What if the teacher called on her to read it out loud? She didn't want him to, of course, but what if he made her, and what if somebody else in class thought it was good and wanted to talk to her afterward? Maybe they'd ask her about the guy in the poem, and then she could tell them the mysterious and romantic story about him. Maybe she'd get a reputation for being kind of mysterious and romantic herself. Maybe the girl in the Victorian house would hear about her…
Mr. Humphries was calling for volunteers. Predictably, no hands were raised… until one went up in the back.
The teacher hesitated. Cassie turned to see that the raised hand had long red nails.
“Faye Chamberlain,” Mr. Humphries said at last.
He sat on the edge of his desk as the tall, striking girl came to stand beside him, but Cassie had the oddest feeling that he would have moved away if he could. An almost palpable air of tension had filled the room, and all eyes were on Faye.
She tossed her glorious mane of black hair back and shrugged, causing her off-the-shoulder top to slip down a little lower. Tilting her head back, she smiled slowly at the class and held up a piece of paper.
“This is my poem,” she said in her lazy, husky voice. “It's about fire.”
Shocked, Cassie looked down at the poem on her own desk. Then Faye's voice caught her attention.
I dream about fire– Tongues of flame licking me. My hair burns like a torch; My body burns for you.
Touch my skin and your fingers will stick-
You'll blacken like a cinder.
But you'll die smiling;
Then you'll be part of the fire too.
As the entire class watched, riveted, Faye produced a match and somehow-Cassie didn't quite see how-managed to light it. She touched it to the paper and the paper caught fire. Then, walking slowly, she moved to stand directly in front of Jeffrey Lovejoy, waving the burning paper gently before his eyes.
Howls, whistles, and desk banging from the audience. Many of them looked scared, but most of the guys looked excited, too. Some of the girls looked as if they wished they dared to do something like that.
Voices called out, “See, Jeffrey, that's what you get for being so cute!” “Go for it, man!” “Watch out, Jeff, Sally's gonna hear about this!”
Jeffrey just sat there, the back of his neck slowly flushing dull red.
As the paper was about to burn her fingers, Faye sashayed away from Jeffrey again and dropped it in the metal wastebasket by the teacher's desk. Mr. Humphries didn't flinch when something in the wastebasket flared up, and Cassie admired him for that.
“Thank you, Faye,” he said evenly. “Class, I think we can call what we've just seen an example of… concrete poetry. Tomorrow we'll study some more traditional methods. Class dismissed.”
Faye walked out the door. There was an instant's pause; then, as if everyone had been released by a spring, a sudden mass exodus. Jeffrey grabbed his notebook and was gone.
Cassie looked at her own poem. Fire. She and Faye had both written about the same thing…
Suddenly she tore the sheet out and, crumpling it into a ball, thrust it into her backpack. So much for her dreams of being romantic and mysterious. With a girl like that around, who was ever going to notice Cassie?
And yet they all seemed almost afraid of her, she thought. Even the teacher. Why didn't he give her a detention or something? Or is lighting fires in trash cans normal in New Salem?
And why did Jeffrey let her hit on him that way? And why did he care where I live, for God's sake?
In the hall, she nerved herself to stop someone and ask where room C310 was.
“It's on the third floor,” the girl said. “All the math classes are. Go up that stairway-“
“Yo! Look out! Heads up, everybody!” a shouting voice interrupted. Something was whizzing down the hall, scattering students right and left from its path. Two somethings. Dumbfounded, Cassie saw that it was two guys on roller blades, laughing and bellowing as they tore through the crowd. Cassie had a glimpse of disheveled shoulder-length blond hair and almond-shaped, slightly tilted blue-green eyes as one passed-and then she saw it all again as the second one streaked by. The boys were identical, except that one was wearing a Megadeth T-shirt and the other's said Motley Crue.
They were creating chaos as they went, knocking books out of people's arms and grabbing at girls' clothes. As they reached the end of the hallway, one of them caught a pretty redhead's miniskirt and deftly flipped it up to waist level. The girl shrieked and dropped her backpack to push it down.
“Why doesn't somebody do something?” Cassie blurted out. Was everybody in this school crazy? “Why doesn't somebody stop them-or report them-or something. …”
“Are you kidding? Those are the Henderson brothers,” the girl said, and she walked away, joining another girl. Cassie heard a fragment of a sentence float back: “… doesn't even know about the Club…” and both girls glanced back at her, then walked on.
What Club? That girl had said it as if it had capital letters. What did a club have to do with breaking school rules? What kind of place was this?
Another bell rang, and Cassie realized that she was now late for class. She slung her backpack over her shoulder and ran for the stairs.
By lunchtime, she still hadn't exchanged more than a “hi” or “hello” with anyone, no matter how she tried. And she hadn't seen the girl with the shining hair anywhere-not that that was really surprising, considering the many floors and corridors of this school. In her present state of insecurity, Cassie wouldn't have dared to approach the girl if she had seen her. A leaden, miserable feeling had settled in her stomach.