I put my arm around her and we walk back to the truck. I want to ask about her family and where she's from, but I'm pretty sure she wouldn't know about either, so I just stay silent.

"I'm sorry I made you come here," she says. "I was just curious. I thought I might be able to do some good, you know? Help peel away the rust." She locks her door and then scoots in close to me. "It's so tragic-to be just a number."

"You're not just a number." I stroke her cheek, just a little, and say, "I think you're pretty great." And I really mean it.

She kisses me and rests her cheek against mine. "I want to know what it feels like to be from someplace. Not just some number. Not some unrested spirit without ident.i.ty."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean I want to be with you. I want to experience it-your world of roots."

I feel kind of good bringing her to my house, showing her how nice it is, at the tip of a cul-de-sac overlooking all of Witchcraft Heights. We go inside and I ask her if she wants a drink, but all she wants is to see the inside of my room. So I take her there and she kicks off her shoes and barefoot-skates across my rug, all around my room.

"Having fun?" I ask.

She takes my hands and we spin around. At first I feel totally stupid doing it-but somehow with her, it's actually kind of cool.

"I think you're truly wondrous," she says. "And one day, when you put all that glitter out, and it's just you and your porous thoughts and your smashing ideas, I hope I still know you-an intelligent and harvesting young man. But for now, you're my karmic destiny."

We stop spinning and she kisses both my hands. And I know it's cheesy and totally unlike anything I've ever felt or thought before, but here, with this girl, after all this time, I just want to hold her and kiss her and never let her go.

"What's wrong?" she asks, when I don't say anything back.

And then I realize I can feel my face, stuck in some sort of confused knot. "It's just that n.o.body's ever said anything like that to me before," I say. "Wow, that just sounded so lame." What is the matter with me?

"It sounded honest, Derik. Honest." She pats my hand. "Maybe you haven't let anyone get close enough to say those things to you."

"Not until now," I say. And I look at her. Really look at her, hoping she sees what I mean without my having to say it. Wondering if she'd care if I kissed her right now. I want more than anything to kiss her again.

"I'm happy you feel that way, Derik," she says. "Just think, if that Sean-guy hadn't come into your diner, we might never have shared like this."

"I'll have to thank him," I say, and she smiles at me, not breaking the hold I have on her eyes.

And I think she's right about being my destiny or me being hers. We were definitely meant to meet.

She goes and sprawls herself out on my bed, starts flopping around, telling me how wonderfully yellow everything is in here-even though my room is blue and gray. Then she stops, walks on her knees to the foot of the bed, and looks up at me like she could cry at any second. "Drink me up, Derik, for even just a short spell, and make this mine. My roots in the soil. Will you do that for me?"

Soil?

She gets up and makes a beeline for me. She plasters her lips to mine, thrusts her tongue in my mouth, yanks me onto the bed, and I go toppling on her.

She lifts my shirt up with her teeth. Then pulls it up and off, and I'm hoping she notices my body-my chest, my abs-the result of working out at a gym ten hours a week, but she's too busy unb.u.t.toning my jeans, ripping them down with my boxers until they get stuck at my sneakers. She pulls off my shoes, and now it's just me, completely exposed, and her, exploring every inch of my body with her lips and tongue. She actually sucks my nipples.

I decide I should try and take her clothes off as well, but she pulls away when I touch her lacy sleeve. Instead, she stands up on the bed and gives me a striptease. First those sticks from her hair, so that the bun comes undone and her hair just falls, long and thick and wavy, like a mermaid. Then she peels off her top, and she's just got some bra-thing on underneath, and you can see right through it. She takes the straps down over her shoulders like they're suspenders, and rolls the thing down her waist, over her hips, off her legs, and then kicks it in my face. And she just stares at me, watching me watch her, like she can tell what I'm thinking-that she's the most unbelievable girl I've ever seen.

She blows me a kiss and then moves her fingers to the side of her skirt. She pulls at the ties, and the skirt just falls off her. Underneath she's wearing these silky boxer shorts, with hearts all over them, that make me laugh out loud. There's a pocket inside the hem. She reaches in, takes out a purple condom, and opens the wrapper with her teeth.

I lean back while she puts the thing on me, and it's really weird, but all of a sudden I can't help but think how I've never felt so close to a girl before, like she can read my mind and can be totally crazy, smart, and cool all at once.

