“All done?” I said.

“Almost. Which period do you have free on Thursdays?” She took a day planner out of the pocket of her shirt and paged through it.

“Second,” I said. “Why?”

“Our school just got funding for a nutritionist to come in once a week. His name is Bob and he’s wonderful. I’m sending all the vegetarians to talk to him. I’m putting you down for next Thursday, ten a.m.” She said it with the gleefulness of a child who has just learned a new magic trick and is eager to subject it to anyone and everyone she can.

“Vegetarian doesn’t mean anorexic,” I said. “They even have separate entries in the dictionary.”

This was one of Noe’s favorite rants. Look it up, people! Vegetarian: person who opposes the systematic torture of animals. Anorexic: person who opposes the systematic eating of food.

The nurse winked at me. “Bob’s lots of fun. He can help you come up with a plan to get more protein and iron. After all, we don’t want you keeling over on the high beam.”

“I get more iron than the average carnivore,” I said, again quoting Noe. “Did you know that spinach has more iron than steak?”

She patted my shoulder. “That’s something you can talk about with Bob. It looks beautiful out there. Enjoy the rest of your day.”

4

AT THE BARBECUE, I MOVED DOWN the food table quickly, making myself a plate from the picked-over piles of buns, cheese, chips, and watermelon. I fished a can of soda out of the ice-filled garbage can and walked over to where Noe and Steven were sprawled under a tree.

“Hey, doll,” said Noe. “How’d it go?”

I sank into the grass with my plate.

“Oh, fabulous,” I said. “I have an appointment with Bob the Nutritionist. She’s sending all the vegetarians to talk to him, so watch out.”

“Are you kidding me?” said Noe.

I shook my head. “Better keep your meatless ways on the sly or you’ll be next.”

Noe made a hiss of exasperation. “She should be sending all the carnivores to the school psychiatrist to get their heads checked for psychopathy.”

Steven whimpered, midway through a bite of his hamburger. Noe picked up the top half of her bun and chucked it at his head. “That includes you, Cow Killer McNeil.”

“My mommy says that hamburgers come from the Happy Farm,” said Steven in a little-boy voice.

Noe shot him a dark look. “Well, Mommy lied.”

Noe and Steven had been dating since June. He was typical Noe material: intelligent and well mannered, with a special talent (acting!), professional parents (lawyers!), and none of the character flaws (a fondness for hallucinogens! the playing of team sports! weakness in grammar and punctuation!) that Noe held in such contempt. I’d watched him play the part of Willy in Death of a Salesman, but had never interacted with him close up until Noe announced, just before exam time, that she and he were an item.

Steven had Noe’s favorite hoodie in his lap and he was mending the kangaroo pocket with a needle and thread. It was jarring to see Noe’s hoodie receiving surgery from a boy I still considered basically a stranger. I knew they’d talked on the phone every day over the summer, and he’d even driven up to visit her at Camp Qualla Hoo Hoo, but because this had all taken place outside my sight, my brain still had Steven filed in the “abstraction” category and had not yet updated him to a living, breathing reality. What are you doing? I almost said when I saw Noe’s hoodie spread out on his lap. That’s mine. Noe’s boyfriends demonstrated a degree of devotion I still found incredible after more than three years of knowing her. Whether this trait was something Noe selected for or cultivated after the fact was a mystery I was still unraveling.

I cracked open my soda and took a sip.

“I didn’t even know we had a nutritionist,” Noe said.

“They just got funding for him. Yippee.”

“They can afford a nutritionist, but they can’t spring for new gym leotards?”

“The idea is to fatten everybody up to the point that we fit in the saggy old ones.”

Noe made a face. “Bad mental image,” she said. She picked up the rest of her bun and started throwing pieces of it at a crow that was eyeing us from the grass.

I watched the way it hopped forward to snatch them.

“Caw, caw,” Steven said.

5

IT WAS WEIRD TO SEE ALL the new freshmen swarming around at the barbecue, talking and laughing as if they already owned the place.

When I started high school, I was a total mess.

After prolonged backroom deliberations, my mom and grandmother had determined that the summer before freshman year was a good time to inform me that I was half monster. My crazy cousin Ava caught wind of the plan and beat them to it.

It was Ava’s birthday and I’d been charged with keeping her corralled in her room while the adults decorated the table and put the finishing touches on her cake. We sat on her bed, and she turned up the volume on the screaming music she kept playing twenty-four hours a day, her version of a white-noise machine.

“How much has your mom told you about your dad?” she’d said.

I blushed and shrugged. Ava and I used to play together when we were little, but when she started high school Ava changed. Now when we hung out, it felt like she was always pushing and pushing, trying to get a reaction. “Do you know what this is?” and she would show me a cut on her arm. Or she would name the creepiest boy at her school and tell me all the things she had done with him, or worse, say that he liked me and wanted to go out. I longed to be in the bright kitchen with Mom and Nan. I could hear them laughing, shouting at Uncle Dylan to find them some tape to wrap Ava’s present.

“His name is Scott,” I said. “He went to Northern. They only slept together once. He was mean to Mom and she didn’t want him around me.”

Mom had dropped out of college to have me. She was nineteen. I’d never met my dad, but I imagined him as the popular quarterback in a teen movie, the one who starts falling in love with the girl from the outdoors club, only to cave in to social pressure and publicly snub her in favor of the hot cheerleader. I knew lots of other kids whose parents weren’t together, so my lack of a father had never caused undue torment, although it was true that Mom was the youngest parent at my school.

“She didn’t sleep with him,” Ava said. “He raped her. They’re going to tell you before school starts. I heard them talking about it yesterday.”

I dug my hands into Ava’s quilt. In the kitchen, laughter, banging cupboards, the finding of candles, the taking down of plates. Ava was a fan of dark secrets and skeletons in the closet. She had subjected me to some pretty disturbing stories over my lifetime, but this one beat them all.

“Everyone was shocked when she decided to keep you,” Ava said. “She came this close to giving you up for adoption. My dad says the whole time she was pregnant, she hardly spoke at all. She wouldn’t even tell anyone what happened until almost eight months. She must have felt like there was this monster growing inside her and it was too late to stop it.”

Ava was studying my face for a reaction. I kept it carefully blank, a skill I had learned from other encounters in Ava’s room. Monster, I thought to myself, feeling the shape of the word settle into me, feeling it quietly reconfigure every cell in my body, like hitting the translate command by accident and seeing all the writing on your screen suddenly and incontrovertibly turn to Japanese.

“You don’t believe me, do you,” said Ava.

I shook my head.

“Or you do believe me, and you don’t want to show it.”