Mr. Davidson, clearly, was one of the few people in Greenville who a person could call a kindred spirit. By which I mean that he was clearly a fellow lover of marvelous things.

I truly hoped he also loved disco.

I skittered out of the classroom and into the hallway, which was flooded with students, a mix of Forevers and locals and probably a bunch of kids in between, jostling and shoving each other down the hall, trying to make it to the other side of the day.

I stepped forward and was swept into the flow, not really sure of anything beyond the one person I needed to find.

Berry.

Who didn’t want to talk to me. And by the time I got to homeroom, was nowhere to be found.

TWENTY-TWO

Between looking for Berry and getting full-on glares from Tanner, Sarah, and Gilly for the rest of the day, it was kind of a mess. It was like every second between talking to Mr. Davidson and going to rehearsal was like another pin being pushed into my brain.

Like here’s how upset I was:

I ordered pizza for lunch. Greenville disgusting pizza. And then I ate it by myself, sitting on the still-wet steps writing and deleting texts to Berry.

I mean, look, I take a person’s request for personal space very seriously. If someone says they need you to back off, you absolutely need to back off. But there was also the look Berry gave me right before she skated off into the rain. Like I was the biggest numb brain ever. Like, okay, not unlike the look I was sure I was giving Lucy the night before.

So I didn’t send the many texts I wrote to Berry.

Meanwhile, I couldn’t miss the look Gilly gave me from her seat at the lunch table with Sarah and Tanner and John. Like some fugitive message of concern lobbed at me from inside the fort or something.

I wasn’t up for it. Like. Everything was falling apart; I couldn’t afford to do one more thing that would take the ground out from under me. Maybe Lucy was right. Maybe all my choices were making everything worse. For everyone.

But then, of course, by that standard, after school I could have just gone home and not gone to rehearsal.

But Mr. Davidson seemed so sure. And a sliver of me just didn’t want to give up. So I went.

Rehearsals were after school in the chemistry lab, of all places. I guess because the band was in the music room. On the way there I ran into future magical fairy, Minnie, with new and improved wings on her back. And even more eyeliner. It was like her face was morphing into a fairy face more and more every day.

“You look awesome,” I cheered.

“Coat hangers!” She pointed at her back.

“They worked great.”