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more, I physically felt it, as if it were being inflicted right at that moment.
    Finally, I found my voice. “Stop! Please, stop!” I cried at the top of my lungs, but the sound was barely more than a faraway squeal, an echo of sound.
    That tiny voice was all that was needed, apparently, because Link immediately stopped reading, and everyone in the classroom except us disappeared, fading into nothingness. The room shrank to a fraction of its true size, until Link was standing a few feet in front of me. He skirted the podium to kneel at my side. I wasn’t paralyzed anymore, was able to turn to him.
    Link swept his thumb over the corner of my lip, and when he pulled his hand back, it was streaked with crimson. I stuck my tongue out, pressing it to the crease where my top lip met my bottom. The taste was tangy, metallic. My phantom injury was bleeding. Tears welled in my eyes, and I couldn’t hold them back.
    “Shhh,” Link whispered as he wrapped gentle arms around me and pressed my face against his shoulder. “It’s okay, Callie. I’m here.”
    Yes, he was here. But was he reopening old wounds I’ d thought were healed?
    I woke in a cold sweat, hoping morning was near enough that I wouldn’t have to go back to sleep. But it was only 12:43. From that point on until morning, the clock became my arch nemesis.

 
    Chapter Six
    Somewhere around four a.m. I gave up on sleep. If I had to lay in that bed for one minute longer, with nothing but the sound of Corrine’s soft snores and my own hard thoughts for company, I was going to come undone. As if I wasn’t unravelling already.
    I slipped off the bed and crept down to the living room. I settled into the corner of our threadbare couch and reached for the TV remote. A few minutes of channel-surfing proved that the only thing on at this hour were infomercials and reruns of westerns from when my grandmother was a kid. I didn’t last more than three minutes watching Gunsmoke before I scrambled for the remote and switched over to the shopping network.
    I must have nodded off, into blissfully dreamless sleep, because one minute I was watching the Jewelry Extravaganza and the next, Corrine was standing over me, the first dawning rays of sunlight peeking through the blinds to play in the chestnut waves of hair hanging over her shoulders.
    “Hey Cal, I’m off to school. I left you some cinnamon toast and O.J. here.” She motioned toward the coffee table, then patted my shoulder affectionately. “Love you.” And she was gone, the front door clicking shut behind her.
    I sat up and rubbed stiff fingers over bleary eyes. The insides of my eyelids scratched like sandpaper. Sleep—what little I’d managed to get—had fogged my mind, and I was having trouble shaking off the vestiges of cloudy lethargy.
    The small bit of light seeping in the window was momentarily blocked out by Corrine’s shadow as she passed in front of the house on her way to the bus stop. I reached up, pried two of the vertical blinds apart with gentle fingers, and watched my sister jog to the corner where a handful of other teens loitered, waiting for the bus. I felt a twinge of something I didn’t want to define. Part of me really wanted to be out there with the other kids, acting like a normal teenager, pretending I wasn’t the walking catastrophe I’d become.
    Link was there, with Sylvie Moss. They were talking, laughing; she was touching his arm with her perfectly manicured French tips. And I was ticked. I shouldn’t be, but I was. I tried to tell myself that it was about Sylvie—perfect, pixie-petite and fashionably-blue-eyed, brunette Sylvie—and not about Link talking to another girl. I didn’t have a claim on him; he’d made that clear when he stood me up this weekend. Would he have shown up if I was a girly-girl like Sylvie? Would he show more interest in me if I wore short skirts and tall heels like her?
    I lowered my gaze to my tattered, used-to-be-black sweats. I bet Sylvie would never