Will Colven sat cross-legged on one of the benches outside the cafeteria, watching the students as they exited. He’d sat through two lunch periods already, and was prepared to wait through the beginning of the next one if necessary. After that, he’d have to leave and try another day: the dogs would be catching up to them soon.

He tried to look bored, as he scanned the faces of every dark-haired girl who passed him. One or two glanced his way, but most people didn’t even notice him. Will was good at not being noticed, though he rarely chose to exercise the gift. As the youngest of eight children, his energies had generally gone more toward attracting attention than deflecting it. It was handy, though, on a day like today.

As the lunch crowd thinned out, he began to worry that he’d somehow missed her. There had been two or three crowds so large he hadn’t gotten a good look at everybody—could she have been in one of those? His reason told him that nothing was less likely, and that his brain was only doing its natural tricks in response to a long, fruitless wait. The fact that she hadn’t shown up for the first or second lunch periods made it more likely, not less, that she would come for the third.

The hall was empty now, and Will stood up to get a change of scene. One wall was lined with yellow lockers; the other was mostly windows looking onto a paved courtyard, with a few round planters housing dwarfed trees, stunted apologies for Nature, looking sheepish and sullen amid the smooth tan concrete. As he was turning away from the window, a motion at the far end of the courtyard caught his eye. Around one of the planters a slight, dark-haired girl appeared, wearing simply a white T-shirt and blue jeans, conspicuously nondescript.

How could he ever have doubted that he’d recognize her? Even at this distance, she was unmistakable: the forward hunch of her shoulders, the thick black braid, her slow, soft walk, tentative, as though something delicate might suddenly appear beneath her foot. His stomach tightened as he watched her walking slowly in his direction, eyes on the ground. For a moment he was seized by a horrible sense of unreality: it could not be that he was really looking at her, that there was only a pane of glass between them, that in a moment she would look up and see him. He waited motionlessly for it, watching greedily as the olive blur of her face resolved into the thin, sharp features he knew. Then, abruptly, while she was still ten yards away or more, she stepped to the side, where a brown tin trash can stood, threw something in, and turned around again.

“Hey!” shouted Will involuntarily. Now she was walking away, headed toward a door on the far side of the courtyard. He banged on the window pane, but she didn’t seem to notice. He looked around desperately. There was no easy way to get from here to the other side of the courtyard; he’d already gotten himself seriously lost in these halls once today. He banged again, frantically. “Turn around!” he shouted futilely at the glass. Why wouldn’t she at least look to see who was hitting the glass? What was wrong with her?

“Hey, man, don’t break the window,” said a tall guy who had entered the hall without Will’s noticing. He strolled up and looked out. “Oh,” he said understandingly, seeing that Will was looking at a girl; then he got a second look. “Oh. Leave that one alone, man.”

His voice was portentous. “Why?” Will asked.

“That’s Gaby Rice. Do you know her?”

Will sized him up quickly. A good-natured know-it-all; figured everybody else was just like him, only not as good at it. The kind of person who was always ready to receive a new disciple.

“No,” he said. “I just thought she was cute.”

The other guy looked at Gaby appraisingly. “She could be, I guess,” he said dubiously. “But you don’t wanna go there. She’s a freak. I don’t mean like black nail polish, I mean really a freak. She creeps everybody out.”

“Why?” said Will curiously. “What does she do?”

The guy hesitated. “Most of the time, nothing. Never even looks at you most of the time, but when she does, you can see she’s not normal. Doesn’t talk to people, doesn’t have any friends. But if she’s upset, weird things happen. One time, these two guys were after her in the library—you know how it is, some guys’ll go for anything. I could’ve told them not to try it, but there they were, and they were making a big scene, wouldn’t leave her alone, until suddenly all the windows on that side exploded.”

Will maintained a steady and skeptical gaze. “Exploded?”

“For real. Out of nowhere. I’m telling you, stuff like that happens around her. You know, real Poltergeist kind of stuff.”

“How do you know it was her?”

“It’s obvious! Everybody knows it was.” Will gave a little shrug, irritating the tall guy with his skepticism. “Look, I’m just trying to do you a favor, bro.”

Will looked across the courtyard. Gaby had disappeared through a door on the far side; she could be anywhere now, and he didn’t have a lot of time. He grinned at the tall guy. “Yeah, thanks. But now I’m curious. Do you know where her locker is?”

Will had guessed correctly that his would-be advisor was the kind of person who can never answer ‘no’ to a question beginning with ‘Do you know.’ Ten minutes later they were standing beside a locker with a dented door. “Three one five, there it is,” said the tall guy, as if he had known it himself instead of having to ask three successive people. “But look, man, seriously. Stay away from her. You’re just asking for trouble.”

Will grinned again. “Maybe I like trouble.”

The tall guy shook his head. “Hey, it’s your nuts on the line.” He walked off with the air of someone getting away before the bomb exploded. Will guessed he would be hovering near this hall as long as he could, hoping to be cast in the role of knowledgeable eyewitness in whatever drama ensued. Too bad he’d be disappointed.

