by Inara Scott
“You know the rules. I’ll be watching to make sure you obey them. The clock starts now.” Trevor pushed a button on his watch and stepped back to lean against one of the trees.
We looked at each other silently. Hector walked over to the wall and reached his hand up as high as he could. It went about two-thirds of the way to the top. He motioned to Paul, the skinniest kid. “Why don’t you stand on my shoulders?”
They flailed around for a few minutes, trying to get Paul onto Hector’s shoulders. Once they did, Hector leaned against the wall for support, but he could barely stay upright when Paul tried to stand up. Paul, meanwhile, got so scared when he tried to straighten his legs that his entire body shook, and he couldn’t reach up to grab the top of the wall.
“It’s high up here,” he said, his voice wavering as he tried to get his legs to stay still.
Allie said, “He needs more support from below.”
Hector frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
She put a French-manicured hand on his arm and patted comfortingly. “It’s hard to stand up straight on someone’s shoulders. I was a cheerleader, so I know. It takes forever to learn to do that. A pyramid is easier and more stable.”
Why was I not surprised that she was a cheerleader?
Allie guided the group into forming a pyramid at the base of the wall, with her at the apex. She ended up an easy foot or two from the top.
“Wait!” Marika interrupted, as Allie started to pull herself over. “Shouldn’t we plan this out? I mean, once Allie goes over the wall and comes down from the platform, she can’t be part of the pyramid anymore. Shouldn’t we think about the order?”
A few scattered groans greeted her questions. After a pause, Allie called down, “Good point, Marika.” She climbed down from the top set of shoulders and jumped lightly to the ground. The rest of the pyramid dissolved around her.
“You mean we’re going to have to do that again?” Hector asked, rubbing his shoulders.
“Cheerleading isn’t as easy as it looks, is it?” Allie said with a wink. Everyone laughed.
Great, I thought. Perfect Girl is cute and funny.
After milling around a while longer, people started throwing out ideas for the order. Everyone, that is, except Jack and me. I had no intention of offering stupid suggestions that would bring attention to myself. Jack seemed to have the same plan, except his also involved following me around and whispering comments under his breath, like: “Do you think this is actually a test to see if we’re stupid enough to throw ourselves over a twelve-foot wall simply because Trevor told us to?”
A good point, when you thought about it.
Finally they decided to send Gideon up first, and then alternate girls and boys. My rude awakening came when I heard the group discussing who should go last.
“It will have to be someone skinny. I’ll hang down the wall and they can hold on to my ankles. The people on the platform can pull us both up,” Yashir said.
“They’ll have to be tall,” Marika added. “To catch your ankles. And strong enough to pull themselves up the wall if necessary.”
“What about Dancia? She’s tall and thin.” Jack and I stood a few feet from the crowd, and Yashir motioned for us to come closer. “Dancia, can you do a pull-up?”
I admit I was so flattered by him calling me thin that I didn’t hesitate before responding. “Yeah, one or two.” A second later, it occurred to me I probably should have kept my mouth shut. Before I had time to retract my statement, Yashir and Marika—the apparent decision-makers of the group—nodded.
“That’s it, then. Dancia goes last.”
I made a halfhearted protest, but no one was listening. They were already focused on making the pyramid and getting Gideon to the top. It’s harder than you’d think to pull yourself up and over the top of a wall, and as I watched Gideon struggle, my stomach began to roll. I might have to do that by myself? What were they thinking?
Panic started to set in, so I decided to throw myself into the fray. Even though I force myself to stay on the sidelines a lot, doing nothing drives me absolutely crazy. I guess that’s why I like running so much. It gives me something to do when I get stressed out. After about twenty minutes of struggling in the heat and getting stepped on, climbed over, and kicked in the head countless times, my face burned and sweat soaked my T-shirt. But everyone—except Jack, of course—was completely absorbed in the task. Marika almost ripped her pants trying to get her leg over the top, and Yashir smashed his knee getting Hector off the ground. The giggles and cheers when Yashir made it up were infectious. Jack spent some time in the pyramid, and when his turn came, pulled himself up and over the top of the wall with surprising strength. But he did it all with a lazy, uncaring air that would have made me crazy if I had stopped long enough to pay attention.
