Beautiful Creatures(9)

I don’t know why I even bothered. It was a stupid conversation, the same way it was stupid that all the guys had to meet up before school on Wednesday mornings. It was something I’d come to think of as roll call. A few things were expected if you were on the team. You sat together in the lunchroom. You went to Savannah Snow’s parties, asked a cheerleader to the winter formal, hung out at Lake Moultrie on the last day of school. You could bail on almost anything else, if you showed up for roll call. Only it was getting harder and harder for me to show up, and I didn’t know why.

I still hadn’t come up with the answer when I saw her.

Even if I hadn’t seen her, I’d have known she was there because the hallway, which was usually crammed with people rushing to their lockers and trying to make it to class before the second bell, cleared out in a matter of seconds. Everyone actually stepped aside when she came down the hall. Like she was a rock star.

Or a leper.

But all I could see was a beautiful girl in a long gray dress, under a white track jacket with the word Munich sewn on it, and beat-up black Converse peeking out underneath. A girl who wore a long silver chain around her neck, with tons of stuff dangling from it—a plastic ring from a bubblegum machine, a safety pin, and a bunch of other junk I was too far away to see. A girl who didn’t look like she belonged in Gatlin. I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

Macon Ravenwood’s niece. What was wrong with me?

She tucked her dark curls behind her ear, black nail polish catching the fluorescent light. Her hands were covered with black ink, like she had written on them. She walked down the hall as if we were invisible. She had the greenest eyes I’d ever seen, so green they could’ve been considered some new color altogether.

“Yeah, she’s hot,” said Billy.

I knew what they were thinking. For a second, they were thinking about dumping their girlfriends for the chance to hit on her. For a second, she was a possibility.

Earl gave her the once-over, then slammed his locker door. “If you ignore the fact that she’s a freak.”

There was something about the way he said it, or more like, the reason he said it. She was a freak because she wasn’t from Gatlin, because she wasn’t scrambling to make it onto the cheer squad, because she hadn’t given him a second look, or even a first. On any other day, I would’ve ignored him and kept my mouth shut, but today I didn’t feel like shutting up.

“So she’s automatically a freak, why? Because she doesn’t have on the uniform, blond hair and a short skirt?”

Earl’s face was easy to read. This was one of those times when I was supposed to follow his lead, and I wasn’t holding up my end of our unspoken agreement. “Because she’s a Ravenwood.”

The message was clear. Hot, but don’t even think about it. She wasn’t a possibility anymore. Still, that didn’t keep them from looking, and they were all looking. The hallway, and everyone in it, had locked in on her as if she was a deer caught in the crosshairs.

But she just kept walking, her necklace jingling around her neck.

Minutes later, I stood in the doorway of my English class. There she was. Lena Duchannes. The new girl, who would still be called that fifty years from now, if she wasn’t still called Old Man Ravenwood’s niece, handing a pink transfer slip to Mrs. English, who squinted to read it.

“They messed up my schedule and I didn’t have an English class,” she was saying. “I had U.S. History for two periods, and I already took U.S. History at my old school.” She sounded frustrated, and I tried not to smile. She’d never had U.S. History, not the way Mr. Lee taught it.

“Of course. Take any open seat.” Mrs. English handed her a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird. The book looked like it had never been opened, which it probably hadn’t since they’d made it into a movie.

The new girl looked up and caught me watching her. I looked away, but it was too late. I tried not to smile, but I was embarrassed, and that only made me smile more. She didn’t seem to notice.

“That’s okay, I brought my own.” She pulled out a copy of the book, hardback, with a tree etched on the cover. It looked really old and worn, like she had read it more than once. “It’s one of my favorite books.” She just said it, like it wasn’t weird. Now I was staring.

I felt a steamroller plow into my back, and Emily pushed through the doorway as if I wasn’t standing there, which was her way of saying hello and expecting me to follow her to the back of the room, where our friends were sitting.

The new girl sat down in an empty seat in the first row, in the No Man’s Land in front of Mrs. English’s desk. Wrong move. Everybody knew not to sit there. Mrs. English had one glass eye, and the terrible hearing you get if your family runs the only shooting range in the county. If you sat anywhere else but right in front of her desk, she couldn’t see you and she wouldn’t call on you. Lena was going to have to answer questions for the whole class.

Emily looked amused and went out of her way to walk past her seat, kicking over Lena’s bag, sending her books sliding across the aisle.

“Whoops.” Emily bent down, picking up a battered spiral notebook that was one tear away from losing its cover. She held it up like it was a dead mouse. “Lena Duchannes. Is that your name? I thought it was Ravenwood.”

Lena looked up, slowly. “Can I have my book?”