The Tattooed Heart Read Free Page A

piling from their parents’ cars,and the luckier seniors were pulling up in cars of their own.
    The familiar morning rush. And we joined it, invisible to the crowd as it filled the main hallway. How did we squeeze through dense-packed bodies without touching anyone around us? I don’t know. It’s something I’ve now seen happen many times, and even when I pay the closest attention it’s hard to explain. It’s as if reality bends to get out of our way. Like we’re a force field that no one feels. Limbs and heads and torsos all seem to warp, like some kind photo booth effect.
    Testing it, I deliberately passed my arm through a girl. Her body appeared to split in two at the waist, upper half and lower half seemingly completely disconnected, yet she chatted glumly to a friend all the while and her legs kept moving her forward.
    Messenger noticed my experiment, raised one eyebrow slightly and said nothing.
    We walked in this way until we arrived at a narrower hallway leading into one of the wings. There Messenger’s focus seemed to settle on one particular group of three boys walking together in that bouncy, playfully shoving way that boys sometimes have. There wasnothing particularly noteworthy, just three boys, probably sophomores or juniors, all three of them white, all three dressed in jeans and T-shirts with logos of bands or defiant slogans.
    Here the crowd had thinned a bit and I took notice of a particular girl moving in the opposite direction from the boys. She was wearing a hijab of sky blue over her head and neck. Other than that she was dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved white blouse. I liked her shoes.
    It was the hijab that one of the boys grabbed as she went by. Grabbed it from behind and yanked it back off her head.
    â€œHey!” the girl yelled, and tried to put the scarf back in place.
    â€œSee, she does have hair under there!” This from the smallest of the three boys, a short, cute kid with longish brown hair.
    â€œDrop dead,” the girl snapped.
    â€œJust playin’ with your towel, towel-head.” This was not said in a playful tone, and it came from the boy in the middle. He was tall, powerfully built, with short blond hair. He was wearing sunglasses so I could not see the color of his eyes.
    A second girl, just arriving on the scene, saw what was going on and said, “It’s called an abaya, moron. And leave her alone, Trent.”
    This second girl was not in Muslim dress. She was in the navy blue and white uniform of a cheerleader.
    â€œWasn’t me,” Trent said, faux innocent. “It was Pete. Wasn’t it, Pete? See, Pete thought maybe she had horns under there and that’s why she’s always wearing that towel.”
    â€œIdiot,” the cheerleader said, and rolled her eyes.
    The bell rang and everyone went hurrying away.
    The Muslim girl looked shaken and angry, but she said nothing more and the incident appeared to be over.
    Messenger and I now stood in an empty hallway, ringing with the muted sounds of lessons filtering through a long row of closed doors.
    â€œThis is connected to the dead boy, Aimal,” I said, careful not to give it a questioning inflection. But Messenger was not enticed into answering my non-question question.
    I did not know where we were, exactly, nor where Aimal had been, but I was pretty sure there were thousands of miles separating the two locations. However,in Messenger’s world, space and time are a bit . . . different.
    I did not believe we were there because one jerk kid had harassed one girl in one school. The penalties Messenger imposes can be . . . Well, they are the fuel of my nightmares.
    â€œWhere should we follow the story next?” Messenger asked.
    â€œWhat?” The question was so out of the blue I wasn’t sure how to answer. Since when did Messenger consult me? And, anyway, didn’t he already know all the answers? Didn’t he know exactly how this