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words.
    Lillian watches the frames go by, leaning over Kelly’s shoulder. “Nasty,” she says, wrinkling her nose and gesturing for me to come look.
    The shot is a close-up of a bruised mouth—an empty, bloody gap where two teeth used to be—and I flinch, screwing up my face, but we’re both laughing a little.
    Kelly spins in her chair and shoos me away, but not with any real seriousness. She runs off prints of scowling tattooed drug dealers and drunk, disorderly frat boys standing against a dirty wall outside one of the college bars.
    I package the pictures carefully, making sure to touch only the edges, while Lillian studies them over my shoulder. She reaches to point things out sometimes, and it takes all my concentration not to bat her hand away, even though the sensible part of me knows there’s no possible way she can do something as human as leaving fingerprints.

CHARM
    CHAPTER THREE
    M usic camp gets out at 2:00, and I make sure to be there before the teacher dismisses the class.
    The day is blindingly hot. By the time I walk the three blocks to Harris Johnson, I’m sweating and my dress is sticking limply to my back and my legs like it’s starting to wilt.
    I’m already waiting next to the bike racks by the time the girls get outside. Pinky comes out first with her songbook and her saxophone, looking annoyed.
    “Where’s Ariel?”
    “She had to stay. Mr. Tyler wanted to tell her all about her attitude.”
    The obvious thing is to ask what’s wrong with Ariel’s attitude. But I don’t. Knowing would mean having to decide how bad it is and whether or not I need to tell on her. I figure I can wait. If Mr. Tyler calls our mom, I’ll know it’s serious.
    When Ariel finally pushes through the double doors, she’s already half incoherent, raging about how her music teacher is a total fascist.
    She comes straight at me, mid-sentence, and I nod along, unhooking her hair from the buckle on her clarinet case, trying to zip the pocket on her backpack so her sheet music doesn’t go everywhere.
    I duck around her to wrestle with the zipper, and when the doors swing open again, I almost run right into Finnegan Boone.
    He’s paying more attention than I am and steps back before we actually touch. I freeze with my hand on Ariel’s backpack and we stand there looking at each other. I can’t quite breathe. He is all shoulders.
    “Watch it,” he says, and his voice is low and husky.
    He’s wearing a plain wifebeater with nothing over it, which is against dress code, but it’s been so hot lately that the teachers must not care anymore. I don’t want to seem like I’m checking him out, but I can’t help it. His summer-school books are tucked carelessly under one arm. They’re all for classes I had two years ago.
    It’s been a while since I actually looked at him. In my head, I still remember him big and mean and sticky in elementary school. I remember him licking Lay’s potato chips and throwing them at me.
    The sun is crazy-hot and everything seems to come from far away. I can hear sirens and fire trucks out on Huxley Road, and a noisy bird in the ash tree above us.
    His hair is standing up in crazy tufts like Johnny Rotten, bleached so blond it’s almost white. The way the sun hits it makes the ends look translucent. When we were little, it used to be this dusty in-between color, not blond, but not really all that brown either. Then last semester near the end of March, for no apparent reason, he started bleaching it to within an inch of its life.
    I remember because it was just after the two-month anniversary of Lillian’s death—and the day I came very close to losing all my friends.
    * * *
    Lillian was the one who’d started it. She’d been after me for weeks, telling me to stop moping, get happy, add more color. She kept saying I needed to start acting more like Hannah and less like one of the tragic emo kids who ate lunch out on the steps, so I was trying. That day, I had on a choppy lace- up