Then came my turn. Emma and Alessandro were standing on the wall, and Yashir was hanging off the wall by his arms.
“I’m supposed to do what?” I asked, squinting up at Yashir.
“Just grab his ankles,” Alessandro called down. “We’ll pull you both up.”
Emma didn’t look like she could pull up a toddler, let alone two teenagers. Still, I nodded. Alessandro sounded as if he actually believed this was possible.
“You’d better do it fast,” Yashir said. “This hurts like hell.”
“Okay, okay!” I screwed up my courage and jumped. His ankles were higher than they looked, and the first few times, I missed. Then I caught his ankle for a second before falling back to the ground.
“Dancia, Dancia,” Allie started chanting softly. A few others joined in. Their attempt at encouragement fell somewhere between inspiring and nauseating, though the nausea probably came more from my fear of failing than from anything else. My hands turned slick with sweat, and I had to keep wiping them on my pants before I jumped. On the fourth try, I managed to get a hold of both ankles, and they started to pull us toward the top.
The pain hit immediately, shooting from my elbows to my shoulders. I thought my arms were going to be ripped from their sockets. Somehow in the midst of the agony, I tried to lock my hands tight.
Though I had wanted not to care, I realized at that moment that I did. I wanted to get over the wall. I might not have friends, and the entire school might one day remember me as that girl no one really knew, but by God I was going to get over that wall.
Except…I was slipping. Slowly but surely, I was falling back toward the ground. Alessandro and Emma pulled Yashir high enough to get his torso over the wall just as one of my hands slipped down to his shoe. Alessandro reached over to try to grab me, but he couldn’t get more than a handful of my ponytail. I would have willingly given up every curl on my head to have gotten over the wall at that moment, I swear.
“Two minutes left!” Trevor roused himself from his position by the tree long enough to shout at us, and the cheers got even louder. I think Allie might have actually done a jumping jack or two in my honor.
I clutched tighter at Yashir’s shoe and willed my fingers not to let go. But at that moment my fingers didn’t appear to be taking orders from my brain.
I looked down, pleading really, as if I could convince the ground to move away from my feet. That was when I saw Jack looking up at me, hands in perfect spotter-form, a tiny furrow in his brow. When our eyes met, he nodded.
“No problem,” he mouthed.
I turned my attention back to Yashir’s shoe—an enormous bigger-than-my-head concoction of black leather and hard sole—and my fingers slipped another fraction of an inch. My mind spun furiously. Had I asked Jack a question? Why did he nod? Did he think I wanted his help?
Even as the questions shot through my brain, something amazing happened: the air under me suddenly felt solid. I pushed against it and was able to shift my hold on Yashir’s shoe to grab his ankle, and then his calf. One more push against that wall of air and I threw my other hand up, where Alessandro caught it. He hauled me up with a one-handed death grip I wi
ll never forget, and I was there, stomach on the top of the wall, ready to throw myself onto that platform on the other side.
Our team went crazy. Yashir shouted for Emma and Alessandro to get down so we could jump onto the platform, and they did. Everyone whistling and shouting like we had just won the lottery. Yashir tumbled onto the platform and practically hauled me the rest of the way over. When my nerves and shaking hands calmed down enough to move, I stood and looked over the wall, an enormous smile decorating my face.
The team smiled and cheered, but it was Jack’s gaze that caught mine. He shrugged as he looked around our group, as if to say, “What a bunch of idiots.”
Then he winked at me.
My smile dissolved. Had Jack helped me over the wall? Was that what his nod had meant?
But I knew that when I’d looked down he hadn’t been touching me. Anyway, the rules were clear—once you went over, you couldn’t help except to spot. If Jack had pushed against my foot, everyone would have noticed, and Trevor would have busted him for sure. But there had been something solid under me, I couldn’t deny that.
