There was a loud snapping noise. I’d hit a chunk of unidentifiable hard matter and it’d broken a few tines off my plastic fork. I got up and threw the fork and burger away.

Suddenly, I really wasn’t hungry anymore.

In Pre-Cal, we had a quiz on trigonometric identities, which I failed. I had no idea what the difference between the double-angle and half-angle identities was.

My mood instantly brightened when I walked into the Physics Lab and saw the note on the board: We will be throwing things off the roof of the gym tomorrow. Bring something that you can throw. Nothing live. I laughed, wondering what excuse Mrs. Edwards would cook up for how that was scientific.

I sat at my table and dropped my books onto the empty stool next to me. I was the only student in the class without a lab partner, but I didn’t mind. I’d rather work alone anyway. I glanced around the room, waiting for the bell to ring. As my eyes slid past Mrs. Edward’s desk, my blood froze. The foreign girl was standing there, waiting for her “transfer of classes” slip to be signed. I moved my books from the seat next to me, the only empty seat in the class, which would soon be filled.

Hurriedly, I thought of something to say, some way of explaining my actions yesterday. I’m sorry I was such a jerk, you just surprised me because you’re so weird didn’t seem the best way to apologize.

Mrs. Edwards pointed to the seat next to me. I thought I saw the girl’s shoulder’s fall a bit when she recognized me, but I couldn’t be sure. Her face was expressionless, a neutral mask, telling me nothing of her feelings. She sat down silently, acting as if I wasn’t there.

“Hi,” I said.

She turned, looking directly at me, and again I noticed how strangely, perfectly, stunningly beautiful she was.

“Hi,” she said emotionlessly, and turned away.

“Uh…” I began. “I’m Lizzie.”

She turned again, and smiled an uncertain smile that didn’t show her teeth. The smile didn’t change the neutral expression in her eyes.

“Meenah,” she said, and turned away again. Mentally, I sighed.

“Listen, about yesterday at lunch, I’m really sorry, I just--”

“It’s all right,” she cut me off somewhat urgently, as if she didn’t want me to say the rest. “I’m the new exchange student. People stare."

She didn’t meet my eyes, just remained staring at the note on the board. “This class is fun?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “As long as you don’t know anyone in Leadership. Why’d you switch out of Biology?”

She sighed. “Learning sciences are harder when you’re not speaking your native language. I decided to take one that I’ve already done.”

She didn’t say anything else, and after a few seconds Mrs. Edwards started the lecture and we didn’t have any more of a chance to talk. Not that she was too eager to talk about anything anyway.

Danni was right, Meenah was strange. She sat almost motionless through the entire lesson: only her hand moved as she took notes in her perfect handwriting. She’d positioned herself as far from me as the table permitted, with her nose wrinkled as if she smelled something unpleasant. And, though she claimed to have transferred to Physics because she had trouble with English, she wrote all her notes in English and never asked for a rephrasing or how something was spelled. Some of this I understood. She was foreign, not stupid, and had already taken the subject. It could all be easily explained.

Then there were the things that couldn’t be explained, the things that didn’t make sense, the “intangible strangeness” as Chris had called it. The way that she sat as if she was preparing for an attack, shoulders tensed, but with her detached, emotionless face.

A minute before the bell rang, she closed her notebook and stuck it in her messenger bag. It was the first time she’d moved since the beginning of the class. Glancing at the clock, I followed suit. We both were out the door as the bell started ringing, and I managed to get out of the parking lot before the daily post-bell traffic jam so that I was home at my usual time.

I rattled around the empty house for a bit, before finally deciding to do something about that poster project. No matter how hard he tried to make me, I wasn’t going to do it all for Brian again.

I grabbed the phone book and looked up “Palmerson. ” There were six entries. I grabbed the phone and started dialing. At the fourth house, a woman answered.

“Hello?”

“Hello,” I said. “Is this Brian Palmerson’s house?”

“Yes, this is his mother. May I ask what it is about?”

“Hi, Mrs. Palmerson. I’m Lizzie Trezmé , and I’m in his AP history class. We were assigned a group project and--”

“He blew you off?” she asked brightly.

“Uh…yeah.”

“Well, then, can you come over here? I’ll give you directions, do you have paper and a pen? I’m so glad that someone has finally said something.”

