“I don’t care if she did it for real or not,” croaked Mr. Germander. “Detention, for the rest of the month.”

  I spun around to face him, my eyes gone wide. I was struggling not to cry, but not because I was sad. I was just so furious that the emotion had to get out of me somehow, and that somehow just happened to be in the big fat tears building up in the corner of my vision.

  “What?” I demanded. “But I didn’t do anything! They’re the ones who were being awful!”

  “Threats of violence will not be tolerated at this academy. I don’t know how things were done where you came from, Ms. Hoggwaller, but I fully expect you to start following the rules, standards, and expectations we have set in place here.”

  Trevor countered, “May and Alice started it.”

  “You little creep,” hissed Alice.

  Mr. Germander said bluntly, “Frankly, I could give a cat’s whisker about who started it. A verbal argument should never be solved with a physical reaction. You’re all almost adults. It’s about time that you started learning that. Ms. Hoggwaller, if you aren’t at detention this Friday, I will see to it that you’re suspended.”

  The bus doors hissed open.

  He pointed at them. “Load up.”

  Alice rolled her eyes but turned and started up the bus steps. May followed suit. That must have been enough of an assurance to Mr. Germander that we weren’t going to get into some sort of a physical brawl, because the man nodded once and then turned and shuffled away, back toward the school.

  I was mortified.

  I had never been yelled at by a teacher like that before.

  Not once.

  Detention? Suspended? Those were things that had never been thrown out at me before. And in front of Trevor, too!

  Embarrassment crawled over my skin like a horde of spiders. It wasn’t just in front of Trevor. It was in front of everyone standing around waiting to load up onto the bus and head home for the day. A bunch of people had started giggling as they headed up the steps and into the bus.

  The driver, Mr. Playton, was watching me like a hawk. I could practically see him daring me to continue that fight on his bus.

  “Hey, Quinn.” Trevor reached out to touch my shoulder but then thought better of it. “Don’t get so upset about it. I know those bitches egged you on. I probably would have lost my temper with them too.”

  “Just leave me alone,” I spat out, the words thick with choked-back tears. I blinked rapidly to try and stop them from falling, but it wasn’t working. Hot droplets flowed down my cheeks.

  “Quinn,” he repeated, reaching out again, palm up, like he wanted me to take his hand.

  I jerked backward, nearly tripping over the curb, but I caught myself on the yellow-painted side of the bus at the last second. The metal was hot from baking beneath the sun.

  “I said leave me alone!” Then I turned and threw myself into the entrance of the bus, almost falling again as I climbed inside.

  Mr. Playton commanded, “Sit down.”

  “I’m going to,” I snapped at him, storming all the way to the back of the bus. The bench seat was already filled up, but I slid into one of the left-side rows of seats right in front of it. I squashed myself all the way up against the wall, and slammed my backpack onto the other seat cushion, just daring someone to sit down next to me.

  No one did.

  And if I cried all the way home… at least no one was there to see it.

  Pushing to the Limit

  The week passed in a haze of hot anger, and cold sorrow, short tempers, and snappy words. I had to do my detention on Friday, just like Mr. Germander said. The room was big and kind of empty. There was a student wearing all black in the corner of the room—Isla Vanders—and another one that looked like she was getting ready to go to a club somewhere, complete with fuzzy pink coat—Jessica Morrow.

  Mr. Germander announced, “This is not a place for fun. This is a place for sitting and contemplating the actions that landed you in detention. I don’t want to hear anyone speaking until the end of class. If you need to use the restroom, you may raise your hand and I will escort you there and back.”

  And then it was silence.

  Just total silence.

  So much silence.

  We just had to stare at him, or at the desk. Someone had scratched a couple of hearts into the surface of the desk. I picked at them with the tip of my nail. I had been feeling extra angry and emotional lately, and this wasn’t helping.

  It was this turmoil of emotions that built up in the back of my chest. I just didn’t feel like myself at all. Just like in my dream. Everything made me so mad! I was having a hard time controlling myself; I mean, news flash! I had been put into detention for the first time, ever. I had never almost punched someone before, either.

