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if not flexible, so I initiated Plan B. I let Brock help me up, had him walk me to class (deftly keeping him out of lap-dancing distance from Fuchsia, who was still steaming over my Jackson comment), and prepared myself for a confrontation. If this guy thought I was going to let him suck me into some kind of hallucination-induced social downfall, he was in for a rude awakening. Weird stuff of the Lissy James variety may not have been my strong point, but getting my way was.
    My nonexistent “I am…” poem came back to me. I was Lilah Covington. I was the most popular girl in the junior class. I was Brock’s girlfriend, and I was in control. I’d worked hard to be that person, and it was going to take more than a little vision trouble and a flirty best friend to change that. I looped my hand through Brock’s as we walked down the hallway. Touching a guy was like putting a label on him, and I wanted it to be perfectly clear to all people (real and imaginary) in the near vicinity that Brock was mine and that, as his haiku had so eloquently stated, I was Brock’s.
    As we walked, Mystery Boy followed us, never more than a couple of steps behind me. I wondered if he was looking at me, and for some reason, I suddenly felt self-conscious in a skirt that I knew had fit me perfectly that morning.
    Once I was safely in the classroom and had convinced Brock that he really didn’t want to maul me in front of a poster of Oliver Cromwell, I kissed him goodbye and closed the door firmly behind him.
    Alone with my imaginary stalker at last.
    “This how you get your kicks?” I asked Mystery Boy. “Watching other people make out?”
    Normally, I wasn’t so blatantly nasty, but there was something about this guy (other than the fact that I shouldn’t have been seeing him at all) that rubbed me the wrong way.
    “Retract your claws, Princess,” he said, sitting down on top of the teacher’s desk and smiling darkly at me through a mess of black hair. “I’m not here to bring down your court.”
    “Don’t call me Princess.” My words hung in the air, and I felt ridiculous. I had an invisible (to everyone else) stalker, and I was worried about the fact that he was giving me condescending nicknames? “If you’re not here for the jollies,” I said, trying to get a grip on the fact that the life I’d worked so hard to perfect had taken yet another turn for the strange and uninvited, “why are you here?”
    “Oh,” the boy said, shrugging as if that was a completely unimportant question. “I’m not.”
    “Allow me to demonstrate,” I retorted. “This is you”—I pointed my finger at his smirking lips—“and this is here.” My gesture broadened to include the entire room. “It would stand to reason that this would be you, here.”
    “Really?” the boy asked. “Because the last I checked, I wasn’t here, or at least, I wasn’t now.”
    “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    “That, Princess,” he said, “is for you to find out.”
    And with that, he disappeared, leaving me standing, furious, in the room by myself.
    Air crackling, fading to black and white: sharp contrasts, static, and three rings of color blazing in the air. Blue. Purple. Pink.
    I don’t know how long I stood there, absorbed in the colors of the air before a voice broke into my thoughts.
    “Lilah?”
    “Fuchsia,” I answered, automatically forcing back the tears that wanted to protect my eyes from the bright lights I’d seen microseconds before. If I let Fuchsia think she’d made me cry, I was as good as dead.
    Lilah Covington didn’t cry over spilt milk or attempted boyfriend steals. She got even. And when I got even, I did it without letting anyone know that I’d ever been bothered or hurt or worried at all. It’s a simple fact of human nature: if you don’t show your emotions, people assume you don’t have them, and that tends to convince them that they can’t hurt you and that you won’t think twice about hurting them. And,