“Or, if you don’t care if I look down, I could read?” Izzy asked, raising his big, dark eyebrows. “I’m toward the end of a book.”

“Cool.”

I couldn’t hide my surprise when he pulled Artemis Fowl from his bag. I was glad to see he read more than comics.

“What?” he asked.

“Nothing . . . I’m just . . .” Surprised you read?

What a jerkish assumption, said the mean voice in my head. You think you’re the only kid who’s ever picked up a book before?

No, I snapped back. I don’t think that!

Yes you do!

Izzy looked at me curiously. “Did you want to finish your sent—”

Karly cleared her voice loudly, cutting him off. “Let’s get to work, okay?” she said from where she was sitting across from Jake. She gave me and Izzy a stern look.

“Sorry,” I said. “We’ll start now.”

Izzy shifted in his seat, then opened his book to a dog-eared page. I watched his eyes moving left and right as he read, and I felt less anxious with his focus on the book and not on me. I inhaled for four counts, then exhaled for six, like I’d learned from internet advice. It helped, so I did it three more times, as quietly as I could; I didn’t want Izzy to think I was some panting weirdo.

Ready to draw, I realized that I’d ripped the corner of my clean paper into strips, so I flipped the page, hoping Izzy hadn’t seen.

With my medium pencil, I drew the shape of Izzy’s face, wider at the top for his forehead, tapering to a sharp jawline at the bottom. With my lightest pencil, I drew guidelines, splitting the shape in uneven quarters, with more space on the left side than the right since his right side was turned away from me. Then I drew another line to split the bottom half into quarters again.

I started on Izzy’s kind of big, straight nose. Noses are challenging for a lot of people, but they’ve always been easy for me. At least until now.

I hadn’t really wanted to draw since Colette’s accident, but before that, art had been part of my life for as long as I remembered. I’d taken classes after school and had placed at art competitions in and outside of school. It wasn’t like taking three months off would have made me forget how to draw or something.

And yet suddenly, I couldn’t do it.

The first time I drew Izzy’s nose, I couldn’t believe what I was looking at.

One of those elephants trained to scribble on paper could do better, Mean Me jeered. An emoji has better detail than that!