Every afternoon, they posted the results of all the morning placement auditions outside the auditorium, so everyone could see where they (and everyone else) had placed, and either be celebrated or humiliated. Or neither. Honestly, it was mostly neither. I mean, for the most part, we all got the sections we expected to, but even within those, some were better than others. Everyone wanted to be in Ms. Vanderly's junior voice, because she sometimes moved people into senior halfway through the year if she liked you enough or you were really good, because she was also in charge of senior voice.

I felt shy when I got to AP English, and found myself wishing Molly hadn't had to go to her locker. I took a seat, as always, in the last row. Then, out of the corner of my vision, I saw Kyle. He was making his luxurious way through the doorway of the cla.s.sroom. My heart slammed into my rib cage, rattled the bars. He had his video camera again, trained on Elizabeth Wood, who was talking into it in a totally exaggerated and annoying way, and wearing a skirt so short and plaid that she looked like a p.o.r.n star doing a parody of a schoolgirl. Kyle was all drowsy and tousled, like he had rolled out of bed five minutes ago. In fact he was rehearsing Fool for Love with Elizabeth, so I knew that he'd been at rehearsal from 6:00 to 8:19, when he had his first cla.s.s. Maybe he had that carefree sleepy look because he was actually really tired. I guess that's one cost of stardom-if you're so hot and talented that you get to play the lead in Fool for Love, then you have to wake up at 5:30 to get to school in time to kiss Elizabeth Wood for two hours before your first cla.s.s. That can probably be exhausting, even for the most vigorous of boys, like Kyle. It's also possible that he went to bed every night at 7:30, and wasn't tired at all, but cultivated the lidded look because it was so vulnerable and gorgeous.

Molly came back in, holding a notebook and a new, unopened Diet c.o.ke. She sat in the empty seat to my left. Then Goth Sarah arrived, sat in front of Molly, and turned to us to say hi. I nodded, but was so distracted that by the time I tuned back in, Goth Sarah was talking about how teenagers are always made to be so cute and clever in movies and how she hates that even though she thinks of herself as cute and clever. Molly was nodding attentively. I was furiously busy watching Kyle. I didn't want to turn my attention away from him to utter a single sentence, even if it would have solidified forever my only potential friendships at D'Arts.

He wasn't leaving! He wasn't dropping Elizabeth Wood off, to my monumental relief. He was in the room, and appeared to be staying. I couldn't believe it. He was in my section, and I imagined in the pro-noid psychosis he inspired in me that he had figured out my schedule and signed up because he wanted so much to follow up on his joke about being seated next to me alphabetically.

He turned from the front of the room, where he'd stopped filming Elizabeth and started bantering with Kim Barksper, the sweeter of the Barksper twins and the only one of the two of them who can resist bringing up four hundred times a day the tedious fact that they were once in a Doublemint gum commercial when they were babies. Kyle saw me. When we had eye contact, I thought my heart might shoot out of my chest like a cannonball.

And then he came and sat next to me. Even Sarah and Molly shifted around on the other side of me. Were they impressed? Surprised? Disturbed? Jealous? I have no idea-the surf was pounding in my ears. I glanced around. Stockard Blumenthal, famous for that absurd name and for apparently blowing Greg Bailey during the movie King Kong at Top of the Park the summer before freshman year when they were both, like, not even fourteen, seemed to notice too. Although maybe I'm imagining it, since why would she have cared where Kyle sat? To me, everyone was tuned in to his every move. But maybe she was actually thinking about how unfair it was that people started calling her Jock-hard Blew-them-all instead of Stockard Blumenthal. I mean, what if he was the only guy she'd ever blown? Why Blew- them-all? Especially since she's still dating Greg Bailey. Maybe they're trying to make a point. Last year they both got tattoos that said "OATS," and at first everyone was apparently like, "OATS? What the h.e.l.l?" And then someone figured out that what it meant was "one and the same," like they had become two parts of one person. And people said how stupid that was and joked how they were going to break up and have to have laser surgery to have the things removed, but I think it's kind of romantic. And I bet everyone else probably does too, they're all just big haters.

Stockard was doing a showy mime routine in the aisle between the desks, and I could see her OATS tattoo on her ankle, but I didn't care, because Kyle set his camera on the desk and stretched his enormous legs into the s.p.a.ce between us. I was suddenly aware of mine, dangling from my chair.

"Judy L.," he said, "how're things?"

"Good. You?" His eyes were gray, dark gray, like where the sandbar ends and the water changes to the color of drowning.

"You know. I can't complain." He smiled.

My mind raced around like a foaming dog, desperate to come up with something, a joke about our being seated next to each other, something about complaining, anything, anything. There was nothing. A fire started in my brain and burned it blank. Maybe we would get tattoos of each other's name on our ankles. Or better yet, the backs of our necks. I caught my breath just as the teacher walked in. She was shockingly young and beautiful, wearing dark lipstick and with her straight red hair pulled back into a neat ponytail and held by a silver barrette. She clicked to the front of the cla.s.sroom, set some books and papers on the podium, and wrote her name on the board: Ms. Doman. Even Stockard sat down and appeared to be paying attention.

