda had chosen me, I’d just assumed that I was her only real friend. Now it turned out that I was one of three people she assigned totems to. Three people she’d gotten involved in her prank (whatever it was). I mean, she knew about the I-Girls. So why didn’t I know about Hal and Nia?

The cafeteria was packed, but I spotted Heidi, Traci, and Kelli at our usual table. They’d clearly been looking for me because the second I walked into the room, Kelli’s hand shot up in the air and she said something to Heidi who turned around to wave. As I made my way toward them, I passed Hal and Nia sitting together at one of the small tables by the windows that someone must have thought would make the place feel more like a café. They were leaning toward each other and Nia was talking and gesturing.

Even as every atom in my being longed to know what she was saying, I couldn’t not be conscious of the nearby table of upperclassmen, some of whom I recognized, who were looking at me. I realized everyone must have heard about the VP’s car by now. And if they’d heard about the car, they’d probably heard about the three people who’d been called into the office: Nia, Hal, and me.

Would they think the three of us were friends now?

At our school, there are a lot of what I think of as social neutrals in the ninth grade. You know, they’re not popular, but they’re not unpopular. Nia Rivera was so totally not one of those people. The irony of it is, she’d had to work to be the outcast she’d become. I mean, even with her baggy sweatpants and lumpy ponytails and geeky glasses and angry, confrontational attitude, I still think that, if for no other reason than her brother, she could easily have spent her life as a social neutral.

Could have, that is, if she hadn’t turned Heidi and Traci in for cheating on a math test two years ago.

Remembering the poisonous song Heidi had made up about Nia after the cheating incident (the song she’d then taught to the entire grade) made it easy for me to turn my feet in the direction of my usual table. I may have wanted to know what Nia was saying, but this was a perfect example of curiosity having the potential to murder the cat.

Or at least the cat’s social life.

“OH MY GOD!” Heidi yanked me into the seat next to her. “I heard everything!”

“This is the most insane thing ever!” said Kelli.

“Everyone’s talking about it,” said Traci.

“We were, like, freaking out,” said Kelli.

Kelli and Heidi both have long blond hair, and when we’re all out together, people think they’re sisters, which they sometimes pretend that they are. Traci gets her straight black hair from her mom, who’s Chinese, and her blue eyes from her dad. All three of them look like they could be models, which, as you can imagine, does wonders for my self-image. I mean, I’m not a dog or anything, but my legs are kind of on the short side, and my hair’s more frizzy than curly, and even on my best, best day, I could never be taken for someone whose only job is to look good. Which is probably about reason number one hundred and fifty why it’s so incredible that I’m one of the I-Girls and that a popular and great-looking guy like Lee would choose me for his girlfriend. Or kind-of girlfriend. Or whatever we are.

“So first of all, what did he want you for? You don’t even know that girl.”

Heidi always called Amanda “that girl,” refusing to dignify her with a name. Heidi’s mom is kind of a celebrity in Orion because she’s a TV reporter, and her dad is the police chief, so everyone knows her and her family. Even if she weren’t beautiful and rich and popular, Heidi would definitely be somebody because of who her parents are, and everyone at Endeavor is a little intimidated by her. Even the senior girls (even the popular senior girls) always say hi to her in the halls. The four of us were almost always the only freshmen at parties, and no one ever gave us a hard time because we were with Heidi.

But Amanda never acted like Heidi was anything special. Her first article in The Spirit (the Endeavor paper) was called “Do You See What I See? A Newcomer’s Take on Orion,” and she included something about watching the local news and referred to Heidi’s mom as a “small-town TV reporter.” Heidi was furious, but not nearly as furious as she was after she confronted Amanda and Amanda said simply, “Well, that’s what she is, isn’t she? I didn’t mean it as an insult or anything. But Orion’s a small town, and she’s a TV reporter here.” After that, Heidi was happy to take any excuse to say something bad about Amanda, and Amanda provided her with plenty of excuses, like the time she beat Heidi out for a part in As You Like It and then didn’t even take it because she said she was too busy.

