The lunchroom got louder, with conversation pitches rising and rising and rising. Minnie wished she could wear her headphones, but she’d left them in her locker, and she was pretty sure it was against school rules to listen to music anyway. With so few students compared to her Miami high school, she supposed you couldn’t get away with much.
And then, out of nowhere, a girl at a table three away from Minnie started screaming.
Minnie and the rest of the lunch crowd turned toward her. The girl was pretty, with blond hair and angelic features. Minnie had noticed her before and labeled her “popular and rich.” But those angelic features crumpled to reds and pinks. Staring at her cell phone, she sobbed as her other pretty friends got up and tried to comfort her.
“No! No!” the girl cried.
One of the lunchroom staff members came over, scooped the girl into a side-hug, and got her out of there. But now that she was gone, excitement exploded. Several students, who’d been hiding their phones till now, announced what they were sure was wrong with the girl. It took Minnie a little while to understand. Everyone was speaking at once, blotting each other out. Eventually, Minnie had to get up and walk over to the nearest table, one of the nerdier tables that she felt would be more welcoming, where she asked, “What’s going on?”
One of the nerdy girls flashed Minnie a look that made Minnie wilt with dread.
“You don’t want to know,” the girl said, returning to her food.
Silence rang over this table and this table alone, as though they didn’t want to tell Minnie anything.
“Come on,” Minnie said, her eyes scanning their blank faces. “I can just ask someone else.”
“Her grandfather was found dead,” one of the guys at the table said finally, rolling his shoulders back.
Minnie’s jaw dropped. She’d expected something more high school dramatic, like a breakup or a cheating scandal or something like that. “That’s awful,” she said quietly.
The guy nodded, for the first time looking her in the eye. “Nobody knows what happened.”
“Gosh.” Still reeling from her own private tragedy of losing her father, Minnie felt the shock of the popular girl deep in her soul.
“He’s really high-up at city council,” the guy continued, his voice low.
Minnie’s ears rang. She thought of her mother’s recent article, of the “scandal” she’d written about at the Miami city council and higher-ups, of the taxpayer money that had apparently been stolen. She wondered if every city council was rife with scandal. She wondered if the world was a corrupt place.
But just as soon as the thought had come, she shook it out. She wasn’t like her mother. She didn’t want to think that all successful, wealthy people were criminals. Sometimes people worked for what they had. Sometimes they simply earned it. Maybe she should read that book her father gave her and learn a thing or two.
After lunch was art class,Minnie’s second favorite after any kind of music course. The guidance counselor had told her it was better to wait for the fall semester to enroll in choir, as the choirs had already had their final concert, and they wouldn’t bedoing much of anything before the spring semester was through. So art it was. Mrs. Green, the art teacher, was a hippie who’d spent many years in New York City, trying and failing to build an art career before returning to Nantucket to take over the art teacher role. Of course, as Mrs. Green described her backstory to Minnie, she left out the part about having failed. She said it like, “I wanted to come back to the most beautiful place I’ve ever known and deepen my artistic mission!” But Minnie understood a lie when she heard one.
Mrs. Green set Minnie up at a table near the window and told her she could make whatever she wanted. “Honestly, it’s too late in the year to worry about grades,” she said. “As long as I see you working and committing yourself to your craft, you’re going to get an A.”
Minnie felt an immediate fondness for Mrs. Green, a warmth that she’d forgotten was possible. While the rest of the class settled in and continued the work they’d already begun, Minnie went through the cabinets to find a mostly empty sketchpad, pencils, charcoals, and paints. For a little while, she sketched willy-nilly on the paper, grateful to let her mind blank out.
It had been a long time since she’d allowed herself to feel creative, to go with her instincts and let something flow out.
But something out of the corner of her eye forced her eyes up. Her heart dropped into her stomach. For there, sitting just three seats away from her, was the guy from lunch—the dark-haired guy who’d spent the entire half-hour drawing. Now, he was painting, using delicate strokes to make a gleaming painting of a crow. From where Minnie sat, the crow seemed so lifelike that she thought it might fly off the canvas. She shivered.
This time, he felt her gaze and turned to look at her. His gaze was earnest and curious. He didn’t seem embarrassed about being stared at, nor about staring back.
Minnie told herself to say something, to engage with this guy in some way. But she didn’t know his name, and he didn’t know hers either, as Mrs. Green hadn’t forced her to stand in front of the class and talk about her interests. Thankfully.
“I really like that,” Minnie said, sounding more earnest than she’d planned for.
The guy didn’t smile. “What are you working on?”
Minnie removed her hand from her sketches to show the makings of the haunted house into which she and her mother had moved, the drafty, scary beachside place that seemed to leak from every crevice and groan and creak with every breeze. Her idea had been to make a painting of it, maybe as a way to understand it or memorialize her pain. She didn’t know why.
“I know that place,” the guy said, raising his chin.
“My mom and I just moved in,” Minnie said.
“It’s cool.” The guy shrugged. “I mean, I don’t think anyone’s lived there in a long time. A friend and I broke into it a few years ago. That was before he moved away.” The guy returned his attention to his crow, tickling the edge of his brush on the feathers.
Minnie loved the idea of this boy and his friend breaking into her new house. She wanted to know more. She drew up the confidence to ask. “What did you do? I mean, when you broke in.”
