“Go,” he said, and I did.

Without my brother distracting me, I was able to fully absorb the campus in its immaculate, overlandscaped splendor. Fat blades of emerald grass anchored the grounds, clipped within a millimeter of uniformity. A sprawling courtyard divided the campus into blooming, flower-framed quadrants. One section housed the gaudily becolumned library, another the cafeteria and windowless gymnasium. The classrooms and administration office dominated the last two quadrants. Open-air archways and brick paths connected the structures and led to a gurgling fountain in the center of the lawn.

I half-expected to see woodland creatures burst forth from the buildings and break into song. Everything about the place shrieked WE ARE PERFECT HERE AND YOU WILL BE TOO! No wonder my mother chose it.

I felt grossly underdressed in my T-shirt and jeans; uniforms were required at Croyden, but thanks to our late transfer ours hadn’t arrived yet. Switching from public school to private as a junior—and in the middle of the trimester, no less—would have been torment enough without the added insult of plaid skirts and kneesocks. But my mother was a snob, and didn’t trust the public schools in such a big city. And after everything that had happened in December, I was in no shape to argue coherently about it.

I picked up our schedules and maps from the school secretary and headed back outside as Daniel hung up the phone.

“How’s Mom?” I asked.

My brother half-shrugged. “Just checking in.” He looked over the paperwork for me. “We’ve missed first period so your first class is …” Daniel fumbled with the papers and declared, “Algebra II.”

Perfect. Just perfect.

His eyes scanned the open-air campus; the classroom doors led directly outside, like the structure of a motel. After a few seconds, Daniel pointed to the farther building.

“It should be there, on the other side of that corner. Listen,” he said, “I might not see you until lunch. Do you want to eat with me or something? I have to speak to the principal and the head of the music department but I can find you after—”

“No, it’s fine. I’ll be fine.”

“Really? Because there’s no one I’d rather eat mystery meat with.”

My brother smiled, but I could tell he was anxious. Daniel had kept a big-brotherly eye on me ever since I was released from the hospital, though he was less obvious about it, and therefore less irritating, than our mother. But as such, I had to work extra hard to reassure him that I would not crack today. I put on my best mask of adolescent ennui and wore it like armor as we approached the building.

“Really. I’m fine,” I said, rolling my eyes for effect. “Now go, before you fail out of high school and die poor and lonely.” I shoved him lightly, for emphasis, and we separated.

But as I walked away, my little facade started to crumble. How ridiculous. This wasn’t my first day of kindergarten, though it was my first day of school without Rachel … ever. But it was the first of many. I needed to get a grip. I swallowed back the ache that rose in my throat and tried to decipher my schedule:

AP English, Ms. Leib, Room B35

Algebra II, Mr. Walsh, Room 264

American History, Mrs. McCreery, Room 4

Art, Mrs. Gallo, Room L

Spanish I, Ms. Morales, Room 213

Biology II, Mrs. Prieta, Annex

Hopeless. I wandered the path to the building and scanned the room numbers, but found the vending machines before I found my Algebra classroom. Four of them in a row, pushed up against the back of the building, facing a series of tiki huts that dotted the grounds. They reminded me that I’d skipped breakfast. I looked around. I was already late. A few more minutes couldn’t hurt.

I set the papers down on the ground and dug in my bag for change. But as I inserted one quarter in the machine, the other one I held in my hand fell. I bent to search for it, as I had only enough money to buy one thing. I finally found it, placed it in the machine, and clicked on the letter-number combination that would provide my salvation.

It stuck. Unbelievable.

I clicked the numbers again. Nothing. My M&M’s were trapped by the machine.

I grabbed the sides of the machine and tried to shake it. No dice. Then I kicked it. Still nothing.

I glared at the machine. “Let them out.” I punctuated my statement with a few more useless kicks.

“You have an anger-management problem.”

I whipped around at the sound of the warm, lilting British accent behind me.

The person it belonged to sat on the picnic table under the tiki hut. His general state of disarray was almost enough to distract me from his face. The boy—if he could be called that, looking like he belonged in college, not high school—wore Chucks with holes worn through, no laces. Slim charcoal pants and a white button-down shirt covered his lean, spare frame. His tie was loose, his cuffs were undone, and his blazer lay in a heap beside him as he lazily leaned back on the palms of his hands.