Could it be that somehow, without touching me, Jack had given me a push?
I went down the ladder in a daze, my euphoria quickly evaporating. When I reached the ground, Allie ran over to give me a hug. I wasn’t trying to be rude, but I didn’t really hug her back. I just couldn’t look into the eyes of Perfect Girl and pretend I was happy. Not with a lead weight suddenly hanging on my shoulders. Allie didn’t seem to notice, bouncing away a second later and high-fiving Hector, then linking arms with Emma.
“Congratulations,” Trevor said, motioning for us to circle around him. “I didn’t think you were going to do it. I saw some excellent teamwork out there. I was impressed.”
Jack stood next to me, and I could feel waves of something—satisfaction? pleasure?—radiating from him. He alternated between a bored stare at Trevor and a sideways glance at me. I had to restrain myself from grabbing his shirt and spinning him around and demanding to know what he had done.
Was it possible? I could hardly dare to voice the thought in my head. The signs seemed to point to one conclusion, but I refused to believe it could be true. Because if it was, Jack had special powers just like me. And unlike me, he wasn’t scared to use them.
THE REST of the week went by in a blur. We started classes and settled into the school routine. Everyone seemed excited about different subjects—the dancers hung out in the studios, the science kids were practically drooling over the lab, and Yashir and his friends were always sitting around in the commons, drawing.
Everyone, of course, but me, who had no subject to look forward to, and nothing to excel at. I swear, I was the only kid, other than Jack, of course, who was in all the remedial classes.
I saw Cam a bunch of times during the week, but it was only for a second or two between activities. He wasn’t a team leader, like Trevor, so he didn’t eat in the cafeteria with the freshmen. Usually I saw him walking the halls with Mr. Judan or one of the other teachers. He always waved to me and smiled. Sometimes he’d even stop and say hello, or ask how my day was going. He said he was working for Mr. Judan, doing boring office stuff. I could barely pull myself together enough to speak to him. I think the problem was that it took me about ten minutes to become accustomed to his gorgeousness, so the quick stops in the hall always left me incoherent.
I passed Hennie once, speaking to a girl in Chinese, and then another time with a boy speaking Spanish. Both times she tried to get me to stay and talk, but I said I had to get to class. Every time I saw Esther, she was hanging out with a different group of boys and laughing that big laugh of hers. Kids always looked happy when they were with Esther. She did these imitations of people—teachers, even Principal Solom—that were hilarious. She could somehow make herself completely change to fit whoever she was impersonating. I swear, when she would do Principal Solom, she would actually shrink.
I tried to duck and hide whenever I saw Hennie and Esther, but it was hard. It wasn’t that I didn’t like them. It was that I liked them too much. I was generally able to avoid them during the day without being rude—for this first week, they had us doing activities each afternoon with our teams, and sitting with them at meals—but at night, after study hours, it was impossible to avoid them completely. We just fit together so well, the three of us. Like we were meant to be friends.
Catherine came in pretty handy in all this. She shut the door to our room at exactly ten o’clock, and didn’t allow visitors. And I wasn’t lying when I told Esther and Hennie that I needed all my free time to study. Our teachers had actually assigned homework for the first day of class, and then once classes started, I was swamped. I wasn’t even taking hard classes. Some of the others were taking higher-level stuff, like calculus and physics. They were doing review work until the upperclassmen arrived on Monday. I was just reading books and doing basic math problems, and I was still overwhelmed. Let’s just say Danville Middle hadn’t exactly prepared me for Delcroix.
Meanwhile, Jack had become my constant companion, dropping notes over my shoulder in class and making snide comments in my ear when Trevor led us through another group activity. There was no repeat of what had happened at the wall, and the further away from it we got, the more I started to doubt my own conclusions about what had happened. Maybe I was stronger than I thought. Maybe I had just imagined that cushion of air suddenly supporting my weight. Maybe Jack was nothing more than a clever cheater who had somehow managed to escape Trevor’s eagle eye.