  But every time I saw May and Alice in the hallway, I just wanted to bring my fist down onto their faces. I had never broken someone’s nose before. Well, that was only sort of true. When I tripped Dream Mr. Tart, his nose had broken.

  That just didn’t count, though.

  For one, it was in my dream. For another, he had only busted it because he fell. I might have tripped him, but that didn’t mean that I had broken his nose. I bet it would crunch. Like popping bubble wrap or one of those huge bubble bags that people used when they were shipping big glass items.

  Pop!

  I chewed on my lower lip. I scratched at the hearts that were already on the surface of the desk. Mr. Germander was staring straight at me. I stared right back at him, unwavering. It was a very, very long detention.

  When the bell finally rang, Isla and Jessica practically flew out of the room. I stood up and made to leave, but before I did, Mr. Germander said, “A moment, Miss. Hoggwaller.”

  “What?” I stopped in the doorway.

  He said calmly, “I understand that you’re going through a hard time right now, but you need to find another outlet for your anger. Violence isn’t the answer.”

  “Not everything I do is because my dad is dead,” I snapped at him, furious with that accusation. “I’m so tired of every teacher that talks to me feeling like they need to bring it up! I already know he’s dead.”

  “Mind your volume,” he said tartly.

  “Stop talking about my dad,” I fired back, and then flew out of the detention room, too. He didn’t call after me. That was good. I probably wouldn’t have gone back. I ran down the hallway and out into the late-afternoon sunlight.

  The other two girls I’d had been in detention with were long gone. The bus was long gone. That meant even though it was hot as Mars out here, I had to walk home. Great.

  The only upside to the walk was that I had plenty of time to try and cool off, figuratively, before I had to deal with my grandparents. I was trying super hard not to take these weird issues out on them.

  The problem was, I didn’t know how else to handle them. I couldn’t just kill people here to get out emotions. And I couldn’t do it in my art, either, just in case it was all real. But today was so hard, and I was so upset… By the time I made it home and up into my bedroom, I’d managed to convince myself none of my dream was real.

  The computer and tablet were set up at my desk, and I started to do exactly what Mr. Tart and Mr. Carp had wanted; add more killings to my story.

  The first person I put into it was Mr. Germander. I needed to make sure that it fit with the old lady moving in. He was a big guy, so I decided I would have him be the one moving boxes in.

  Ghost Girl was still trying to make friends for herself at that point, so she saw him and she went, That guy has gotta go. And what better way to kill someone as big as Mr. Germander than by dropping a chandelier on him?

  All Ghost Girl had to do was fly up to the ceiling and unhook the chain holding it up. And then down it went, crashing down on him. Splat! He flattened out like a strawberry-filled pancake, blood and goop and gore all over the floor.

  Dee Dee liked gore. Mr. Tart—he wanted me to push it. So push it I did.

  The cops came. It was an accident, of course. Old Lady had just moved in, she couldn’t have been expected to have everything up to code in such an old house! They let her off with a warning; the main cop, he looked just like Mr. Carp. I wanted him in the story. He wanted there to be more death? I would give it to him.

  Isla and Jessica were fresh on my mind, so they were kids that she paid to come and clean the front lawn up. I had Old Lady watch them through the kitchen window; the outside world was visible, but no one had gone into it yet. My pen flew across the tablet, almost frantically.

  The moment Old Lady turned away, Ghost Girl struck!

  One of them, straight into a beehive. Buzz! Buzz! The bees swarmed her! Isla flailed her arms and sent Jessica falling backward—right into the road. A truck hit her. Splat!

  This time, I had Old Lady breach the threshold. The front yard was worn and sunburned, with curled grass and a big old oak tree. A rope swing hung from the branches of the tree. It looked like something that someone like Molly would have fun on.

  A knock on my door broke me from my thoughts. I was gripping the pen so tightly it made my knuckles throb and ache. I breathed out, hard, and forced myself to shake out my hand.

  Then I shifted a little bit and went to answer the door.

  Grandma frowned. “I’ve been calling for you, Quinn. Dinner is ready.”

  “Oh,” I looked over my shoulder at the work, fully planning on telling her that I couldn’t come out because I just had so much to do… But then my stomach growled. “Sorry. I just… Was super focused and didn’t hear you.”

