Freya had an audience all day, but no one applauded. Everyone knew about this morning, and they’d all taken Jane’s side. People liked Jane. Freya and Radomir were the weirdos. Now, she couldn’t open her mouth without feeling like she was flubbing a line.
Freya kept her eyes low during class, resisting the urge to lie her head on the desk and close her eyes. The teachers spoke, but the words came to her distant and garbled, like they were being shouted across a river. She should have gone home, but she didn’t have the energy to get on the bicycle. When she thought about taking a cab, the first thing that came to mind was Lassa’s closet and Randall’s gun. It was safer to coast through the rest of the day.
She went to the library during lunch to avoid everyone. She tried to read the paperback, but the words were just black lines on paper with no significance. She kept getting halfway through the same page and sliding off, something about the starship pilot outraging the ship’s chef by ordering a cheeseburger with an egg on it.
The thought made her queasy. The constant hunger that gnawed at Freya was gone. That had been the Starball. The idea of eating anything seemed impossible.
Freya needed to call Mr. Mathis and tell him she was too sick for practice but, at the end of every period, she found she couldn’t. He was one of those old people who pretended text messages didn’t exist. As the day went on, it was worse and worse to cancel on such short notice.
She knew how he would sound, bitter, and let down. She’d been trying so hard and practicing so much, and it was all for nothing. She could barely keep her head up. It seemed impossible she had been looking forward to seeing him tonight just hours ago.
Instead, she just took a long time packing up at the end of each class so no one had time to talk to her as she walked to the next. She saw uncertainty in the faces of her teachers. They wanted to say something, but each decided against it. They knew the answer. They had to all be so tired of dealing with her, the anchor dragging their classes down.
The text from Dan she’d been dreading came just before the last period of the day.
She typed in “no,” and then deleted it, typed it again, and deleted it again. Then she sent nothing. More than anything, she didn’t want to see Dan or be seen by him. The girl from last night was just an illusion. He would run away from the real Freya as quickly as he could. And he would be right to.
Freya didn’t reply to the text. She sat through Mr. Manzinni’s class, and his words drummed against her head like drops of rubbing alcohol. Each evaporated before the next could strike.
One thing finally sunk in, the words “This Will Be On The Test!” They were underlined three times, written under the words “Binomial Radical Expressions.” None of that made sense to Freya. How long had she been checked out of this class? She had loved math last year, that burst of understanding as she figured something out, the feeling of things locking in place, everything expanding. She was going to fail that test. It wasn’t like she could even study and figure out what she’d missed. Her Trigonometry textbook was in her locker with the Starball.
Freya saw everyone else taking their textbooks out and realized she was supposed to be working through problems. She was the only one without a book.
Mr. Manzinni’s eyes fell on her, and a disappointed look crossed his face. He bent down and disappeared behind his desk, then popped back up with a textbook wrapped in green construction paper. He walked over to Freya’s desk with his odd gait; he had a club foot. The audience watched.
“Please, remember your textbook next time, Miss Jokela,” Mr. Manzinni said quietly. Everyone in the class stared at her. The homemade dust jacket said “BOOK OF SHAME” in giant letters written in marker.
Normally, Mr. Manzinni made a big joke about it, and the student would ham up being embarrassed and remember their book next time. It was so much worse when he didn’t go through his routine.
“I’m sorry,” was all Freya could choke out, but Mr. Manzinni had already turned and started scraping back towards his desk.
She struggled to make sense of the lesson. She flipped backward the book with mounting desperation, stumbling through other lessons she had been just as zoned out for.
She was going to fail this class. Freya had never failed before. Her grades had been the only thing she could cling to and pretend she was okay. Now, that was gone, too, and all she could think about was the river. She didn’t have a climbing harness, but she could just put on her heaviest coat and fill the pockets with rocks.
The class ended, and she still hadn’t figured out anything. Her head was full of people she was supposed to call. She needed to call Mr. Mathis to cancel the lesson. She ought to call Dan and ask him for help. She was supposed to call Dr. Garbuglio and let him know she was having suicidal thoughts. Hovering over everything else was the certainty she should have called the authorities about the Starball long ago. But she couldn’t do any of that.
Everyone was getting up to leave. They all looked so enthusiastic to be anywhere else. Freya was the last one in the class, and she knew Mr. Manzinni stared at her, but she just couldn’t get up.
She shut the book and started to cry silently. A big fat teardrop hit the construction paper BOOK OF SHAME cover and soaked into it. She tried to pull it together, but she failed at that, too. She hid her face in her arms and sobbed against the desk.
“I can’t do it! I can’t!” she wept into the sleeve of her jacket. She kept her head down until she felt Mr. Manzinni’s hand on her shoulder.
“Hey, hey, hey,” Mr. Manzinni kept saying. “It’s okay.”
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The world was blurry with tears, her nose running down her face, and Mr. Manzinni scraped to his desk and brought her a wad of tissues.
“I’m sorry,” Freya said, trying to clean herself up. At least she was too numb to feel embarrassed. That would come later.
“I shouldn’t have given you that. I’m so sorry, Freya,” Mr. Manzinni said. He tore the cover off the BOOK OF SHAME, balled it up, and threw it at the trashcan across the room, missing completely. “I don’t know what I was thinking. Please, forgive me.”
