“You do want him for him, and there’s nothing wrong with that. He is in. Love. With. You. Screw Katrina. Screw Tiana. Screw them both.” And then her eyes lit up. She looked down at the pile of SAT prep before her and said, “You know what? You’re right.”

“About what?”

She started gathering her stuff, shoving it into her pack. “About everything. Except Sean. Let’s go.”

I gathered my books and ran to catch up to her, charging, with purpose, down halls and up stairwells.

“Kira,” I panted. “Where are we going?”

“Art room,” she said, walking faster. “I am entering that goddamn art fair. I have really good pieces I made and left in class last year, they’re sitting on a shelf collecting dust, and they’re better than anything anyone else has made this year, which I know because you are not the only one who can obsess and spy, my friend, oh, no, you are not.” She stopped abruptly and turned back to me. “I should be in that class.”

“Yes,” I said, excitement replacing the misery of just moments before.

“Me,” she said. “Not them.”

“Yes!”

She put all her small but determined weight against the art room door and pushed it open.

Kind of anticlimactic. Enya playing from a laptop, wall of windows and natural light, a few kids milling around working on stuff. They looked up, nodded at Kira, and went back to painting and gluing feathers on a papier-mâché bird. “Look,” she said, beaming, and pointed.

On a high shelf were a couple of small canvases, a wire mobile, and a sculpture. “That’s my favorite,” she said. “You will especially love it.”

I could not wait to see.

“You guys, is Mr. Taxera here?” she asked the room. Everyone shook their heads. “I’m going to get a ladder.” She went searching in an adjacent supply room.

“Muiriel!” Elliot backed in through the classroom door carrying a box of a dozen seedling plants, camera strapped to him as always, and right behind him (Why, Elliot, why?) was Jerky McUpSpeak.

“Hey, Elliot.” I smiled, ignoring Tiana ignoring me. “Kira’s looking for a ladder, do you know—”

“Kira?” He dropped the box of baby plants on a shelf near the window. “Where?”

“Uh, back there?”

He ran to the supply-room door.

Tiana was pretending hard not to care about the whole exchange. But she saw me looking up and followed my gaze to the shelf.

“What do you need?” she asked.

“Not a thing,” I said brightly, and moved away to look out the windows and wait. I could hear Elliot and Kira chatting it up in the supply room, laughing about who knows what—private jokes about tempera paint and stippling. It made me happy to hear her happy.

Then a sickening crash.

“Oh my gosh,” Tiana said blandly. “Oh no.”