"Hi, guys," Ms. Doman said. "Why don't you come up and take a syllabus and a course pack?" And with this, she pointed to two stacks of papers in front of her. Syllabus and course pack! I was thrilled, just like everyone else.

Kyle looked over at me, blinked his nighttime eyes. "I'll get you one," he said, and galumped up to the front of the room before I could respond. Was this a typical offer? Or had he had the thought that I might not want to stand up in front of everyone and get myself a syllabus? Was he flirting? Was he a real person, or a figment of my low-budget-independent-movie imagination? He tossed the papers on my desk and wedged himself back into his chair. His hair flopped into his eyes and he breathed upward, trying to blow it out of the way.

"I need a haircut," he told me, and then, before I was required to say something interesting or flirty in response, Ms. Doman cleared her throat. Her white throat. She had on a silver chain with gold and silver circles of various sizes dangling. One of her earrings was a gold circle, and the other was silver. She wore a big diamond on her ring finger. I wondered who her husband was. He must have been thrilled when she said yes. She had light freckles on her cheeks and probably her shoulders and back, too.

"This is AP English and I'm Ms. Doman," she said. Her voice was warm and bubbly, lower than I'd expected, something like a deep bath. She looked out at us, first surveying and then appearing to have decided something important.

"Before we even touch the administrative aspects of the syllabus and a.s.signments, I want to talk about narrative," she said, making us all feel adult. "Why are stories important? Why have English cla.s.ses at Darcy at all?"

Elizabeth Wood raised a fake-baked tan hand and Goth Sarah rolled her eyes. She was jealous, I thought. So was I. You have to be a certain kind of girl to raise your hand first in a cla.s.s like that, on the first day.

"Because books allow us to have experiences we can't necessarily have in our own lives?" Elizabeth said.

For when your heart is full of love, you're nine feet tall, I thought.

"Indeed. Great. What else? Other reasons?" Ms. Doman asked.

Ms. Doman was one of those teachers who actually cares what students say, who collects answers from lots of people and then responds to them. She's not looking for the answer she's already thought of. Goth Sarah spoke without raising her hand. "Because those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it," she said.

"Good." Ms. Doman smiled, but she seemed less impressed than she had been with Elizabeth's response. Maybe because the whole "doomed to repeat it" thing is a cliche. Or maybe because Sarah hadn't raised her hand.

"Can you explain a little?" Ms. Doman added.

"I mean, we have to read books or we'll make mistakes. If we read stories of how other people lived, we can figure out better ways to live. I mean we can look at other people's lives and not make the same mistakes they made. Or we can, like, use their examples as models for ourselves." I knew she meant the V-word play, hoped she would stop short of saying it out loud.

"Brilliant," said Ms. Doman, and I could tell she was thinking: "Wow, this is going better than I even imagined it would." I was kind of thinking that too, like Sarah had turned out to be smarter than I thought she would. And so had Elizabeth Wood. I had this experience a lot at Darcy, because the truth is, the kids there were pretty smart for the most part. I mean, once we were trapped in cla.s.srooms.

"If those are two reasons for reading, then what about writing? Why write?" asked Ms. Doman.

"Immortality," said some a.s.s-kisser.

"Yes! What else?"

"So you won't forget something you want to remember," Molly added.

"Those are related, right?" said Katherine Ha.s.sel. "I mean, not forgetting and not being forgotten?"

I noticed none of the guys had spoken.

"They certainly are," Ms. Doman said. "So, what does it mean to call this cla.s.s 'American Lit'?" This was the first I'd heard of that. I thought it was just AP English.

But Ms. Doman was such a good teacher that she taught hers as an American lit cla.s.s. She thought it was too "inst.i.tutional" to teach straight AP English. She promised that her cla.s.s would also prepare us for the AP test; she just wasn't going to plan the whole syllabus around a stupid standardized test. She taught us contempt for tests, especially standardized ones, and never gave us quizzes. We just wrote papers for her. Ms. Doman wanted to be a college teacher, I think, so she pretended that we were college students and that this was a university cla.s.s. Everyone adored her; I wasn't the only one.

"That you teach American writers?" Molly said.

"Okay, but it's more than that, too. What makes a body of literature American?"

"I think the relationship between culture and literature is two-way," I said, breaking my Tracy Flick rule, but feeling inspired and like everyone else in the cla.s.s was a huge nerd, too, so why couldn't I live it up a little? Plus, right away I had a teacher crush on Ms. Doman and I couldn't resist showing her as soon as possible that I was smarter than anyone else in the cla.s.s.

It worked. She looked at me glowingly and then looked down at her grade book, trying to remember my name. "Say what you mean, Judy," she said, and then, "Do you go by Judy or Judith?"

