grimace, and each tooth was a skull. The tongue was an impossibly pale, delicate pink. Sitting on

the razor's edge of the beautiful and the grotesque, it was unlike any work of art I'd ever seen.

I don't know how long I'd been standing there, gaping, when I noticed the guy who kept looking

back and forth from the painting to me. I stood up a little straighter before I realized it was just

Sam Wolff from my art class. Sam's got black, curly hair, and when he's painting or drawing, he

pulls on it, so usually when I see him his hair's standing more or less straight up from his head.

But I guess when he hasn't been doing that, it lies a lot flatter, which would explain my failure to

recognize him at first.

"Hey," he said, turning to face me. "You're in my art class." He didn't smile.

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"Oh, right," I said. "I was trying to figure out where I know you from. What are you doing here?"

I wondered if Ms. Daniels had told him to come to the museum, too. On the one hand, I liked the

idea that I was the only student she'd told about the exhibit. On the other, if she was going to

lump me with another one of her students, Sam Wolff wasn't exactly shabby artistic company.

"What am I doing here?" asked Sam. He looked around at the paintings and then back at me.

"I'm shopping for a sofa bed."

I couldn't tell if he was laughing with me or at me. "Funny," I said.

When he didn't say anything, I should probably have taken his silence as a subtle sign that he

was not interested in pursuing a conversation, yet I plunged on. "So, do you like the exhibit?" I asked.

He'd gone back to looking at the painting. "What?" he asked distractedly.

"Do you like the exhibit?" My question, which hadn't exactly been brilliant the first time around, sounded utterly inane the second.

"Do I like it?" Sam repeated my question slowly, rolling the syllables around in his mouth either because he wasn't sure how to answer it or because he felt he was tasting a new and particularly

impressive flavor of idiocy.

"Yes," I repeated in a snotty voice. "Do you like it?"

Why was I being so rude? After all, he'd just repeated my question. Lots of people did that and I

didn't snap at

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them. But there was something about the way he was standing there, silently, like he was all

alone with the painting, like I wasn't even there, that was driving me crazy.

Then again that was kind of how I'd been standing there a minute ago.

Sam finally looked at me. "Yes," he said. "I like it."

"Oh," I said, unprepared for such a civil response. "Well, I like it, too."

Sam ran his hand through his hair. With his curls once again veering straight up to the ceiling, he

looked more like the guy in my art class than he had a minute ago.

"That's ... great," he said. "Yeah," I said. "Great."

He glanced down at his watch. "Well, I gotta go," he said. "I'm meeting someone downtown."

"Oh, yeah, of course," I said. I looked at my watch-less wrist. "I should get going soon, too."

"Okay. Well, bye," he said, turning to go.

"Yeah, okay. Bye." I watched him disappear into the crowd.

I wandered into a little room off the main exhibition space. In the past, whenever my dad and I

went to a museum, we played this game where we each had to pick which painting we'd want if

we could have only one. I tried to play the game by myself, walking slowly through the room

and pausing before each piece as I imagined

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owning it. The stuff here was completely different from the painting I'd just been looking at;

everything in this room was either a page from a tiny illuminated manuscript or an equally

intricate pencil drawing. I imagined hanging first one piece and then another in my room. But it

wasn't any fun without having someone to show what I'd picked, so finally I quit trying and

headed back down to the lobby. I ended up wandering into the gift shop, where my dad and Mara

were comparing napkin rings. I watched them for a minute, laughing and talking together, before

I called out to my dad. He looked up, but he didn't seem especially glad to see me or anything.

The whole ride back in the car, I tried to figure out what was wrong with me. How can you be

Cinderella after she meets the prince and still feel so incredibly sad?

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Chapter Nine

The first thing I did when the bus pulled up to school on Monday morning was check to see if

Connor's SUV was in the senior parking lot. Which it was. I'll say this for the car-dependent

suburbs--it's much easier to track a crush here than in a major metropolitan area like San

Francisco.

On the way to chemistry, my last class before lunch, I still hadn't seen Madison, Jessica, or

Connor, but I was starting to get a really weird feeling. Everywhere I went small groups of

people were whispering to each other. At first I wondered if some scandal had taken place over

the weekend, like back in November when two kids got expelled for selling Ecstasy. On my way

from chemistry to the cafeteria, though, I started to sense the buzz was more localized,

something that followed me around. Two conversations ended just as I walked by and started

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up again as soon as I was out of earshot. I thought I was being paranoid, but then I passed a

group of senior girls I didn't know talking by their lockers. As soon as I was within hearing

distance they stopped talking and watched me. Then, as I walked by, they said, "Hey," even

though I'd never spoken a word to any of them.

"Hey," I said back, thinking, What's the deal?

Suddenly I started to get a bad feeling in my stomach. What if Connor had told Dave or Matt

about how we'd made out in the car, only he'd turned it into some kind of joke. Yeah, man, she

was so into me. She practically lost her friggin' mind when I kissed her. I remembered how I'd

been so disoriented I'd tried to get out of the car without taking off my seat belt. Could that be

what everyone was whispering about? Remembering all the movies I'd ever seen where the cute,

popular guy asks out the ugly, unpopular girl on a dare, I walked faster, not meeting the eyes of

anyone I passed.

The cafeteria was crowded, but instead of taking my sandwich and heading for the exit and the

studio, I found myself walking toward the table where Madison and Jessica and I had sat on

Friday. As I got closer, I could see Jessica sitting there alone, but just as I was about to wave, I

stopped myself. What if she and Madison had concocted this whole setup with Connor in order

to humiliate me? Why had I been so quick to dismiss Madison as too stupid to come up with a

complex practical joke? This was what happened

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when you underestimated people--they destroyed you.

I decided I'd slow down as I approached Jessica's table but wouldn't stop. That way if she didn't

ask me to sit with her, I could pretend I was just passing by on my way to join all of my other

friends. When I was two tables away, I cut my speed in half, and by the time I was one table

from Jessica's, a paralytic snail could have overtaken me. Just as I was about to start walking in

place, Jessica looked up, saw me, and squawked with delight.

"Oh my god," she said, running over and giving me a hug. "Can I just say," she walked me back to the table and pulled me down next to her, "that you two are adorable together?"