Falling In Read Free

doesn’t. She takes a bath every night. And it’s not that she’s dumb, although it’s true she has a bad habit of not doing her homework except when she really feels like it, which is almost never.
    And it’s not that Isabelle Bean is a bully. She’s never beaten anyone up or even made the smallest threat. No one is physically scared of her, except for a few of the very nice girls in Mrs. Sharpe’s class, girls whose hair smells like apple blossoms and whose mothers still read them bedtime stories. These are the girls who sharpen their pencils at home so they never have to walk near Isabelle’s desk.
    There’s a barely visible edge of otherworldliness to Isabelle, a silver thread that runs from the top of her head to the bottom bump of her spine. It frightens other children away. They’re afraid that if they sit too close, the thread will weave itself into their hair and pull them into dark places they can’t find their way out of. A girl named Jenna claimed itreached out to grab her one day as she walked up the aisle on her way to recess, but she had her scissors in her pocket (don’t ask why) and nipped it before it could entangle her.
    A girl who sits in the back corner, a girl who is as silent as a weed, a girl who everyone stays away from as though she were contagious. No friends, of course. Oh, there was that one back in second grade, the one who always came to school with yesterday’s dirt still underneath her nails, but that didn’t last long. The other girls stole her away. It was a game they liked to play, Keep Away from Isabelle. Rules: Leave one girl (that weird Isabelle Bean) outside so other girls (everybody else) can congratulate themselves for being inside. Old news, old news.
    By the time Isabelle reached third grade, she had given up on friendship. She’d grown tired of sending birthday party invitations to children who never RSVP’d, much less appeared at her door on the given date with brightly wrapped packages in their hands. She’d given up making persimmon cookies to bring to school, where the other children calledthem Cootie Cookies and refused to eat them. She’d given up handing out Valentines stenciled with pictures of beating, winged hearts. She’d even given up smiling at girls who seemed shy and in need of a friend themselves.
    What she never gave up: Telling herself jokes and laughing under her breath. Memorizing the letters she found in her alphabet soup and rearranging them into stories.
    And she never gave up hope. She always kept a tiny sliver of it in her right pocket. Just in case it might come in handy someday.

3
    Up until the moment of the squeal and the squeak, it had been a dull year for Isabelle.
    Now, when it came to Isabelle and school, dull was not always bad. Dull meant you were left to yourself, generally ignored, not fully acknowledged by your classmates to exist. And there were benefits to this. When other children started paying attention to Isabelle, they often took her the wrong way.
    Just the week before, Truma DeStefano had been standing behind Isabelle in the cafeteria line when she noticed a strange light snaking around Isabelle’s legs. “Isabelle is wrapped up in supernatural spirits,” she whispered to her best friend, Casey Weathervane, pointing to the shimmering light. “She’s a ghost magnet!”
    Casey, being on the high-strung side, let out a shriek that caused one of the cafeteria ladies to drop a ten-gallon pot of chili in the middle of the kitchen, which in turn provoked a swarm of swear words that the children usually only heard at home when their fathers were watching their favorite football teams blow a big game. A gaggle of lunchroom monitors came running, and Casey and Truma pointed at Isabelle’s legs, where the light still hovered ominously. Isabelle stood very still, like a small animal cornered by a pack of snarling dogs.
    Mrs. Wigglestaff, the most seasoned of the lunchroom monitors, sighed. “It’s the light bouncing,”