"Judy is fine," I said. Everyone in the cla.s.s was staring at me except Kyle, who was looking at his notebook, and it occurred to me that they were grateful that I had raised my hand to speak, because now they got to stare with impunity, at least for a few minutes. I resisted the urge to smooth my hair down, felt the weight of my legs, tried to hold them still so they wouldn't swing. I cleared my throat a little, not in a gross way, but just enough to speak without coughing.

"I mean, we define American literature as American because it comes from America. But the idea of what America is comes from our literature. So it's two-way."

She smiled openly at me, the way you do at someone you know you'll fall in love with-a person you agree with more than you agree with anyone else. Maybe like the way I smiled at Kyle when we met at Chessie's party. I think Ms. Doman knew I'd be her best student, and she wanted me to know she knew. Maybe she wanted me to feel like that was enough, like my life would be okay if I could come up with smart things to say and write in American lit. Or maybe it went further than that; maybe she knew that it wouldn't be okay, that I'd be eaten alive at Darcy, and that she would love me by then and be heartbroken when it happened.

After cla.s.s, I had my first D'Arts lunch with Goth Sarah, which was a relief, because even though she spent the whole hour chewing with her mouth open and telling the story of her on-again-off-again thing with a tall, black-haired guy named Eliot Jacobs, it meant I wasn't alone. I couldn't tell from the story whether they had done it or not, and thought maybe she wanted me to ask, but I didn't want to ask and I didn't want her to ask me if I was still one, so I said as little as possible. I didn't see Molly; maybe she went off campus to Zingerman's or something, at D'Arts you were allowed.

When Ginger came into the lunchroom with Amanda Fulton and Chessie Andrewjeski, she didn't sit with me, but she did wave from across the room and smile. Kyle was on the other side of the cafeteria, taping some stupid thing Alan and Chris were doing, something that involved grabbing each other in headlocks and rubbing each other's hair. I was happy just to have a clear view of him, and I felt pretty sure that I could feel him turning the camera across the cafeteria every now and then, maybe even including me in a pan of the room.

"He's coming back right before Thanksgiving," Goth Sarah was telling me, about Eliot. "His dad was on sabbatical, but now he's finished and-well, wow-I can't believe he's coming back. He's great. He's, like, super evolved."

"So less of an armpit-scratching caveman than other guys?"

She laughed. "Exactly. I hope you guys will like each other. He's a really open-minded person."

I arched an eyebrow, wondering about the connection between that and our liking each other.

"Meaning?"

"He's okay with my, you know, whatever you want to call it-b.i.t.c.hiness," she said, and looked down, embarra.s.sed.

I was interested. "What do you mean, your b.i.t.c.hiness?"

"Well, you know," she said, looking flushed. "A lot of people find me, I don't know, too abrasive or radical or something." She shrugged, but I could tell she was hurt by whatever it was she perceived that people thought of her. And that it was a question.

"I don't," I said. "I find you weakwilled and not enough of a loudmouth."

She laughed and then, to my astonishment, climbed onto the bench so that she was towering over the room. Everyone looked up. She wadded the Saran wrap from her sandwich into a ball and threw it overhand, hard, across the room. It missed the trashcan by six feet and landed in the middle of the floor, but she yelled, "Three points, woo-hoo!" without any holding back, and threw her arms up in a mock cheer.

Then she climbed back down onto the bench next to me and opened a bag of barbeque soy crisps. Everyone, including me, was still staring.

"Wow. Well, I take back the part about the loud mouth," I said.

"I knew you'd rethink it," Goth Sarah said, grinning, and held the salty orange bag open to me. "Want one?" she asked.

I did. I love those things.

4 I've made a friend at the Motel Manor, a middle-aged guy named Bill, who has apparently been living here for more than a year. This is the kind of place that rents rooms by the week or month. Sometimes, late at night when there's no wall of sunshine between me and my terror, I think I'll be like Bill, just settle down and stay here for the rest of my life. It's only $106 a week; I could last a long time with the money I took.

I wonder who's paying for Bill's room. Maybe he has some money saved up from when he used to go to Alaska every winter to catch fish. That's what he told me when we first met in the hallway. He seemed harmless in some hard-to-define but certain way, so I stopped to talk to him when he said hi, and he told me he used to go every winter and work on an Alaskan fishing boat and then he would come home and "just live" the rest of the year on the money he'd made, once it wasn't fishing season anymore. I guess you can make a lot of money if you're willing to go to Alaska and work on a fishing boat. Although I don't really understand what it means to "just live," especially if you do it at the Motel Manor.

Bill is a good friend for me here because he's too daft to realize that I'm a teenager and shouldn't be here on my own, or that my story about being between jobs and "down on my luck" can't possibly be true, that there's probably a manhunt across the Midwest for a missing dwarf, or that I'm three feet tall. That's why I like him; in his worldview, I'm as normal as the next person. The truth is, there are so many freaks on this wretched strip of highway that I barely stand out. I like that aspect. And I bought enough cans of SpaghettiOs to live for at least another week before I have to emerge and walk down the street to Kroger.

