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Chapter 6
“Can I help you?”
I tore my eyes from Ryder and found an irritated, mid-fifties man eyeing me over the top of his bifocals, his hand frozen in midair, holding a marker poised against the whiteboard.
“Uh…” I said, and had the good fortune to remember to close my mouth. “Chemistry,” I finally mumbled. “With, uh…” The fumbling started then as I scurried to find my class schedule. “Uh, with Mr. Dorkman.”
“That’s Dockman,” he corrected.
“Oh. Sorry.” Oops. I cringed and sank back as half the class snickered.
He dropped his marker from the board and stepped toward me, snapping his fingers.
I handed over my schedule immediately. “New student,” I uttered as I did so.
He scowled at the sheet a moment then flipped it back to me so quickly I had to fumble yet again to catch the flapping page.
Ten feet away, Ryder Yates tapped the seat in front of his with his shoe. His friend—yeah, the staring one—lifted his disinterested gaze from the notebook he’d been doodling on and glanced over his shoulder.
He and Ryder had some kind of silent conversation that consisted of the enlarging of Ryder’s eyes and then directing them my way. His friend turned slowly to study me.
I diverted my attention to Dockman just as he showed me his back with a very dismissive air. “Class,” he announced. “We have a new student. This is Grace En… En-dee…”
“Indigo,” I supplied. “Pronounced and spelled just like the color.”
It felt strange saying my name aloud, knowing Ryder Yates was finally learning my true identity.
Dockman nodded. “Grace Indigo. She’s new here. So, please…” he gave a tired sigh and said, “treat her with a little decency today, will you?”
He told me to take a seat and as I scanned the room for a chair, Ryder sank lower into his desk and ducked his head to study his opened textbook.
The only place left in the room was next to his friend and catty-corner from him. Knowing this was going to be one very long hour, I sank down into the chair, sitting one place over and in front of Ryder Yates.
Class started.
Thank goodness Southeast used the same textbook we had at Hillsburg, and a double thanks to the fact we’d already started learning about the Periodic Table, because no way could I have concentrated on that first lesson, not when I was stuck wondering how much Ryder Yates had to be staring through my head to watch the teacher lecture.
The back of my neck burned and sizzled; I was surprised I didn’t set off the smoke alarms. I pressed the tip of my pen astutely to my pad of paper and wrote words in a fury. Most of my mad ramblings consisted of how much I wanted to return to Hillsburg, flee from this foreign place, and treat my mo
ther to some kind of nasty prank—nothing permanent or painful, mind you, just something humiliating enough to make her feel exactly how I felt at that very moment.
About thirty minutes through the agony, Dockman finally passed out a worksheet for homework. When I turned to hand off my stack, Ryder and I made eye contact. He paused a moment and gave me a vague, brief, tight smile before turning his attention to his friend to receive his own homework.
Yep, he remembered exactly who I was.
The teacher explained the assignment and then gave us the rest of the hour to work on it. As he sat at his desk, some students bent their heads and began to fill in the blanks, but most of the room relaxed, each person turning to a friend and chatting quietly.
I planned to be an assignment worker, until Ryder’s pal spun directly toward me. “So, you’re Grace, huh?”
I jumped. Shocked someone had finally spoken to me, I lifted my head and glanced over at him. The first person to voluntarily talk to me at my new school just had to be the very buddy of Ryder Yates, didn’t he?
Great.
I didn’t want to be rude and lose all chance of making any friends, but seriously, did it have to be Ryder Yates’s chum who first spoke to me?
“Yeah,” I answered, forcing the friendliest smile I could manage. Since I wasn’t sure what else to say, I sucked in a breath, lifting my eyebrows as if to stretch out my friendly demeanor as far as I could, and went right back to studying my homework. From the corner of my eye, I watched the friend glance back at Ryder, who grinned smugly at him and gave him the thumbs up sign as he sarcastically mouthed the word “smooth”.
The friend gave Ryder a dirty look and turned back to me. “I’m Todd.”