“No, it’s all my fault. I can’t think. I can’t concentrate at all. I shouldn’t even be here. I’m sorry for messing up your class.”
“You’re not messing up anything. It is perfectly natural for you to have difficulty. I know you’re trying your best,” Mr. Manzinni said, and that made her start crying again. Her best was staring off into space and weeping in class. It took her a while to get herself together, and when Mr. Manzinni uncertainly asked her if she wanted him to call someone, she shook her head.
“I just want to go home,” she said, and he nodded.
“It will get better. I promise you,” Mr. Manzinni said.
She knew he was wrong.
* * *
Freya stared at Dan’s text again. With every minute that passed, it got weirder she hadn’t replied to him. She told herself if she could make it through the bike ride home, she would be strong enough to answer. Her only chance for surviving the guitar lesson was to try and run beforehand, though she had no idea where she would find the energy. She had to walk past her locker on her way to the bike rack, and she stopped outside, trying to see if she could feel anything.
There was only emptiness. Her insides were sobbed-out and raw. The wind blasted her as she opened the door to the bike racks, and she remembered her jacket and gloves were in the locker. Could she even make it back without them?
Her bicycle was still the only one on the rack, and both tires were flat. Someone had slashed them and cut up her seat.
Freya stared at the bicycle, stunned. She looked around, clenching her hands into fists.
Who had done it? Jane? Tammy? Malcolm? For the second time today, she felt anger, and it burned in her empty stomach, and she wanted to scream. But that was what whoever had done this wanted. They wanted her to react.
They wanted to scream at her in the hallway, they wanted to throw rocks at her through windows and give her black eyes and call her a snitch in front of everyone, just to see what she would do.
Freya pictured herself taking Randall’s gun down from its shelf. She could take them all with her. The idea burned in her so bitterly she nearly threw up. She looked to the cars idling in the pick-up lane. Was one of them Malcolm’s? Was the whole pack of them waiting around the corner, hoping to see her crying?
They were too late. She had nothing left. Did they think they could scare her like this? She was more of a threat to herself than all of them put together.
Her jacket was in her locker, and she was getting cold staring at her savaged bicycle. Freya took out her phone and took pictures of everything, getting a closer look at the damage. At least they hadn’t messed up the shifters.
New tires, new tubes, and a new seat, she could do it all herself. She would bring tools tomorrow and fix the bicycle right in front of everyone in the afternoon. Let them know she didn’t care at all. She glanced around for any clue of who’d done it, and then her eyes settled on the camera right over the door. Of course.
They were so stupid.
Freya shook her head and went back inside, walking past the auditorium where the choir people were warming up. It was just so much effort. She would have to go to the office, everyone would have another reason to call her a snitch. Mr. Evers would get mad, Officer Ed would be called in. It would be another Big Deal.
She had a low, whispering thought she could go home without telling anyone about this. She could call a cab. The bike could just stay there rusting on the rack all winter until they cut off the lock and threw it away. She wouldn’t be there to see it.
Freya slipped the phone out of her pocket; she had an excuse to call Mr. Mathis. But she was too upset to talk. The anger burned beneath every breath she took.
Randall’s gun.
She tried to push the thought away. Better to just disappear. But then she realized if they found her, everyone would think she’d killed herself over a stupid bicycle. Whoever had done this would think they’d won. She realized she had no way to get down to the rapids tonight without the bicycle. She would have to walk the whole way. Cars would see her walking along the road. It was hard to just disappear.
She found herself standing in front of her locker, #1642. Another low feeling whispered to her: If she was going to kill herself anyway, what the hell was she fighting against?
If the Starball wanted to use her, so what? At least it wanted her. She’d wished she were dead every single minute the Starball had been sealed in the locker. Freya held her padlock and twisted in the combination. She hesitated before she pulled it open.
What if the Starball was angry? What if it drove her insane? What if she was already insane and there had never been a Starball? What if this was all one long drawn-out delusion?
Anywhere but here. Anyone but herself.
Freya took off the lock and, the moment she opened the locker door, she felt it, like she’d stepped from darkness into the full light of the sun. How had she been oblivious to this for so long?
When her fingertips touched the glossy shell of the Starball, a tingling warmth radiated up her arm. The feeling intensified, and the padlock tumbled from her hand and clacked against the polished concrete floor.
Freya shuddered. She had to brace herself against the locker to keep from falling. Her eyes rolled upward, and she gasped for breath. She’d nearly come just from touching the orb. Whatever the Starball was, it no longer felt the need to be subtle.
“I don’t care. Do whatever you want,” she whispered. The rush found equilibrium as it settled over her, like a kind of pleasant hum in her bones. The peace she’d wanted so badly arrived, and the fog surrounding her pulled back. The world slid back into focus.
Why had she fought against this? Maybe the Starball was only trying to help her all along. She ran through the things an alien intelligence might want, building a stargate, infiltrating the government, acquiring plutonium…
There was no response, no sense the Starball wanted any of those things, or that it even understood her. There was only calm.
Freya tucked the Starball into her pocket where it belonged and decided she would deal with the bike tomorrow. She took out her phone to call a cab. She had another thought, flipped to her texts, and replied to Dan.
She thought about adding more but stopped herself. She reached into her pocket and brushed her fingertips against the Starball, telling herself she would never let it go again.