The funny thing is, even though I started out by lying to Bill about the whole "between jobs" thing, I decided almost right after that to tell him my whole story, the way the reporters, and maybe even my parents and brothers and friends, would have liked to hear it. Bill doesn't know how lucky he is to be the recipient of the epic dwarf download. Which is why he's perfect. At first, I wasn't sure how to tell him, even. I thought maybe I'd start with the hardest part, but then I rethought it, and decided I'd do it chronologically. I mean, I hinted that things turned out badly for me, and of course he knows-in whatever way it's possible for a guy like him to know anything-that I ended up here and that that's not good news. But I started with the beginning of my life at D'Arts.

I've already told him up to the part about Chessie's party. Bill's a good audience for drama, probably not comedy. I don't think he'd get jokes. But he's kind, and he listens. And he nods a lot. Maybe he's on drugs and can't manage much information. That's basically why I decided I'd tell him-it's like practice in case I ever have to talk about it with my family, a rehearsal. During the whole nightmare, I managed to say impressively close to nothing for someone with such a big mouth. But I might have to explain it at some point, my perspective, I mean. Maybe to Sam. The thought of Sam makes me feel like my heart might bite its way out of my chest, fangs all over the place. He must be so grossed out and hurt and-I wonder if everyone at Tappan is making fun of him. I wonder if he's seen-I can't think about it.

If I survive this, and leave the Motel Manor, even if I can't ever bring myself to talk about it with Sam or Chad, I might need to tell my kids. I mean, if I ever have kids and they're daughters or teenagers or something. I could make it like one of the "morality tales" Ms. Doman liked to talk about.

Ms. Doman had this whole thing about how we have to tell stories about whatever happens to us, and then we can use those stories to decide whether our lives are happy or not, whether events have redeeming aspects or are totally hopeless, that it's really all about how we choose to shape and name things. If we can just make a bearable story out of what happens to us, then whatever happened becomes bearable. Ms. Doman once said that that's how people rebound after losing their entire families in car crashes and stuff.

But I can't do it, and my whole family isn't even dead; I'm just disgraced, so what's my problem? I mean, some nights I lie awake thinking about all the worse things that have happened to people in the world, and how can I feel this sorry for myself, etc. But none of it, no matter how gruesome, changes the fact that my life is ruined. So maybe suffering isn't relative. And I can't take Ms. Doman's advice, because every time I start to try to make a story out of it, let alone make one I "can live with" or that makes me seem like a person who might be happy again in the end, I start chattering like a wind-up toy, clacking around the room. Literally. The first time I talked to Bill about what happened, I got so scared while telling him that I had to excuse myself and throw up.

Sometimes, at night, when my mind wanders back to the video and what it looked like and how many people are probably watching it right now-this minute-my teeth actually start banging against each other like shutters in a storm. Every night, even if I sleep for a few sweaty hours, it's like I'm rewinding myself to start the anxiety again every time I wake up. So my new coping strategy is to watch Friends reruns all night, every night. It's not working. I'm not coping.

My mom says I have a bad habit of tying all my anxieties together, which makes them seem "systemic," rather than sorting them out and dealing with each at a time. My mom went to nursing school before she and my dad opened the Grill. She thought she wanted to be a nurse, but then decided she hated it before she had graduated. But she likes to use words like systemic, maybe to make herself feel like the whole enterprise wasn't a waste. And it wasn't. I mean, when we got hurt as kids, she always knew exactly what to do, even the time Chad cut his leg open on some terrifying submerged rock when we were swimming on vacation and my mother made a tourniquet out of her shirt and stopped the bleeding while we waited for an ambulance to come. Chad still has a scar so giant it looks like he used to have another mouth on his leg and they sewed that one shut, but at least he didn't bleed to death. The paramedics said that my mom had saved his life. It took them forever to get there, but I can't remember why. My dad almost fainted, apparently, did nothing to help. Poor guy. I guess he watched Sam and me, which is something, considering that we could have drowned while my mom was putting pressure on Chad's leg. I was only five at the time. Sam was a toddler.

In this case, who cares if my panics are systemic? There's only one giant one, and I don't see how its only being one thing makes it any better.

To make matters more horrifying, someone knocked on my Motel Manor door this morning. I didn't answer it, and they didn't come in, so I know it wasn't housekeeping. It wasn't Bill, either, because he's the only person I know here and he never comes to my door. It's like an unspoken agreement we have that if I want to talk I stop by his room, 214, and knock twice quietly and once loud and he comes out. Or we peek into the hallway if we want to see each other. He's almost always outside 214, smoking. I was scared it might be people looking for me-I don't even know who, reporters, I guess. There's no one I can stand to face, so I hid. In the closet. Maybe I'm losing my mind. I mean, when I think that out loud, even say it, I hid in the closet, it reminds me of The Shining, of how if you stay in a hotel too long, you go crazy. Of course I've been here only a few days. What if I stayed a month? A year? Forever? I wonder if the police are looking for me, but it wasn't them, because I know from movies that when the police come to your door at the Motel Manor, they shout "Police" really loud and bash the door open, and that didn't happen. Plus, I don't think this whole thing, my life that is, is a big enough deal for the police. Although maybe it is. Hard to say. But maybe it was just some jacka.s.s looking for someone else. Part of me thinks it might have been my mom, but wouldn't she have called my name? Or Sarah. It was gentle knocking, so I don't think it was, like, the media, coming to ferret me out. I don't know. The only certainty was it wasn't anyone I could tolerate seeing.