She lays her naked body on mine, and already I'm holding back. "You're luminous, Derik," she whispers, leaning in to kiss my shoulder. But then I feel teeth-they sink into my skin, right beside my collarbone, completely catching me off guard, and so I let out a shriek. Lucky for me, I think my shrieking gets her going even more, because not two seconds later, she's circling her hips and letting out these catlike cries, right on top of me. I can't hold on much longer, so I try to distract myself and stare at the crystal stick around her neck, but it's bopping up and down right between her Mary Janes, and so it's no use. Before I know it, I'm all done.

She rolls off and snuggles into my side. And I'm thinking that she liked it, that she's all set, because she's smiling at me, fingering through the gel in my hair, like nothing's wrong. Like she's completely satisfied.

"You're wonderfully crimson," she says.

And I want to say something totally incredible back. Not a line or anything bogus like that, but something smart and different and special. I want to tell her how awesome I think she is; tell her how this is so different for me, how it's crazy how it happened, the way we kept meeting, like it was meant to be; tell her that I've never felt this way about anybody before. But instead I say, "You're the one who's amazing." And then I lean over and kiss her lips, slowly, concentrating the whole time, hoping that it's full of the magical stuff they sing about in love songs, because it really feels that way for me.

When the kiss breaks, I lean into her ear and say, "Isn't it weird the way we kept b.u.mping into each other?"

"What do you mean?"

"You know, the way we kept seeing each other. The party, Starbucks, the newsstand ..."

"I don't know what you're talking about, Derik." She stops twirling her fingers through my hair. "We met today, at the diner."

"No, before, all those times. Even earlier today, at the video store."

"It must have been somebody else, Derik. I would have remembered if I'd seen you before."

"Were you not in the video store today? Movie Mayhem? There was this old guy buggin' you."

"Yeah, I was there. But I didn't see you there. That's really unusual." She continues to nuzzle into my chest, but then there's this ringing from that enormous pocketbook of hers. "I should get that," she says, rolling over to answer it.

"h.e.l.lo?" she says. "Hi. How are you feeling?" She grips the phone and moves toward the edge of the bed, like suddenly I'm in the way. "Truly wondrous," she continues into the phone. "No, nothing really. Just setting time with a friend. Sure. Yeah, I'd love to; that'd be crimson. I'll place there in an hour." She clicks her phone off and lies back down to give my nipple one final kiss. That's when she notices.

"You're bleeding," she says.

I look at my shoulder, noticing her bite marks, the way she broke right through my skin.

She grabs for a handful of tissues and presses them into my shoulder. "I guess I got a little carried away. I hope this doesn't change anything for you; it was a luminous time."

I grab the napkins from her, maybe a little too quick; I think she senses that I'm p.i.s.sed. "I'm fine," I say.

Mearl responds by kissing my shoulder, then my chest. "Thank you, Derik," she whispers. "For letting me plant here, even if it was just to be uprooted again."

She sits on the edge of the bed with her back to me and slips on her bra-top thing and the lacy shirt. She pulls the heart boxers on, then wraps and ties her skirt, slides into her flip-flops, and swings the giant purse over her shoulder. Grabbing her hair sticks from the night table, she leans down next to me and whispers into my ear, just like she did with that perv at the video store. She tells me she's glad we met and wishes me a spiritually enlightened life.

And then she walks right out of it.

SAt.u.r.dAY, AUGUST 12, 3:00 P.M.

I hate my house. I hate everyone inside of it. I even hate the color-apple pie-filling brown, with globs of dirt stuck to the bottom shingles. I' m standing at the front door, but I don't want to go in. And I've already spent a whole hour at the library. I wish Maria had let me stay at her house, at least until after my mom went off to aerobics cla.s.s. I don't know why she didn't. I don't know why she made me sneak out her bedroom window and hide in the bushes. Or why she touched herself on her privates when she changed her clothes. She told me not to peek, but I did. And I almost wish I didn't.

My mom's car is parked in the driveway, so I know she's home. Maybe I'll just stay out here and play with my Game Boy, beat Dracula, free his prisoner, and become Sadie-istic, Supreme Vampire Huntress once and for all.

Except I'm hungry.

I turn the k.n.o.b and push the door open. "Sadie," Mom says, coming out of the washroom. "Hi, sweetie-dee. I was just thinking about you." There's an unopened box of Nutty Buddies sitting on top of the heaping basket of clean laundry she's carrying. "Come on upstairs. Ginger and Nina have some friends over. We were just about to have a snack."

Is she really going to let me have one of those Nutty Buddies?

I follow her up the stairs and into the kitchen, glad she hasn't noticed that the sign she put on my shirt isn't there anymore.