Will now turned his attention to the locker. He hoped it really was hers. He was almost out of time now; he’d have to leave a note, and hope he could make it back tomorrow. Hastily, he retrieved out a sheet of paper from his backpack, and began scribbling.

***

Gaby’s main problem was what to do about dinner. Her parents were away at a conference, and she was considering eating out at a restaurant with the money they’d left her. Ordinarily she hoarded every dollar, buying a bare minimum of groceries and adding the rest to her stash, but today the idea of going home to a silent house and a microwaved dinner was hard to bear. Last night she had dreamed of meeting Will again, and as always the dream had cast its sick misery over her entire day; every minute she was alone, the feeling came back to her. After many months, she had learned to wrap herself in isolation, to take some warmth from her surrender to the cold, but whenever that dream came she was shaken out of it sharply.

She had nearly changed her mind this morning and told her parents she wanted to come with them to the conference, but they had already booked their hotel room and she didn’t want to have to explain why she was troubling them to change their plans. They would have agreed in a moment. Her dad would have skipped most of the lectures in order to take her around town and help her distract herself, and she hated the thought of that. She hated to see him looking at her with those soft, searching eyes, hated to see her mother’s quick sidelong glances, both of them helplessly looking for clues to how she was coping, to what exactly it was she was coping with. She had felt the burden of their worry less and less over the last year, and she didn’t want to reawaken it now. So this morning she had kissed them goodbye with a bright face, promised she would call them tomorrow, and cheerfully bid them have a good time.

She reached her locker and twiddled the dial automatically. The lock didn’t pop open, and she pulled down on it, surprised. It stayed firmly closed. She frowned, cleared it, and dialed the combination again. Again it stayed locked. Wincing inwardly, she rehearsed the numbers to herself: 5 9 3 3. She had been using this combination so long that she rarely thought about what it meant, and to be reminded of it now, so soon after that dream, stung like a scrape against a patch of skin already raw.

But she was dialing it correctly, and the combination still didn’t work. It had been fine earlier that morning. Who would have changed her locker combination, and why? She supposed it was the sort of harassment that an unpopular student might get from time to time, but never her. She knew perfectly well what kinds of things the other students whispered about her; some of them were even true. They were all a little afraid of her, and she couldn’t really blame them. But who, then, could have changed her locker combination? And how? She would have noticed if someone had ever been watching her closely enough to see it; she was always keenly aware of people near her. Was it possible that someone had guessed it? The code was simple enough, but who was there in this entire city who could guess at the word she would use? W I L L—

The bell rang as Gaby’s hand froze on the dial. All around her the movement quickened, as lingering students hastily slammed locker doors and hurried to their classrooms. In a few minutes the hall was deserted, and Gaby stood there alone, fingers rigid on her combination dial, hardly breathing, hearing only the blood pounding through her head.

It could not be. Oh, it could not. It was the unlikeliest thing in the world… and coming today, it was too much, too cruel—too much to hope and too much to fear. There must be some other explanation. She tried frantically to think of one, but her mind was stuck, it kept slipping, like a tire in mud, on the one idea. The one impossible, incredible idea. She could not accept it, could not possibly entertain the possibility. The disappointment would be unbearable. The minutes slipped by as she stood there stupidly, unable to move.

Footsteps sounded down the hall, and she looked up like a startled doe. It was Mr. Douglas, one of her favorite teachers. He quickened his step as he came toward her.

“Gaby? Don’t you have class?”

She looked at him mutely, and he frowned. “Are you all right? Is something the matter?”

Gaby cleared her throat and shook her head. “I don’t feel well,” she said, and her voice shook enough to be quite convincing.

“You don’t look well,” he replied. “Do you want to go to the nurse?”

“No,” she said dumbly. Then her brain shook itself clear. “I’m going home. My dad’s coming to pick me up.”

“All right,” he said. “We’ll be starting The Odyssey this afternoon, and reading the first three books for Monday. I’m guessing you’ve read it before?”

Gaby nodded.

“Good, I won’t worry then. Hope you feel better.”

“Thanks,” she whispered, and watched him go down the hallway.

Once Mr. Douglas was out of sight, Gaby turned to the locker with slightly bolstered courage. She would go home now, whatever happened, and find a way to nurse her sickening disappointment. Curl into a ball, wrap up in a blanket, and listen to music so loud it would drown out all her thoughts. With this thought, and with only slightly shaking fingers, she cleared the combination and dialed the obvious number, the number he would choose: 7 1 2 7.

The lock popped open, and she stared at it in disbelief. Her heart racing again, and this time unable to suppress the wild hope rising in her, she pulled open the door. Taped to the inside was a single folded sheet of paper, and inside it, a series of scratches, incomprehensible to anyone else but familiar as Roman letters to her. She leaned weakly against the neighboring locker as she read it over and over: Same time tomorrow. Sorry I missed your birthday.