My second week at Darcy, I moved through the days on a cloud. It was "placement week," meaning we auditioned for voice and dance. Acting cla.s.s was organized by grade: freshmen took freshman acting, soph.o.m.ores took soph.o.m.ore acting, and so on. Since I was a junior, I was automatically registered for junior acting. But for voice and dance, we had to try out. And even though in the school brochure, Darcy claimed that its "artistic productions are collaborative and inclusive rather than compet.i.tive," someone gets to play Juliet, if you know what I mean. So they auditioned us that second week of school for our cla.s.ses and then a few weeks later for whatever the winter production would be in February. We all knew it would be some huge thing that cast everyone, what with the fall production starring only Kyle and Elizabeth and two other senior guys, who played the "old man" by putting baby powder in their hair or the other guy part by wearing a fat suit. The official reason for doing such an unfair star vehicle of a show in the fall was that it went up four weeks into school, so they had to begin rehearsing before the year even started. There was no need for a party line about why Kyle and Elizabeth got the leads; they were both perfect in every way, a simple fact accepted by the rest of us, like gravity or the sun rising. But D'Arts would make it up to us with a huge winter show. We'd all get fabulous parts, they promised, and have to rehea.r.s.e for a million hours, probably including over Christmas break. But we had signed up to make such sacrifices. The "professional world" was so demanding, and everyone acted like even though we were in high school, if our families took a vacation that meant we weren't dedicated "artists." We used the word artist all the time there.

My fall placement auditions happened the second Tuesday of school, the second day of my second week. I had told the dance teachers I'd just take the absolute beginning-level cla.s.s and therefore there was no need to audition me, but they made me go in anyway. Before it even started, I was already blushing to the roots of my hair, wearing kid-sized yoga pants and a tank top instead of the leotard they required, and I made my way through the moves in the most half-a.s.sed way anyone has ever seen. The sad secret truth is that I love to dance, but only at home in my bedroom, on the bed with a fake microphone, or in front of the full-length mirror in my parents' bedroom with Sam break dancing. I do not like to dance in tights in front of Ms. McCourt, whose anorexic daughter Katie goes to the school, or in front of Ms. Smith, the seven-foot Amazon dance teacher who used to be a professional dancer and still wears her hair in a bun so tight her eyes bulge like they're going to explode out of her head. Her entire being is singed with disappointment that she ended up teaching. I barely made it through the audition, and when it was over Ms. Smith just said, "We'll post the list later today," so I knew I'd be in the beginning dance curriculum, which meant I had to learn basic ballet, tap, and jazz. I wondered if they regretted letting me into D'Arts at all. Maybe I'd be an embarra.s.sment to the school.

I promised myself that I would do better in the singing audition, but as soon as I had the thought, I felt sick because before I blew the dance audition I hadn't even had to think about the voice one because I'd been sure I would do great. Now my one song had so much riding on it. Why hadn't I just practiced the dance moves more? What if some weird thing happened and I did a bad job at the voice audition, too, and everyone thought they had let me in as a total pity move? Worse, what if they had?

I tried to breathe deeply as I went into the auditorium, and visualized the sheet music, since that always helps focus me. I thought how unfair it was that they made us do our placements back to back. I mean, I was still nervous from the dance one. The director of the music department, a wiggly noodle of a guy named Mr. Gosford, was sitting with Ms. Vanderly and Mr. Stenson, the two voice teachers. I was thinking, "Please, just let me get into Ms. Vanderly's section, so when I come out, I'll have good news." I didn't even know what difference her section made, but I wanted to come out proud. And no one liked Mr. Stenson. He was new at the school, and had a bald head with some scabs on it. Mostly, he had no power to put you in senior voice halfway through the year, which was apparently the best thing that could happen to a person. Unless of course you got in right away, which was practically unheard of.