My car took three tries to start. I was going to have to get it fixed pretty soon, and I just hoped that we didn’t break anything in Physics tomorrow.

Brian’s house was one of the huge, new houses with a tiny yard. I spotted two other houses on his street that were nearly identical: only their different colored paint showed some futile attempt at individuality. I wondered if the people who lived in these cookie-cutter houses needed to look at the house numbers to find their way home. I certainly would get lost.

I parked next to Brain’s driveway, grabbed my book from the always-empty passenger seat, and, hoping that I got the right house, I hesitantly rung the doorbell.

Almost immediately, a woman answered the door. She had her long, brown hair pulled back into a bun, and was wearing a flour-splotched apron patterned with bright sunflowers. When she spoke, she had a slight southern accent, something I had not noticed when I spoke to her on the phone.

“Hey there, you must be Lily.”

“Lizzie,” I said. She smiled.

“Of course, so terribly sorry. Well why don’t you just come inside, I was just makin’ some pecan cream cookies, we’ll get you some of them before you start working on that project, I’m so sorry about Brian, thank goodness you said something…” Half of me wondered if this was the same stern woman who I had spoken to on the phone.

I was reminded of one of my grandmother’s favorite sayings, “No good southern woman will ever say ‘bless your heart’ as a compliment, remember that.”

“…all right then, let’s get these in the oven here, now you just come along up with me and we’ll see if we can get Brian out of his room, I always call it The Cave, he just sits in there with his computer and his books, heaven knows what we can do with him, but you know teenage boys, impossible, they’re just impossible, oh well here we are…”

Near the top of the stairs, there was a door to what I assumed was Brian’s room, though it looked more like the scene of a grisly crime with the yellow Police Line, Do not Cross tape plastered across it.

“…I’ve been trying to get him to change it forever, but he just keeps saying that if Jenny gets her Disney Princess poster on her door he can have caution tape, I even tore it down once but he just put it back up the next day.” She pounded on the door. “Come downstairs, you’ve got some homework to do and I just finished some cookies for y’all.”

“I’ll do it after dinner,” he yelled back.

“Oh, no, you ain’t!” she screamed back. I half expected her to storm into the room and pull him out by the ear. I wasn’t sure if people actually did that, but if anyone would, it would be this woman. “You’ve got a group project in you’re history class and this nice girl drove all the way here and you are going to help her with this project. You are not leaving her to do all the work, you were raised better than that.”

He was quiet for a second, then said, in a tone of defeat, “Trezmé ’s here?”

“She’s standing right outside the door here. Now you get your little blessed heart out here and help her or--”

“I’m coming,” he said loudly. As the door opened, I thought I heard him mutter, “Great, now she knows where I live,” but I wasn’t sure.

Mrs. Palmerson turned around and headed back down the stairs. I followed, Brian trailing loudly behind. As we reached the kitchen, she added, “Now ya’ll just sit down, I’ll get you something to eat.”

Brian and I sat down at the kitchen table where I’d set my books earlier. He grabbed a book and opened it.

“You just help yourselves to these, they’re my grandma’s recipe, bless her soul, she really didn‘t want to let me anywhere near it but I just…” Brian’s mom set a mountain of cookies in the center of the table, and he grabbed one greedily. “…and she always said, ‘that recipe is going with me to my grave,’ but I managed to get it out of her, I’m going to go hang the wash up, I’ll be back in a bit, I feel like all that I ever do here is laundry all the time…”

“And she’s back in rambling Southerner mode again,” Brian said as she left. He set the book down. “Let’s get this over with. Do you get the feeling that we could write anything and we’d still pass if it was colorful enough?”

“Mmhmm,” I said through a mouthful of pecan cream cookie, grabbing my book as well. “I’ll take notes on the first half of the chapter, you get the last?” I asked, then added, “Oh, I forgot, the most colorful thing I have is this red pen.”

“Yeah,” he said, “and I don’t…oh, wait!” He walked over to the stairs. “Jenny?” he called. A girl no more than six years old came tumbling down the stairs.

“What?” she asked, then, spotting me at the table, added, “ooh, is that your girlfriend?”

He rolled his eyes. “I need to borrow your crayons,” he told her.

“Are you going to draw a heart to tell her you love her?” she asked, very excited.

She ran upstairs and returned a second later with a box of crayons. “Here you go. Do you love her yet?”

