Stella Lennon - Invisible i

“I hate the idea of erasing it,” said Nia.

I knew exactly what she meant. Even if this wasn’t some kind of message from Amanda, it was from her. And it was so cool. I couldn’t wait to ask Amanda about it.

Wishing I could talk to Amanda made me think of something.

“Hey, have you guys heard from her? I tried texting her and calling, but she didn’t answer.”

Both Hal and Nia shook their heads. “Nothing,” said Nia, and the way she said it made me know they’d spent the day calling her, too.

“I’m going to take pictures.” Hal took out his phone even as he said it. “Will you guys help me?”

Neither of us answered him, we just grabbed our phones and began circling the car with them.

“Look!” Nia was sitting on the pavement by the driver’s side door, pointing at the very edge of the car’s side panel, just behind the tire.

Unlike the cougar, this animal was immediately recognizable to me. “The coyote,” said Hal. “Amanda’s totem,” announced Nia.

“Me? I’m the coyote. The trickster.” She made a fist with her hand, then opened it and showed me her empty palm. “Now you see me, now you don’t.”

Supposedly I was catching Amanda up on quadratic equations, but really she was teaching me about totems, specifically hers and mine. When I pointed out that totems and superstition and ancient belief systems were about as far from trigonometry as you could get, Amanda gestured at me with her quill pen.

“Au contraire,” she said. “Belief systems are belief systems.”

“Oh, come on!” I said. “Math isn’t a belief system, it’s an explanation for how things work.”

“Right,” said Amanda. “In other words, it’s a belief system.”

She was wearing something in her hair that made it look as if she’d grown a waist-length ponytail overnight, and her dress, with its puffy sleeves and lace edging, definitely looked like it was something out of another century. I’d meant to ask her about the outfit—the hair and the pen and the dress, but as usual, I’d gotten sidetracked. That was the thing about talking to Amanda: I could never figure out how we’d gotten on the subject we were discussing or how we’d gotten off the subject I’d thought we were on.

“Wait, are you telling me you don’t believe in math?” Over the course of the past two weeks, I’d discovered that Amanda was probably the best mathematician I knew outside of my mom. She was truly a genius with numbers. How could she question their fundamental truth?

“I believe in math,” she said. “It’s not like the tooth fairy or Santa. I believe it exists. I just don’t think it explains things any better than a lot of other belief systems just because it happens to be in fashion in this particular place at this particular moment in history.”

“So, what, are you talking about, like … God?” This was definitely the weirdest conversation I’d ever had with someone. I tried to imagine talking about God with Heidi or Traci or Kelli.

“Religion is another belief system,” she said. “It happens not to be mine.”

“So, like, what’s yours?” I didn’t mean to sound defensive, but sometimes talking to Amanda made me feel like I was always one crucial step behind her.

“What’s my belief system …” She leaned her head against the wall and closed her eyes for a minute. Then, without opening them, she said, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

I shook my head. “There may be a lot of things in heaven and earth, but the point is, you can still count them.”

She opened her eyes and locked them with mine. “That’s what I’m telling you, Callie,” she said. “You can’t.”

Nia’s camera clicked, and without really looking at what I was photographing I pointed my phone in the general direction of the coyote and took a picture. None of us said anything for a minute.

“Okay,” said Hal finally. “Amanda needs us to do something for her.”

A car pulling out of the circular driveway at the front of the school honked its horn, and when I looked up, I saw Heidi’s mom’s BMW SUV pulling away. Heidi was in the passenger seat and Traci was sitting in the back. She shouted out something that sounded like, Call me! as the car turned onto Ridgeway Drive.

It was so weird that I could be having these two interactions at once: one, the most mundane and transparent, the other unique and mysterious. It was like existing in two parallel universes simultaneously.

But I couldn’t ignore the gravitational pull of what Hal had just said. Turning back to him, I said, “But what does she want from us? And why couldn’t she just ask us for it?”

“He’s not a mind reader,” said Nia. Any softness that had been in her voice earlier was definitely gone.

Okay, I’d had just about enough of this. “Do you have some kind of problem with me or something?” I asked. “I mean, how, exactly, did I manage to offend you in the past five minutes?”

“Let’s see,” said Nia, tilting her head to the side and pressing her index finger to her temple in imitation of someone thinking hard. Then she straightened her head and sneered at me. “No, I’d have to say you have managed not to do anything offensive in the past five minutes.”

“Are you two going to keep—” Hal interrupted, but this time I didn’t care what he had to say.

“Nia, I have never, never done anything to you and now you’re acting like—”

“You’ve never done anything to me?” Nia stood up and took a step toward me, lowering her voice until she was practically hissing. “You’ve never done anything to me? Oh, that’s a good one, Callie. Um, do the words Keith Harmon mean anything to you?”

I took a step back, but it wasn’t just to get away from Nia’s scary voice. The words Keith Harmon did mean something to me.

“That wasn’t me.”

“Yeah, right,” said Nia, turning her back on me.

I reached out and grabbed for her arm. “Seriously, Nia, that wasn’t me.”

She snatched her arm away from me, like there was something revolting about my touch, and I was reminded of Traci’s aborted cootie shot earlier. “Well, like my mom says, ’Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas.’”

At first I didn’t realize what she was saying, and then I did. “My friends are not dogs!"

“Maybe not on the outside,” said Nia, and she went back to snapping pictures of the car.

My heart was pounding. If I was all about avoiding confrontations, Nia was all about having them. No wonder she didn’t have any friends.

But even as I thought that, I couldn’t help cringing a little at the memory of what Heidi had done to Nia in seventh grade.

Nia and Heidi weren’t just in the same math class that year, they also had English together. One day, maybe a week after she’d turned Heidi and Traci in for cheating, Nia left her English notebook behind in class. Heidi picked it up because, as she told us at lunch, she wanted to be a good citizen, and then she dropped it; it happened to flip open, and what did it happen to open to but a page with a few notes on direct objects and predicate adjectives and a small heart in the margin with the initials NR and KH inside of it.

The truth is, I really don’t know exactly what happened or whose idea it was because my dad and I went to Washington, D.C. that weekend to meet my mom at a NASA conference she’d spent the week attending. But apparently, Heidi or Traci or Kelli or maybe all three of them created keith.harmon95@yahoo.com or some address like that, and they emailed Nia and then Nia emailed “Keith” back and then “Keith” emailed Nia and so on. By Monday morning, Heidi had a whole string of emails to show me and the rest of the seventh grade, emails in which Nia admitted she’d always thought Keith was cute and agreed to go out with him sometime. At that point, Nia was just a little geeky with her goofy braids and glasses, but she wasn’t a leper. And even then Cisco Rivera was Cisco Rivera, so maybe if she’d never pissed Heidi off, she could have survived middle school as a neutral. But no.