His strong jaw and chin were slightly scruffy, as though he hadn’t shaved in days, and his eyes looked gray in the shade. Strands of his dark chestnut hair stuck out every which way. Bedroom hair. He could be considered pale in comparison to everyone else I’d observed in Florida thus far, which is to say he wasn’t orange.

He was beautiful. And he was smiling at me.

5

SMILING AT ME LIKE HE KNEW ME. I TURNED my head, wondering if there was anyone behind me. Nope. No one there. When I glanced back in the boy’s direction, he was gone.

I blinked, disoriented, and bent to pick up my things. I heard footsteps approach, but they stopped just before they reached me.

The perfectly tanned blond girl wore heeled oxfords and white kneesocks with her just-above-the-knee charcoal and navy plaid skirt. The fact that I’d be wearing the same thing in a week hurt my soul.

She was linked arm-in-arm with a flawlessly groomed, startlingly enormous blond boy, and the two of them in their Croyden-crested blazers looked down their perfect noses with their perfect smattering of freckles at me.

“Watch it,” the girl said. With venom.

Watch what? I hadn’t done anything. But I decided not to say so, considering I knew exactly one person at the school, and we shared a last name.

“Sorry,” I said, even though I didn’t know what for. “I’m Mara Dyer. I’m new here.” Obviously.

A hollow smile crept over Vending Machine Girl’s puritanically pretty face. “Welcome,” she said, and the two of them walked away.

Funny. I did not feel welcome at all.

I shook off both strange encounters, and, map in hand, circled the building with no results. I climbed the stairs, and circled it again before finally finding my classroom.

The door was closed. I did not relish the idea of walking in late, or at all, really. But I’d already missed one class, and I was there, and the hell with it. I opened the door and stepped inside.

Cracks appeared in the classroom walls as twenty-something heads turned in my direction. The fissures spidered up, higher and higher, until the ceiling began to crumble. My throat went dry. No one said a word, even though dust filled the room, even though I thought I would choke.

Because it wasn’t happening to anyone else. Just to me.

A light crashed to the floor right in front of the teacher, sending a shower of sparks in my direction. Not real. But I tried to avoid them anyway, and fell.

I heard the sound of my face as it smacked against the polished linoleum floor. Then pain punched me between my eyes. Warm blood gushed out of my nostrils and swirled over my mouth and under my chin. My eyes were open, but I still couldn’t see through the gray dust. I could hear, though. There was a collective intake of breath from the class, and the sputtering teacher tried to determine just how hurt I was. Oddly, I did nothing but lie on the cool floor and ignore the muffled voices around me. I preferred my bubble of pain to the humiliation I would surely face upon standing.

“Umm, are you okay? Can you hear me?” The teacher’s voice grew increasingly panicky.

I tried to say my name, but I think it sounded more like “I’m dying” instead.

“Someone go get Nurse Lucas before she bleeds to death in my classroom.”

At that, I scrambled up, shifting woozily on alien feet. Nothing like the threat of nurses and their needles to get my ass into gear.

“I’m fine,” I announced, and looked around the room. Just a normal classroom. No dust. No cracks. “Really,” I said. “No need for the nurse. I just get nosebleeds sometimes.” Chuckle, chuckle. Laugh it off. “I don’t even feel anything. The bleeding’s stopped.” And it had, though I probably looked like a freak show.

The teacher eyed me warily before he answered. “Hmm. You really aren’t hurt, then? Would you like to go to the restroom to clean up? We can formally introduce ourselves upon your return.”

“Yeah, thanks,” I answered. “I’ll be right back.” I willed myself out of my dizziness, and snuck a glance at the teacher and my new classmates. Every face in the room registered a mixture of surprise and horror. Including, I noticed, Vending Machine Girl. Lovely.

I vacated the classroom. My body felt wiggly as I walked, like a loose tooth that could be dislodged by the slightest force. When I no longer heard the whispers or the teacher’s shaky voice, I almost broke into a run. I even missed the girls’ bathroom at first, barely registering the swinging door. I doubled back and, once inside, focused on the pattern of the hideous yolk-colored tile, counted the number of the stalls, did anything I could to avoid looking at myself in the mirror. I tried to calm myself, hoping to stave off the panic attack that would follow the sight of blood.

