Danny leaned his elbow on my shoulder. “We weren’t trying to squash your personal expression or anything. We just thought it might be a bad move to brand yourself too aggressively too early. It might, I don’t know, set the wrong tone.”
They both looked resolutely blank, like they were trying not to look too pleased with themselves. Drew was tossing the bottle of Wite-Out in the air and catching it again. They stood on either side of me and waited for my reaction.
I wanted to do something to show how relieved I was, how grateful, but all I said was, “Thanks.”
Danny punched me. “Don’t thank us. You’re the one who owes the school sixty bucks to get it repainted.”
If it hadn’t been obvious yesterday, Tate Stewart was the new point of interest. She stalked through the halls, past clusters of people who whispered behind their hands. Their glances weren’t the sideways glances of sympathy, but quick, furtive stares, full of curiosity.
They spent whole passing periods watching her and, at the same time, pretending not to. It didn’t seem to matter. She moved through the crowd like she was alone. Like the gossip and the stares couldn’t touch her. Her eyes were closed off, her expression was remote, but something about the set of her mouth made me feel sorry. She didn’t look sad, which made everything a hundred times sadder.
The thing about Tate was, she didn’t have any real interest in what people thought. She never tried to impress them or make them like her. Once, in seventh grade, she joined the boys’ baseball team, even though the baseball team sucked, just to prove that the athletics department couldn’t stop her.
As the morning went on, though, her mouth got thinner. There was a strange feeling coming off her, almost an electric charge. It hung in the air, like she was getting ready to explode, but things didn’t really hit the fan until English.
We were finishing the unit on Romanticism and The Scarlet Letter. Mrs. Brummel was tall and thin, with bleached hair and a lot of different sweaters. She got very excited about the kind of literature that no reasonable person would ever read for fun.
She stood at the front of the room and clapped because she was always clapping. “Okay, today we’re going to talk about guilt and how Pearl’s very existence condemns Hester more effectively than the A. This is most obvious in the fact that some of the villagers believe Pearl is the child of the devil.”