The teachers were all in the front row of seats, right in the middle. It reminded me of that c.r.a.ppy movie Flashdance when the girl from The L Word has to audition for everyone even though she's a small-town girl who's never had professional training. They're all really skeptical until she runs up and down the walls, dancing all over them. Then they love her, of course. That's after the money scene, the one where she goes on a dinner date and sucks lobster out of the sh.e.l.l like an animal while fondling her boyfriend's crotch under the table with her foot. When I watched that movie with Chad and his high school girlfriend, Kate, I thought that scene was like the s.e.xiest thing I'd ever seen. And so did Kate, apparently, because after that whenever she stayed for dinner, she ate with her hands and played footsie with Chad under the table like they were in Flashdance. My parents found this cute, grinned at each other, probably remembering when they used to play footsie in high school. Gross. Sam was the only one who never noticed, of course. He just gobbled his spaghetti and talked about his day at school while Kate picked red peppers from the salad and licked her oily fingers between each bite.

At my audition, I had one of those anxiety visions where you do something totally crazy in your mind, just to torture yourself with the possibility, just to wonder what would happen if you actually did it. I used to feel that same unbearable urge at Chad's swim meets. I'd imagine running down from the risers, tearing my clothes off, and leaping into the pool during a race. I couldn't stop thinking about it, the terrifying question of what would they do so huge I was almost elated to consider it. I think the thrill of contemplating that kind of thing is related to an idea my dad once told me when I was crying on the ski lift at Mount Brighton-that vertigo isn't the fear of falling off a cliff, but the fear of jumping. His point was to comfort me, to be like, "You know you're not going to jump, so why be scared?" But it only made me more scared because how do you know you're not going to jump? I mean, how can you know who you'll be twenty seconds from now? What evidence is there to prove that you'll know the upcoming you? What if the Judy I become in two minutes does a striptease for the voice coaches, shocking everyone in the room with her dwarf s.e.xuality? What would they do?

I wonder if they would have noticed my body. This is conceited, but I think I have a get-out-of-jail-free card, so I'll just say it straight out. It's not only my face that's cute-I also have a cute-looking shape-I mean, I may be too small and my arms and legs are a bit short, but I have a little waist and kind of big b.o.o.bs for someone my size and a nice round b.u.t.t. Sometimes, I can tell that boys look at me and think "Wow," before they think, "Oh my G.o.d, did I think 'Wow' just now about that tiny person? And if she's such a kindergartner, then how come she has a great b.u.t.t?" I can see the transition on their faces, because I've seen it so many times. Achons like me tend to have hourgla.s.s bodies; it's like a concession prize or something. That guy Joel at the Little People conference told his friend Ian who told Meghan who told me that I was the closest thing he'd ever seen to a living doll, with my long eyelashes and hot body.

So what would have happened if I had torn my clothes off and danced a wild flashdance at my Darcy Arts voice audition? I'll never know, because what I did was walk out on stage, stand as straight as I could, and open my mouth up to the lights like I might drink them. I had the feeling I always do when I'm singing, that the notes come from someplace other than my body-an underground current rising through my feet and up my legs, taking shape inside my lungs and diaphragm and then trumpeting out of my throat. Like, not to be too cheesy or anything, but my voice makes me nine feet tall. Because it's huge, and no one, including me, can believe this body contains it. My parents knew my singing was crazy from the time I was a toddler, so I was always in every chorus, had private lessons, and like I said, they splurged on the piano even though they couldn't afford it, so I could have more music in my life. Anyway, like this wasn't obvious anyway, I owe it all to them, because unless you study and practice there's no point in having talent, right? Someday I'll try to remember to thank them. Because I wasn't even that nervous during the voice audition, even though the dance one had gone badly; I mean, I knew they weren't going to be able to believe it when they heard me sing. Partly it's just an expectation thing-it's like when you see a book with a really stupid cover and then you're surprised it's deep or good or smart or whatever. When you see me, you're like, okay, there might be things she's good at, but having a huge, bellowing voice probably isn't one of them. But it is. It's just one of those things.

So I sang the old jazz standard "Four," with its terrible, rhyme-lunging lyrics and achingly beautiful melody, and hit it right out of the place. I could feel how well it was going; my voice soared through the auditorium. There was a stunned silence when I finished, like no one even knew what to say.

Then Mr. Gosford, the director of the music department, said, "Judith Lohden, that was incredible," and Ms. Vanderly and Mr. Stenson said nothing, but just beamed at me like we shared some great secret. Then they nodded at each other, congratulated me, and told me right away without even talking it over privately that they were putting me in the senior voice cla.s.s, even though "such a decision requires a great commitment on my part." Maybe it sounds trivial, but at Darcy, it was a huge deal. And everyone knew about it right away. By the time I walked out of the auditorium, people in the hallway waiting to go next were like, "Holy s.h.i.t-did you get into senior voice? Congratulations."

All I could think of was the certain fact that Kyle would hear about it. I mean, his best friends, Alan and Chris, were seniors, so they'd definitely know. They'd be in the cla.s.s with me. Maybe Kyle would even get in! I wondered how good a singer he was.

I woke up Wednesday morning giddy with it, wondering if he would say something in American lit, or better yet, while pa.s.sing in the hallway or at lunch. And he did. He walked by with Ginger, actually, and they both stopped and were like, "That is so cool about you getting into senior voice; it's been like five years since that happened." I even told my mom about it on the ride home, that's how excited I was.

