Maddy let me crowd her those first few days, smiling and encouraging me to go off on my own and make some new friends. I tried: sitting next to people who I didn’t recognize in my classes and saying hi to the few kids who looked my way. But when none of them said hi back, I ignored them and minded my own business.
That first Wednesday, I went to find Maddy in the cafeteria, excited about the drawing I’d done in open studio. The lunchroom was as loud as always, the smell a cross between burned pizza and nasty gym socks. Looking forward to a half hour of peace, I grabbed a tray and bought something I deemed safe enough to eat—a hot dog—and headed in to find her. But she wasn’t sitting in the corner of the cafeteria like she had been on Monday and Tuesday. That table was empty—eight vacant chairs surrounding an equally deserted table. I searched the other tables, automatically focusing on those kids sitting alone. No Maddy. It wasn’t until I scanned the center of the room, my eyes skating across the six tables that had been jammed together, that I saw her. She wasn’t sitting in a chair. She was perched on top of the table, her arms draped around some kid’s neck. And she was laughing.
I stood there watching her, debating whether to go over and sit down next to her or to seek out one of the empty tables that littered the corners. Luckily, I didn’t have to make the decision. Maddy made it for me.
She extricated herself from the boy’s hold and hopped down off the table. I couldn’t hear her over the noise, but I gathered from the flick of her wrists that she was telling him she’d be back in a minute.
“Hey,” she said as she stopped in front of me. “I waited for you outside the cafeteria, but—”
“Yeah, sorry, I had a question about a geometry problem,” I said, cutting off her lie. She’d never waited for me outside before. Not once during junior high and not once since we started here.
“Who are they?” I asked, looking past her to the group of people now staring at us.
“Alex Furey,” she said, smiling in his direction. Here was a smile I hadn’t seen before—head cocked and perky.
“Okay,” I said, taking a step toward the table. I didn’t care who we sat with so long as I didn’t have to sit alone.
Maddy stopped me, her perfectly pink nails encircling my wrist. I stared down at them, wondering when she’d had time to paint her nails and when she’d started wearing pink. And were those tiny white flowers painted in the middle?
We’d come to school looking nearly identical, so much so that our homeroom teacher did a double take. We were wearing the same jeans, the same hair twisted into a bun, the same boring beige tank tops when we left the house, but somehow she had changed and redone everything from her shoes to her makeup in the last three hours.
“Alex has a cousin your age. He thinks—”
“You mean our age,” I interrupted.
She shrugged that off and steered me toward a table in the back of the cafeteria. “I think you’ll like him. From what Alex says, you two have a lot in common.”
Which translated to: he was smart, quiet, and too quirky for his own family to acknowledge. Apparently, so was I.
“He’s starting an anime club,” she continued, fingering the notebook I had tucked under my tray. It was covered with manga drawings I’d been working on during History class. Some of them were good; most of them were doodles. I had the one I wanted to show her on top. I’d ripped it out of my notebook, thinking I’d give it to her at lunch.
Maddy took the tray from my hands, not once looking at the drawing underneath. “Come on. I’ll introduce you.”
She was a good five steps ahead of me before my feet started moving. I tucked the drawing into my notebook and followed her over. The two kids sitting there looked up when she dropped my tray onto the table. I recognized both of them from Honors English but had no clue who they actually were. They were two guys with longish hair and Mountain Dew T-shirts eating their food and minding their own business until my sister interrupted them.