Brusquely, Brian grabbed the crayons. Jenny grabbed a cookie and headed upstairs.

“Sorry about her,” he said apologetically. “She’s a hopeless romantic.”

Despite my careful planning, I ended up making the whole poster again. Brian seemed convinced that we didn’t need any factual content on our poster and refused to help look up facts. Part of me thought that he was right, but I didn’t want to risk my grade. He couldn’t write the facts on the poster because “a girl’s handwriting looks better,” and he even refused to put colored boxes around the information.

“I have no artistic talent,” he said.

“And this takes no artistic talent,’ I pointed out, grabbing another crayon.

We didn’t say much while we worked. In fact, I was almost done when he started talking.

“So, have you seen the Canadian vampire at school?”

I had no idea what he was talking about it, or if he was joking or not. He spoke very seriously, but joking or not I wasn’t in the mood for cryptic conversations.

“Canadian vampire?” I asked. “is that like Canadian bacon? Because Canadian bacon is really sliced ham. It’s not fancy bacon at all.”

“Are you avoiding my question because you have something to hide?” he accused. “Maybe you’re a vampire too, and this is nothing more but a clever plot to be invited inside so you could come back tonight and slaughter us all.”

“No,” I said slowly, not sure if I should be offended or concerned for his mental health. “I didn’t answer your question because I have no idea what you’re talking about. I don’t like cryptic conversations.”

“You’re joking, right?” I asked. He was silent. “You’re actually serious. Right. Well,” I thought for a moment before deciding that I should defend her. “First of all, she’s from Europe. Canada isn’t in Europe.”

“I know that. Where in Europe is she from?”

I didn’t know. I didn’t even know if she was European. “Secondly,” I continued. “She’s not a vampire.”

“How do you know?” he demanded.

“I’ve done the research. How to recognize them, how to destroy them,”

“You’re trying to kill her?” I squeaked, horrified.

“How’d it go?” Mom was already home when I got back.

“Making the poster? Terrible. First he wouldn’t work, then he started accusing people of being vampires.”

I looked in the fridge for something to eat, but she interrupted me again.

“MeSahGoh is going to deliver my order any minute now.” MeSahGoh was the worst Chinese food you could buy in Roseland, but it was also the cheapest and the only one that delivered, free with a purchase of twenty dollars or more.

The doorbell rang and Mom grabbed her wallet, coming back with cardboard containers of noodles, sweet-and-sour pork, and egg rolls. I pulled apart a pair of chopsticks and started.

As I ate, I looked around the kitchen for something to throw four stories off a roof for Physics tomorrow, hopefully something that would smash into a million pieces when it hit the ground. Finding nothing suitable, I decided that I would just stop by Grocery Outlet tomorrow and pick up an under-ripe Chilean watermelon. That would splat nicely.

When you throw a zucchini off a four-story roof, it doesn’t splat. It splatters. Before the second group had had a chance to throw their items from the gym, everyone was covered in bits of vegetables. I was in the fourth round of students.

“All right, Lizzie, Sarah, Mike, Meenah, you’re up,” Mrs. Edwards called down to us.

Being on the roof was amazing. I had never had problems with heights, unlike Sarah, who took one look over the edge and ran back down. Mike looked a little green as well. Meenah didn’t even look excited; her face was expressionless as ever.

I stepped up first and threw the watermelon as far as I could. A few students ran as it headed towards them, but it fell short, landing in the middle of the food and metal strewn courtyard below.

“Pathetic,” Mike said jokingly, holding the toaster he’d brought. "Watch this."

“Electronic!” Mrs. Edwards yelled to the students below. “Everyone back!”

“Further back!” Mike yelled, then the toaster was flying. It soared farther than anything yet, shattering dramatically as it hit the ground.

“Beat that, new girl,” he shot at Meenah, who was holding a huge eggplant that was nearly twice the size that my watermelon had been. She smiled and lightly tossed it over the edge.

The ground below stood in shocked silence for a few moments, then, slowly increasing in volume until it was a roar, the cheering began. Meenah smiled over the edge, looking a little embarrassed, then turned back towards us. Before her face regained its emotionless mask, I caught a flicker of another emotion on her face, passing by so quickly that I couldn’t be sure that I’d seen it.

She had no reason to be annoyed, did she?