Speaking of my mom driving me home, my parents promised me a used car of some sort once I've had my license for a while, but if I'd held my breath about it, I'd be dead. I mean, even to run away, I had to take the AATA bus. The truth is, I feel guilty about the expense of them doctoring the car so I can drive it-raising the pedals or buying extenders. I bet they were planning on doing it for my birthday. My parents work really hard and they have to pay for U of M for Chad, which is still expensive even though it's in-state and everything, and they made a huge thing about not making him live at home, even though it would have saved them money. He got into Cornell, too, but he didn't go. And I think maybe it was because he didn't want my mom and dad to have to pay that much more. He never said that, he just acted like it was too far away and all his friends were going to Michigan anyway, but I think he would have liked it in Ithaca. After he did a college visit there, he told me there were tons of cliffs. And that sometimes kids there paint bull's-eyes on the rocks below, because apparently lots of Cornell students kill themselves. But I think the suicide thing was a generous kind of sour grapes by proxy, Chad's way of saying to my parents that he didn't want to go there anyway, so it was okay if they couldn't really pay that much money and he ended up here instead.

Anyway, it's possible that my parents are still working on the car thing in secret, actually, that they plan to have it ready by my seventeenth birthday, which is in two and a half weeks, incidentally. It seems very sad now, if they are. If you'd told me I was going to spend my seventeenth birthday at the Motel Manor, with no chance of finishing high school or showing my face in Ann Arbor again, I wouldn't have believed you.

Sometimes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I swam at school in the mornings. Mrs. O'Henry and Mr. Grames had okayed this unusual arrangement, and I loved those mornings of getting to school before anyone else (except Kyle and Elizabeth, who were already there rehearsing). I would eat breakfast in the car, a Power Bar and a Naked cherry-pomegranate juice, and then my mom would leave me at the back door, which the custodians knew to leave open for Kyle and Elizabeth and me. I would go upstairs to the second floor to drop my books in my locker, which I had begun to decorate with ribbon and lanyard. I wove six-foot strands into friendship bracelet patterns at home, beaded the ends, and then borrowed a ladder from the custodian, Mr. Nicks, so I could climb up and Krazy Glue the beaded parts to the top of my locker. So far I had finished only one strand, because it was long enough to reach from the top of my locker to the bottom, and it took forever. I can imagine exactly the sound of the metal door locking shut, beads clicking against it.

Then I'd head down to the pool, on the level below the practice rooms, with my swimsuit and towel and goggles in a bag. When I walked around the school those swimming mornings, all the hallway drama was still potential, the school itself somewhere between asleep and awake. It felt conquerable to me when I was alone there during the quiet, felt like I belonged and like maybe even D'Arts belonged to me.

Sometimes, if I was early enough, I would walk by the auditorium and peek into the doorway where no one could see me from the stage. I could watch a few seconds of the beginning of Kyle and Elizabeth's Fool for Love rehearsals that way, before slipping down to the pool. I must have seen them in it at least a dozen mornings before the show went up, so when it did, for its skinny week of performances, I felt like his girlfriend even though everyone was talking about whether he and Elizabeth Wood were having s.e.x for real. They almost had to have s.e.x to do the play, so it wouldn't have been a big leap. I couldn't even entertain the thought, just stuck to the fantasy where I was her, in the play with him, leaning on his arm, kissing him, screaming at him, even. And offstage they flirted, sure, but I never saw him kiss her or hold her hand in the halls in a boyfriend-girlfriend way. He was nice to everyone. Especially me.

This might sound boring, but I loved those days, loved that I knew exactly where I'd be each morning, that my time was neatly stacked like unit blocks. That the hours couldn't surprise me, except with emotional drama. I dislike logistical surprises, because it's already complicated for me to do normal things, like find the right place to sit, or make my way through a crowd, or reach the Naked juices without taking my grabber out of my backpack. It's fine when I have to use it, I just like to know when I'm going to have to do those kinds of things.

The first time I walked into senior voice, I had to count my breaths to make sure I was still breathing. Chris, Kyle's big, handsome senior friend, was standing right in the doorway doing some kind of comedy routine for Carrie Shultz. Then Alan walked up, looking slippery, like he'd just gotten out of the pool. It's funny how we become the things we do, even start to resemble the places we do them. I mean, it's not like Alan swam all day, every day, and even I had been swimming that day, but he just looked like a pool. He had big blue eyes and the summer hair on his arms and legs and a green, chlorinated tint about him. He stalked over, his equilateral torso balanced on skinny legs, and Amanda Fulton came up from behind and put her arms around his pointy waist. I took a long time walking up to the door, because I was hoping the four of them would disperse, but even though I moved as slowly as I could, they were all still standing there when I arrived, so they had to kind of move over to let me by. I had the unsavory thought that I could probably have just squeezed right through their legs. Alan and Chris were enormously tall, even if you weren't me. Alan was wearing a short-sleeved white T-shirt with a picture of a pigeon that said, "Ceci n'est pas un pigeon," and gesturing with his arms, so that muscles rippled up and down them. It's funny. I never wondered what it would be like to be Alan's girlfriend, but I sometimes found myself wondering what it would feel like to be Alan himself, or in a body like Alan's. To be a boy, I guess, a lanky, wiry boy. Did his body just snap along as he walked? Or glide through the world? Did it feel good to be as athletic as Alan? Or as handsome as Chris? There was an effortlessness about Kyle, though, that neither of the two of them seemed to have. They were always thinking about being themselves. I know, because I'm that type too.