Ginger, my bossy fourteen-year-old sister, stands in the middle of the kitchen floor showing her friend Cheryl how to do a proper plie. Ginger's wearing a dark, shiny red bathing suit that makes her look like a giant Fruit Roll-Up come to life. The snack key dangles from a long silver chain around her neck.

"A straighter back," Mom says. She slides the laundry basket onto the table and puts one hand on Ginger's bony shoulder and the other at the bottom of her spine. She guides Ginger down into the perfect plie, not even thinking about the Nutty Buddies just sitting there on top of the warm pile of laundry, probably melting at this very second.

Nina, my nine-year-old sister, sits at the kitchen table with her best friend, Douglas. They're playing Go Fish. "Hi, Sadie," she says, pairing up a couple of sevens.

"You've got a purple juice smile across your mouth," I say.

She shrugs and takes another sip of her Kool-Aid.

"Very nice," Mom says to Ginger. Ginger is able to plie down until her hair almost hits the floor. Her legs are long and tan. Almost as tall as my whole body. I wonder if my legs will be like that in three years, too.

But I don't look anything like my sisters. My hair is dark brown. Theirs is blond. They have blue eyes. My eyes are brown. They're both tall and skinny-even Nina is almost as tall as me. I need to lose sixteen pounds. Their skin is tan this summer. Mine is pasty white. They both like ballet. I have achilles tendonitis-which basically means that I pulled some muscles at the back of my heel-and so I can't do sports or dancing, and I have a doctor's note saying I can't do gym cla.s.s. If the tendon tears completely, then Mom says I'll have to have surgery or my ankle and foot will kill even more.

I have one other sister, Kendra, who looks a little like me, but she decided not to come back from college this summer. When she came home last summer, Mom made her go to Weight Busters with us, complaining that she had gained the "freshman fifteen" from too much pizza and beer. Kendra is skinnier than me, but not as skinny as Ginger and Nina. I'm mad at Kendra for not coming home, even though I probably wouldn't have either. I can't wait till I go off to college and never have to come back.

"How about that snack?" Mom asks. She starts to open up the box of Nutty Buddies, but then stops and looks at me. "What happened to your sign?"

Ginger starts laughing. She clutches around her hollow stomach like it's the funniest thing she's ever heard. Cheryl starts laughing, too, and soon they can't even stand still. "You girls are so silly," Mom says, shaking her head.

They're laughing because of the sign. The sign. The one my mom pins to my shirt whenever I gain weight, or whenever I'm going out without her and she knows there's gonna be food. Or sometimes when I've eaten something I shouldn't. Or like today, when I have to go weigh in later. My mom says it's for my own good, that beauty is pain, and that someday I'll thank her. And then on comes the sign-just a normal piece of notebook paper that she's written on in big cursive letters: PLEASE DO NOT FEED SADIE.

I know I could take the sign off, and sometimes I do. But sometimes I forget it's even there. And sometimes I don't care if people see it.

Mom says the sign could be a lot worse. She says that when she was a teenager and trying to lose weight for the prom, she and her mother joined this weight-loss club that made members wear a pig nose, stand in the middle of a circle of people, and oink a bunch of times whenever they weighed in and had gained more than half a pound. I guess she's right. I guess that would be a lot worse.

"The sign fell off at Maria's," I say, plucking at my eyelashes, pulling out a three-lash fan.

"Why were you at Maria's?"

"She let me use her nail polish."

Mom looks at my Baby-Got-the-True-Blues fingernail shade and frowns. "Why is a seventeen-year-old hanging around with an eleven-year-old? You told me you were going to the park for arts and crafts."

"I was going to, but then I saw Maria."

Ginger and Cheryl are still laughing at me. Cheryl puffs out her cheeks, fat-girl style, and this makes Ginger laugh so loud and hard that her perfectly straight back slides down the wall and she collapses to the floor, holding her hand between her legs so she doesn't pee. Mom looks over at them. "Ginger, keep it up and Cheryl will have to go home and you'll have to go to your room." Then she turns back to look at me. "Did you have anything to eat?"

I shake my head.

"Well, let's have us a little snack and we'll talk about this later."

I nod and look at Nina. She smiles at me and scores another card from Douglas to make a pair of kings. I hope she wins. I like her so much more than Ginger.

Mom busts open the side of the Nutty Buddy box with her thumb. She gives one cone to Douglas first. "There you go, sweetie," she says. One to Nina, one to Cheryl, and one to Ginger. Then she closes up the box and stuffs it in the freezer.

