Wintergirls Read Free Page A

halls.
    I turn around and clear a place in the backseat, shoving all the tests, sweatshirts, and overdue library books to one side so Emma will have a place to sit when I pick her up. Jennifer insists on sticking her in the back.
    It’s safer, she says.
    There is no safer. There’s not even safe, never has been.
    Cassie thought heaven was a fairy tale for stupid people. How can you find a place you don’t believe in? You can’t. So where does she go now? What if she comes back, eyes on angryfire?
    7:35. Time to go to school and stop thinking.
    No Honors Option for me, not this year. I am Contemp World Lit, Soc Sci 12—The Holocaust, Physics, Trig (again), and Lunch. No gym, thanks to a magic note from Dr. Parker. There are asterisks next to my name and footnotes that explain the situation.
    . . . When I was a real girl , my mother fed me her glass dreams one spoonful at a time. Harvard. Yale.

    Princeton. Duke. Undergrad. Med school. Internship, residency, God. She’d brush my hair and braid it with long words, weaving the Latin roots and Greek branches into my head so memorizing anatomy would come easy. Mom Dr. Marrigan was furious when the guidance counselor kicked me out of Honors and dropped me down to College Track. The counselor suggested that I plan on going to my father’s college, because they had to let me in. Free tuition for faculty kids, she reminded us.
    I was relieved.
    That night Dr. Marrigan told me that I was too smart to be a slacker faculty kid. She wanted to have me privately tested, to prove that I was brilliant and that the school was not meeting my needs. But then I screwed up again and they slammed me back in the hospital and when I got out, I changed all the rules.
    I used to fantasize about taking the Mensa test to prove that I wasn’t a total loser. Maybe I’d score total off-the-hook genius. I’d make one hundred thousand photocopies of the test results, glue them to the walls of my mother’s house, take a bucket of red paint and a thick brush, and I’d write HA! a million times.
    But there was a pretty good chance I’d flunk it. I really didn’t want to know.
    The buzzer sounds. Students float from room to room. The teachers tie us to our chairs and pour worlds into our ears.

    The shades are pulled and the lights are off in the physics lab so we can watch a movie about the speed of light and the speed of sound and some other garbage that doesn’t matter. Ghosts are waiting in the shadows of the room, patient dull shimmers. The others can see them, too, I know it. We’re all afraid to talk about what stares at us from the dark.
    Waves of physics particles stream through the room.
    she called me thirty-three times.
    A ghost wraps herself around me, strokes my hair, and puts me to sleep.
    The buzzer sounds. My classmates grab their books and race for the door. I have drooled on the desk.
    My physics teacher (what is his name?) frowns at me.
    When he breathes through his open mouth, I can smell the night scum coating his tongue and the sunny-side-up eggs he ate for breakfast. “Are you planning on staying here all day?” he asks.
    I shake my head no. Before he tries to be witty again, I grab my books and stand up. Too fast. The floor tries to pull me down face-first, but my night-scummy teacher is watching so I make myself strong enough to float away, stars swimming in my eyes.
    1 . 2 . 3 . 4 . 5 . 6 .7. 8 . 9 . 10 . 11 . 1 2 . 1 3 . 14 . 1 5 . 16 . 17. 1 8 . 1 9 .
    2 0 . 2 1 . 2 2 . 2 3 . 2 4 . 2 5 . 2 6 . 2 7 . 2 8 . 2 9 . 3 0 . 3 1 . 3 2 . 3 3 .

    “Dead girl walking,” the boys say in the halls.
    “Tell us your secret,” the girls whisper, one toilet to another.
    I am that girl.
    I am the space between my thighs, daylight shining through.
    I am the library aide who hides in Fantasy.
    I am the circus freak encased in beeswax.
    I am the bones they want, wired on a porcelain frame.
    When I get close, they step back. The cameras in their eyeholes record the zit on my chin, the