Hannah caught me. “Who are you looking at?”

I mumbled, “Nobody,” but my cheeks got hot and probably red like an unfortunate truth meter.

Hannah insisted, “Who?! Tell me!”

I didn’t want to risk losing my new friends, so I said, “Oh. Um, I think his name is Sky.”

Hannah’s eyes picked him out, and she said, “Ooooh. Sky. Yeah. Mr. Mystery.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

Hannah shrugged. “He’s one of those guys everyone knows of, except no one actually knows him. He somehow manages to seem popular without having, like, any actual friends yet. He transferred here this year. He’s a junior. But he’s totally hot. I’d do him.”

Natalie hit her shoulder. “Hannah!”

“What?” she said. “I didn’t mean I’m gonna. He’s Laurel’s.”

I blushed again. I mumbled that he wasn’t.

Hannah looked over her shoulder and said, “We’ll make him yours. He’s looking at you.”

When I glanced back, he still was.

I realized then that this could be who I am. Right there, with the cement burning my legs under the middle school jeans I’d cut off this morning, short enough that they would pass the longer-than-your-fingertips test only if I shrugged up my shoulders, and May’s silver-white shirt that shimmered in the light.

It was as if an invisible band started playing the sound track to a new life. I heard you. I wondered if this was how May felt when she was in high school. It must have been, because it was her music. All the songs we’d listened to together, playing at once. The world she’d disappeared into was here. I looked up from my blush, away from Sky, whose eyes were still on me, and turned to Natalie and Hannah. I laughed out loud, full of the secret someone I could become. Hello, hello, hello.

Yours,

Laurel

Dear Kurt,

May’s clothes must have worked like magic, because since I started wearing them, things have been happening. I sat with Natalie and Hannah at lunch all week. Then today, Friday, I was walking down the hallway to Bio, just making my feet follow the lines of light on the floor. Suddenly I looked up, because I was about to bump into someone. It was him. Sky. I could have reached out and touched him.

He said, “Hey. What’s up?” His voice sounded like gravel turning to grains of sugar.

I started thinking of how to answer. I know that “What’s up?” is just something people say, but it’s a very hard thing to say anything back to. It’s like the only response is “nothing.” I didn’t want to say “nothing” because, actually, a lot was up.

Instead I said, “I saw you the other day.” Each word felt like its own stone, falling to the bottom of a lake.

He nodded, his head tilted a little. Like he was trying to figure out what I was.

“I’m Laurel,” I added.

“Sky.” He smiled.

I was about to say I know, but thought better of it. When my eyes finally focused, I saw he was wearing a Nirvana tee shirt. This seemed perfect. So I said, “I love Kurt Cobain.”

“Yeah? What’s your favorite album?”

“In Utero.”

“Right on. Everyone says Nevermind. That is, everyone who doesn’t really listen.”

I smiled and scrambled in my head to keep the conversation going. “Yeah. I really like how he’s … how Kurt sounds like, like he’s exploding from inside.” I couldn’t actually believe I said that.

But Sky nodded, like he knew what I was talking about. And that’s when I suddenly realized that he was looking at me like he wanted to touch me. I tugged on May’s tight orange shirt. My skin was burning. I had to get away before I broke out in flame.

“I’m just going to Bio.”

“’K,” Sky said. “Maybe I’ll see you around.”

I nodded and walked away, my heart pounding. I told myself not to turn around. But I did. And his eyes were still on me. I felt something spark—the mystery of what he saw when he looked at me.

In class, while Mr. Smith was talking about covalent bonding, I kept replaying it and noticing new things each time. Like the way one of Sky’s sleeves was a little bit turned up over his arm. How the hairs on his biceps were standing up. The freckle on his eyelid. I thought of what Hannah had said, about how he transferred here. I wondered from where, and I wondered if he’d ever been in love before.

Yours,

Laurel

Dear Amy Winehouse,

I remember one night after May got back from sneaking out, she came into my room and lay on my bed and whispered, “You have to hear this song!” She put her earbuds in my ear, and as she fell back against the pillow, I heard your voice for the first time. I go back to black, you sang. The swinging rhythms of the song sounded bright, but there was a hurt in your voice under its honey—although it’s not as simple as that, really. You had a way of singing that could mix together so many feelings. And I could tell that the words you sang came out of the real you. That they were true.

It turns out my new friend Hannah loves you, too. Hannah and I have PE together eighth period, and she’s always forgetting her gym clothes. Since we went to the fair together two weeks ago, a lot of times now I pretend I forgot mine even if I didn’t so that we can walk around the track together and talk instead of playing kickball or badminton or whatever with everyone else. Hannah wants to be a singer, and sometimes when we are walking around the track, she sings your songs to me. Her favorites are “Stronger Than Me,” “You Know I’m No Good,” and, of course, “Rehab.” She likes to shout “No, no, no” and shake her red hair back and forth. The way that you didn’t want anyone controlling you, that’s part of Hannah’s spirit, too.

Hannah acts fearless, but you can tell that underneath, she keeps secrets.

She’s the sort of girl who guys fall in love with, but she doesn’t act like a pretty girl. She acts like she’s trying to find a way out of herself. She always has at least one boyfriend, sometimes two at once.

Hannah told me her parents died when she was a baby, so she and her brother used to live with her aunt in Arizona. But her brother got in too many fights at his school, so the aunt sent them here to live with their grandparents.

When Hannah first moved here in seventh grade, she dated one of the most popular eighth-grade soccer boys. Then she dated another soccer boy and another, and then by the time she was in eighth grade she dated a couple of guys in high school. Even though Hannah could have hung out with anyone at her new middle school, even the popular girls, Hannah said that she picked Natalie because she could tell that Natalie “got it.”

“What’s ‘it’?” I asked.

Hannah shrugged. “What it’s like to be different, even if you don’t want everyone to know it. Like, I knew that I could have Natalie spend the night, and she wouldn’t be too weirded out by the fact that I love my horse and live with my grandparents who are going deaf and have a mean brother who likes to yell a lot.”

Hannah also told me about this guy, Kasey, who she’s “messing around with.” That’s what she says. She met him at her job at Japanese Kitchen when he was there with a bunch of his friends for someone’s birthday. (It’s a good place to go for birthdays, because the chefs cook in front of you and do fire tricks at the table.) He’s in college, so honestly, it’s really strange for him to want to date a girl so much younger. It makes me a little bit nervous for Hannah because of this older guy who May used to date, named Paul. When I asked Hannah why she was dating someone in college, she just laughed and said, “I’m precocious.”