For her second article in The Spirit, Amanda exposed a secretary who’d been giving kids late passes in exchange for money. The secretary was transferred, so the whole situation stopped, and Heidi informed us that Amanda was the devil because Mrs. Rifkin had just been providing a service and sometimes you really, really need a late pass but then Amanda went and ruined everything.

Amanda’s third article was all about how teachers are afraid of popular students. It said that if a student had a lot of friends or if the student’s parents had money, he (or she, of course) is less likely to be yelled at in class, get detention, receive bad grades, or be asked to provide an excuse if he (or she) didn’t have the homework or couldn’t meet a deadline. The article, which came out right after February vacation, caused a huge scandal, which I thought was kind of weird since it seemed like Amanda was just stating the obvious. I mean, everyone knows that who gets in trouble and who doesn’t is totally unfair and teachers have favorites and some kids can basically do whatever they want in certain classes.

But I guess even something everybody already knows can cause a scandal, especially since Amanda backed up her argument with tons of statistical evidence. Like Mr. Thornhill said, she’s a math genius, and she’d managed to get all this data she was definitely not supposed to have access to (like who had served detention when and for what). It was this huge deal, and some students (okay, Heidi) who had enjoyed a certain … privileged status—and who, as far as I knew, had never been held to a deadline, or asked to show their work on a math problem (even after said students had been caught cheating, if you can believe it), or told to stop chatting with a friend—found that once Vice Principal Thornhill had finished lecturing the faculty of Endeavor on fairness, their classroom experience was suddenly quite different from what it had been before.

“Is it true? Was she expelled?” Kelli’s face was pink with excitement.

“Expelled? Actually, I—”

“God, I hate that girl,” said Heidi, and she stabbed viciously at a piece of sushi.

Part of me wanted to say something in Amanda’s defense, but when Heidi really hates something or someone, it’s scary to try and defend it. Plus, after the morning I’d had and the disappearing act she’d pulled, I wasn’t exactly in the mood to defend Amanda.

Traci, who rarely eats, snapped her gum thoughtfully. “I still don’t get why they even called you into the office with those weirdos. You don’t even know them.”

“I don’t know,” said Kelli. “Nia’s a weirdo, but Hal’s kind of a hottie.”

Was it my imagination or did Heidi look uncomfortable for a minute as she drew her chopstick through a small pool of soy sauce on her Styrofoam plate?

Traci was too busy brushing some invisible lint off her bright red T-shirt to notice Heidi’s behavior, and she didn’t acknowledge Kelli’s comment. “Was it just some kind of monster mistake or something?” As she pressed her chin into her neck, it was impossible to know if she was checking her shirt for cleanliness or admiring her chest, which she tends to stick out as much as possible. “How’d Thornhill get the idea that you would ever have done anything with Amanda Valentino?”

The thing was, I’d never intended to keep my friendship with Amanda secret from the I-Girls, it had just kind of … worked out that way. In the brief time between my meeting Amanda and our becoming friends, Heidi had started hating her intensely, and like I said, you really don’t want to try and point out the good side of someone Heidi’s decided to hate. Amanda made it easy, always at newspaper or some other activity at lunch, so hard to pin down during the school day that she was practically the invisible friend. Keeping our friendship very low profile was no problem. But what was I supposed to say now? Um, listen guys, the thing is that I actually am friends with Amanda. Really good friends. I hope that’s not weird or anything.

Great idea, Callie. And why don’t you bring Nia Rivera to that party on Saturday.

The three of them were staring at me, and I thought about Nia and Hal talking at their table. Maybe they did know Amanda better than I did. Maybe despite what she’d said about my being special and her guide and everything, she and I hadn’t ever really been friends.

“Yeah,” I said slowly. “It was just a total mistake.”