Mom puts her arm around my shoulder. "Now what do you say, you and me have our own snack?" She kisses the top of my head, and I want to cry so bad that my forehead hurts. I nod and look away, stare at the wallpaper, the stripes of pears and oranges and bananas, because I don't want anyone to see.

I look at the inside of the fridge, where Mom is pointing. "How about some nice carrot sticks? I bought some fresh yesterday at the farmer's market. And I have some yummy no-fat veggie dip."

"Okay," I say, hearing my own voice crackle.

She takes the package of carrots out, along with the container of dip. Ginger peels the paper off the cone part of her Nutty Buddy. She takes a bite and the cone is all chewy. I can see it in her mouth. I love it all chewy like that.

Mom arranges our snack on a Tupperware platter she bought from Maria's mother. She places the dip in the center and arranges the carrot sticks around it like sun rays. "Now, doesn't that look pretty?" She holds it out for everyone to look at.

No one says anything.

Me and Mom go out on the sunporch to eat, while Ginger and Cheryl move into the living room for more ballet, and Nina and Douglas keep playing cards. The sunporch is pretty new. It has a big yellow umbrella with pink flowers and matching cushiony lounge chairs. Me and Mom sit at the table, and she starts reading her book. It's a new one. The cover shows a man and a woman on horseback with their hair blowing, and mountains in the background. I wish we had that kind of breeze out here. It's so hot.

"You know, Sadie," Mom begins, "don't think I don't notice when Ginger isn't so nice to you. I'll speak to her later. I just didn't want to embarra.s.s her in front of her friend. They're just silly girls. You'll be giggly like that one day, too. Everything will be funny."

"I don't think I'll ever be like Ginger."

"Ginger's metabolism is different than yours is. She lucked out. You didn't. I didn't. She got your father's genes. So did Nina. You weren't as lucky and got mine. So, like me, you just need to watch it, that's all."

"You look pretty to me."

"Thank you, sweetie. But Mom's gotta work very hard to look good. You know how hard I work. And I still need to lose at least ten pounds."

"I need to lose sixteen."

Mom smiles at me like she knows and feels bad about it. She leans forward and her dark wavy hair hangs into the dip. "Can you keep a secret?"

I nod.

"You'll be the lucky one in the end. I have friends who were like Ginger. They could eat whatever they wanted to growing up. They didn't have to count calories or carbs or fat grams. But then one day, poof, their metabolism slowed and they still kept on eating the same way, and now they're heavier than me. Much heavier. You and I know how to diet."

"You think one day Ginger will be fat?"

"Maybe. I wouldn't be surprised if her metabolism hasn't already started to slow. I've noticed her thighs are getting a bit heavy. If she doesn't watch it, she'll be joining us at Weight Busters, just like Kendra last summer. Remember?"

The thought of Ginger at one of our Weight Busters meetings makes me smile. I picture a fat Ginger stepping barefoot onto the scale, the seams of her Fruit Roll-Up bathing suit stretched, flab bulging out all over. But then Mom pops my fantasy bubble, "You know you have to weigh in tonight," she says.

How could I not know? She's reminded me like, a KAGILLION times.

"Stop picking at those pretty lashes, honey," she says. "You're not gonna have any left." Mom reaches over to grab a carrot, dunks it in the chunky white dip, and then stuffs it into her mouth. She smiles at me between chews, and I almost feel better.

Except I don't want to eat carrots. But I'm so hungry I'll eat almost anything. I take one from the sun ray arrangement, and now it looks like a white face with wild orange hair that sticks out straight. I think about telling her this but change my mind when she turns a page in her book. I drop my carrot into the dip, push it down with my finger, and then spoon it back up. It's completely covered and so are my fingers. I try a bite. It tastes like crunch, cold nothing. I leave the rest in my napkin.

I want a real snack.

I get up from the table and go back inside. Nina's still in the kitchen with Douglas. I could pretend to go into the freezer for some ice for a drink and take a Nutty Buddy instead, but I'm too afraid Nina will see and tell on me. Plus, it's kind of hard to hide an ice-cream cone in a tennis outfit with just Tinker Bells all over it, no big pockets or anything.

Ginger's just around the corner, in the living room. I know she would tell. She's showing Cheryl her frappes now. Cheryl looks so bored. She's sitting on the ottoman, but she looks like she might fall asleep. I look at Ginger's thighs. Mom's right, they are getting kind of round. I smile, then start to laugh.