Besides, I was missing Grandma. I was also trying as hard as I could not to bond with the two nicest people I’d ever met, and I was living with a psychotic dictator who had measured the space in our closet and marked the halfway point with masking tape to make sure I didn’t cross the line. So I guess I just wasn’t tough enough to push Jack away too. Before I knew it we were trading music and talking about our old schools. He figured out right away how horrible Catherine was, and he endlessly made fun of her for being so in love with Delcroix and sucking up to all the teachers. He even came up with the perfect nickname for her: Button-down, because she always wore white button-down shirts and navy pants or skirts. They were probably part of her old school uniform. Even though I knew I shouldn’t, I couldn’t help but laugh every time he said it.
It wasn’t until Friday afternoon, when we were waiting for the Silver Bullet to take us back to the parking lot to go home for the weekend, that I realized the Dancia Lewis way was going to have to change. We were outside the Main Hall, dragging bags of dirty laundry and backpacks full of homework. Everyone was excited to see their parents, though there were some drama queens who were already complaining about how much they’d miss their friends.
Esther gave me a back-cracking hug. “Dancia, I’ve barely seen you all week,” she wailed. “Where have you been? I mean, you’ve been in your room, of course, studying, which is good, and I can’t really blame you. After all, my dad will kill me—and I mean kill me—if I don’t keep my grades up. But we missed you last night. We were in my room listening to music. You should have come down.”
I hung my head. “It’s algebra. You start mixing letters and numbers, and my eyes cross. And you wouldn’t believe the essay I’ve got to write for English. I figured I had to get a start on it before I went home.”
Hennie gave me a gentle squeeze and a deep assessing look. “Everything okay?” she asked. “How’s your team? Are you getting along with everyone?”
“I guess so.” I shifted from foot to foot. “I mean, well, Jack and I have been hanging out a lot.”
“Jack? You mean the guy with the tattoo?” Hennie grinned. “Are you sure you’re just friends?”
“Definitely.” I nodded vigorously. “Just friends.”
Esther snorted. “That’s how it starts, Dancia. Trust me, it always starts that way. Then when you least expect it, everything changes.”
“Not us.” I took a quick look around to make sure Jack wasn’t right
behind me. “No way.”
Esther cleared her throat and adjusted a pair of imaginary glasses on her forehead, just like our World Civ teacher, Mrs. Paskett. “Yes of course, dear, of course. You’re right, of course. How could I ever doubt you.” Her voice rose two octaves and quavered, just like Mrs. Paskett’s. Hennie and I burst out laughing.
When I could speak again, I elbowed Hennie in the ribs. “So when are you going to talk to Yashir, Hennie? He’s on my team, you know. He seems really nice.”
Hennie threw her hands in the air. “As if I could talk to him! He’s in my Spanish class, but he hardly says anything. Tell me more about him. I need details!”
I thought back, relieved I’d managed to change the subject. “He’s usually one of the leaders of our group. Not too bossy, but everyone seems to listen to him. He loves to draw and paint, of course. He’s from California, and his mom does all his piercings.” I was surprised by how much I already knew about him. I guess some of the “get to know you” games Trevor had made us play had actually worked.
“He’s perfect for you, Hennie,” Esther said. “And if you’re feeling shy, Dancia can help.”
Hennie bit her lip. “I don’t know, Esther. You know my dad. He won’t like the piercings.”
“We’re at boarding school, silly. Your dad won’t even know.”
“But I’ve barely talked to him,” I said. “What makes you think I can help Hennie?”
Esther patted my hand. “Don’t worry. Boys are simple creatures. I can teach you both what you need to know.”
Hennie straightened her already perfectly straight skirt and sighed. “It’s true. Esther’s like a walking encyclopedia on the male species.”
Esther nodded sagely. “You know what I always say: they’re just like girls, only different. Now, Dancia, he’s on your team, so aren’t you friends already?”
“Well, I guess…I mean, I can talk to him. It’s not like we’re strangers. But I wouldn’t say we’re friends either.”