I wedged in between them, closing my eyes until I was safely inside the auditorium, where I climbed onto the stage and took a seat in the back row of risers. I felt faint. When the bell rang, Ms. Vanderly shushed us all and then made an impa.s.sioned speech about what a big deal senior voice is and how the fall concert is one of the greatest prides of the school, as important as the shows, and how that's why we get to have cla.s.s in the auditorium even though freshman and soph.o.m.ore and junior voice use a regular cla.s.sroom. When she said "junior," she looked over at me. "I think most of you are aware that we have a junior in senior voice this year. Judy Lohden will join us because, as some of you may already know and all of you will find out, she is a huge talent." I think she flushed slightly when she realized she'd said "huge," but I was busy trying to tell whether Chris and Alan were paying close-enough attention to my glory that they could remember it and tell Kyle later. But when I looked over, Chris was throwing something-a wadded-up piece of paper?-at Amanda Fulton, and she and Carrie Shultz were giggling. I tried to smile graciously at Ms. Vanderly without looking like an a.s.s-kisser. But she wasn't watching me anymore. She had sat down at the piano and begun playing scales. She turned to us and we sang up a scale with her notes, and then back down. I started to relax, worked on not looking at anyone else, and finally heard us singing. It sounded glorious to me, even though we were only doing warm-ups.

Getting to SV and leaving always sucked, and whenever Ms. Vanderly made me sing alone, I had near-death, pulse-racing moments. But when we were all singing together, I forgot about everyone-even Chris and Alan and Amanda and Carrie-and just listened to us, sounding like one big person.

My love of routine is part of why the Motel Manor life is not suitable for me. There are too many variables and too few systems. This morning, just like every morning now, someone knocked gently on my door again, and again I didn't answer. But later, when I woke up from a tortured nap with the TV on, there was an unmarked envelope under my door. I could barely bring myself to touch it. I looked at it for a long time, as if it were something alive and dangerous, a mail bomb or monster. Eventually I went over and picked it up carefully, using my index finger and thumb as if they were sterile tweezers. I felt unequivocal, didn't even smell it or look at it up close. I knew, whatever it was, I couldn't handle it yet, so I put it, unopened, into my diary, which I was keeping on the nightstand for when I felt like writing an entry. When that day comes, maybe I'll also feel like I can open the envelope. Right now, I can't imagine ever doing either.

Tonight I have no plans, except to eat SpaghettiOs, watch TV, and cry. Maybe I'll order pizza and ask Bill to hang out in the hallway and listen to me whine. The sound of my own whining makes me miss my mom. And Ms. Doman. Come to think of it, I really miss Goth Sarah, too. Maybe even Kyle. It's funny how when someone betrays you, it ruins your idea of the person, but doesn't make you stop loving him right away. Or ever, maybe.

5 I picked a Rickie Lee Jones song for my solo in the fall voice concert, and practiced it every day for an hour after school. I did this not because I was especially disciplined, but because I loved the D'Arts practice rooms. They were tiny cinder-block caves in the bas.e.m.e.nt, one level up from the pool, which was in an absolute dungeon next to the gym. The practice rooms reminded me of monk dorms I once saw at a church in New York, during the same trip when my mom took me to see Sat.u.r.day Night Live. The monk quarters were cool, marble, and simple. Likewise, each D'Arts practice room had its own piano, two stools, two chairs, and two music stands. And that was it. But it was everything you could need, even if you were doing a quartet, in which case two people sat on stools and two on chairs. Mostly, one person used the room at a time; there were signup sheets, but there wasn't much compet.i.tion since most kids were rich and had way nicer pianos at home. But I loved them, and frankly, going from those quiet vaults straight to the Grill every night to meet my parents felt perfect. The private to the public, artistic hunger to greasy spoon. I looked forward every day to both, and to the moments between them, my mom or dad pulling up in the car, ready to hear about my day and take me to the Grill, where a plate of whatever special they'd made would be hot, waiting. My mom always played Bruce Springsteen, my dad Ella Fitzgerald. I liked those ten-minute car rides alone with one parent, detailing for my mom or dad my tidy high school days. There were rumors that people used the practice rooms to have s.e.x, but I had a hard time imagining that, considering that they had windows in the doors. I guess you could have hung a shirt or towel, but any teacher walking by would have knocked the door right down if you covered that window.