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what?”
    “Of course you can’t hear it.” Her little face pinched with bitterness. “You’ve got those precious earplugs. At least let me borrow
one
. Please?” She held out her hands and showed me the blood staining her doll-like palms, blood that had come from her ears.
    Her poor ears.
    I removed my right earplug and placed it on the book cover, curious whether the cover girl could reach outside the confines of her two-dimensional world to grab it.
    comecomecomecomecomecomecomecomecomecomecome
    A bolt of lightning sizzled, and for a second, the windows were full of color. Marvelous color. The voices—!
    “Oh no, you don’t.” Carmin hauled me back into my chair by my dress straps. He couldn’t get enough of my dress straps. I reached back and smacked him.
    “What’s the problem back there?” Ms. Harrison called.
    “She took out her earplugs.” Carmin withstood my frenzied attack, snatched the earplug from my desk, and shoved it back in my ear.
    My struggles ceased immediately, and I stared into Carmin’s slap-reddened face. Why had I been fighting him?
    “Hanna.”
    I turned to see Ms. Harrison staring at me from the front of the room. “I only removed one,” I explained, “and only because she asked me. …”
    But the cover girl was gone. The book on my desk
was
a geometry book with a plain blue cover. Page thirty-two was all about coordinates—nary a multiple-choice question to be seen.
    “Don’t remove either of those earplugs,” Ms. Harrison said. “Not inside this school.”
    If I had ever been more confused in my life, I couldn’t remember it. “But—in the window—weren’t there—?”
    “Ignore the things in the window.”
    “Things?”
    “Things, Hanna,” said Ms. Harrison gravely. “
Hungry
things.”

Chapter Six
    I had been prepared to write off the incident in geometry as a manic episode. Even though I’d never blanked out and gone on a rampage before, the rest of it—the talking book cover, the voices in the windows—was business as usual. I was always hallucinating. Even taking my pills religiously didn’t prevent occasional … weirdnesses.
    Except not all of it had been hallucinatory. Ms. Harrison had acknowledged that something was going on with the windows.
Hungry things
. she’d said.
    But I didn’t have time to ponder cryptic remarks. Half the day was gone and I still hadn’t made any friends. I didn’t know what I was doing wrong. I’d never had to make aneffort; people had always come to
me
. Maybe people were shyer in small towns, and I needed to be more aggressive.
    I spotted Wyatt immediately through the swarming lunch crowd, his green shirt blazing amid the sea of darkly attired kids even more flagrantly than my purple dress. About a million other kids were squooshed in around him, including Carmin from geometry. I squeezed in as close as I could.
    “Yeah, we went into the dark park,” Wyatt was saying as he demolished what looked like Salisbury steak, “but nothing happened. The Mortmaine just needed help digging a tunnel. I’ll probably have to go back before school lets out, though. There’re these creatures living underground, and—”
    Wyatt stopped, having noticed that his friends were no longer paying attention to him.
    They were staring at me, the intruder.
    I smiled at Wyatt. He’d been checking me out in the administration office—he still was—so I figured he could be my ticket in. “Do you mind if I sit here?”
    “Sit where?” asked Carmin, who sat across from Wyatt, staring at me over the rims of his blue glasses. “You see any other chairs?”
    “I can find one.”
    “Don’t bother,” said Wyatt, turning away from me. “There’s no space, unless you aim to sit in my lap.”
    Very non-high-minded response. Maybe I was wrong about him. Maybe he only
looked
high-minded.
    I gave Wyatt my sweetest smile. “Thank you.” I sat in his lap.
    “You and transies, man,” said Carmin, chuckling. “It never ends.”
    “What