I breathed slowly. I did not want to clean myself up. I did not want to return to class. But the longer I was gone, the higher the likelihood that the teacher would send the nurse after me. I really didn’t want that, so I positioned myself in front of the wet counter, which was covered in wads of crumpled paper towels, and looked up.

The girl in the mirror smiled. But she wasn’t me.

6

IT WAS CLAIRE. HER RED HAIR SPILLED OVER MY shoulders where my brown hair should have been. Then her reflection bent, sinister in the glass. The room tilted, pitching me to the side. I bit my tongue, then braced my hands on the counter. When I looked up at the mirror, it was once again my face that stared back.

My heart pounded against my rib cage. It was nothing. Just like the classroom was nothing. I was okay. Nervous about my first day of school, maybe. My disastrous first day of school. But at least I was unsettled enough that my stomach forgot to churn at the sight of the drying blood on my skin.

I grabbed a handful of paper towels from the dispenser and wetted them. I brought them to my face to clean it up, but the pungent wet paper towel smell finally set my stomach roiling. I willed myself not to vomit.

I failed.

I had the presence of mind to pull back my long hair from my face as I emptied the meager contents of my stomach into the sink. At that moment, I was glad that the universe had thwarted my attempts at breakfast.

When I finished dry heaving, I wiped my mouth, gargled some water, and spit it into the sink. A thin film of sweat covered my skin, which had that unmistakable just-puked pallor. A charming first impression, to be sure. At least my T-shirt had escaped my bodily fluids.

I leaned on the sink. If I skipped the rest of Algebra, the teacher would just rustle up a mathlete posse to find me and make sure I hadn’t died. So I bravely headed out into the relentless heat and made my way back. The classroom door was still open; I’d forgotten to close it after my unceremonious departure, and I heard the teacher droning on about an equation. I took a deep breath and carefully walked in.

In seconds, the teacher was at my side. His thick glasses gave his eyes an insectlike quality. Creepy.

“Oh, you look much better! Please, have a seat right here. I’m Mr. Walsh, by the way. I didn’t catch your name before?”

“It’s Mara. Mara Dyer,” I said thickly.

“Well, Ms. Dyer, you certainly know how to make an entrance.”

The class’s low chuckle hovered in the air.

“Yeah, um, just clumsy, I guess.” I sat down in the first row, where Mr. Walsh had indicated, in an empty desk parallel to the teacher’s and closest to the door. Every seat in the row was unoccupied, except mine.

For eight painful minutes and twenty-seven infinite seconds, I sat sweltering in the seventh circle of my own personal inferno, motionless at my desk. I listened to the sound of the teacher’s voice but heard nothing. Shame drowned him out, and every pore of my skin felt painfully naked, open for exploitation by the pillaging eyes of my classmates.

I tried not to focus on the assault of whispers that I could hear but not decipher. I patted the back of my tingling head, as if the heat of the anonymous stares managed to burn through my hair, exposing my scalp. I looked desperately at the door, wishing to escape this nightmare, but I knew that the whispers would only spread as soon as I was outside.

The bell rang, marking the end of my first class at Croyden. A resounding success indeed.

I hung back from the mass exodus toward the door, knowing I’d need a book and a briefing on where the class was in the syllabus. Mr. Walsh told me ever so politely that I was expected to take the trimester exam in three weeks like everyone else, then returned to his desk to shuffle papers, and left me to face the rest of my morning.

It was blissfully uneventful. When lunch rolled around, I gathered my book-laden messenger bag and heaved it over my shoulder. I decided to look around for a quiet, secluded place to sit and read the book I’d brought with me. My vomiting shenanigans had ruined my appetite.

I hopped down the stairs two at a time, walked to the edge of the grounds, and stopped at the fence that bordered a large plot of undeveloped land. Trees towered above the school, casting one building entirely in shadow. The eerie screech of a bird punctured the breezeless air. I was in some preppy Jurassic Park nightmare, definitely. I violently opened my book to where I’d left off, but found myself reading and rereading the same paragraph before I gave up. That lump rose in my throat again. I slumped against the chain-link fence, the metal scoring marks in my flesh through the thin fabric of my shirt, and closed my eyes in defeat.