  “One day, you’ll have to show me what you’re working on in here,” Grandma said before she turned and tottered down the hallway, toward the stairs.

  I followed her. “It’s just a school project. It’s boring.”

  “It might be, but still.” She stopped and stood still for a moment. “I would love to see it.”

  Gramps was already sitting there at the table. “Hey, champ! Weekend’s here. I thought you and I could go into town tomorrow and pick up a few things for your room. It’s about time we slapped a coat of paint on those old walls, isn’t it, Annie?”

  “I think that paint would do them good,” Grandma said agreeably.

  “I don’t know,” I told them, taking my seat at the little crowded end of the table. “I have a lot to do for school—homework and stuff.”

  Gramps’ expression fell. “Oh, alright, champ. That’s fine. We’ll do it whenever you get the chance—you just let me know.”

  He and Grandma traded a worried look that I pretended not to see. I shoveled the food into my mouth—soggy spaghetti noodles, metallic-tasting canned sauce, and chewy, overcooked bits of meat that were possibly ground pork.

  Honestly? It kind of tasted like fish.

  Fish spaghetti.

  Yeah, not high on my list of food I wanted to chow down on. But I shoveled it into my mouth all the same, so that my stomach didn’t grumble, drank my tall glass of iced milk—equally gross—and then excused myself back upstairs.

  I knew it was kind of rude, but it didn’t matter. I had been consumed with the urge to try to put more people down on the page; a montage of sorts, so that all the stars that Mr. Carp had added to Ghost Girl’s arms had a meaning.

  The people in my school—they became my characters. They became the people who dropped off groceries, who dropped off the pizza that Old Lady ordered. The maid she hired to clean and just ‘never’ came back, and the eccentric neighbor that kept coming by to sell bags of makeup products that were expired by several years.

  And I killed them, each one, in as many wild and weird and awful ways as I could think of. Friday night bled into Saturday morning, and Saturday evening bled into Sunday at lunch. I had been obsessed with it, just like the night where I fell asleep printing off beautiful colored papers of the original deaths.

  At lunch, which was not optional, Grandma asked, “What about after school one day?”

  “What about it?” I blinked at her.

  “Getting the paint,” said Gramps. “I could pick you up after school, and we could go into town then.”

  That sounded terrible, actually. Gramps drove an old Frankenstein monster of a truck. I wasn’t sure why he still had his license, either. He alternated between driving like he thought he was piloting an aerobatic stunt plane and thinking he was piloting a snail—with a mach total speed of fifteen glorious miles per hour.

  But I also couldn’t see a way out of it so, reluctantly, I agreed. “Okay. Maybe Thursday? I have a test that day. We could go as a, uh, celebration for it.”

  Gramps bobbled his head and blinked his watery eyes. “That sounds perfect, Quinn, oh, it sounds perfect. I’ll give Nelson a ring tonight, and see when he’s open.”

  “Who’s Nelson?”

  Grandma answered, “An old friend of your grandfather’s.”

  “He runs the hardware store,” Gramps explained.

  Grandma clucked her tongue and corrected, “His son runs it now. Wilson. Remember, Eddie?”

  “Bah,” said Gramps. “Nelson still makes all the final calls. It’s just for show, letting Wilson walk around and tell people he’s the manager. You know he’s got a drinking problem?”

  “No gossip at the dinner table,” chided Grandma. “It’s bad manners. You don’t want them to rub off on Quinn, now do you?”

  “A good girl like her?” Gramps laughed. “She could never pick up anything from someone like me!”

  A flush ran down the back of my neck. I wasn’t nearly as good of a grandkid as they thought… But it was just on paper, right? It wasn’t like I was actually going around killing people.

  It was fine.

  I just… Had to stop thinking so much about it.

  Art was supposed to challenge standards. My teachers wanted me to push the limit with this project. Mr. Tart had said so himself, and so did Mr. Carp!

  I hadn’t done anything wrong.

  And if I thought that often enough… I could almost make myself believe it.

  No Ice Cream

  Friday came around, just like it did every week, and I found myself slinking to the ugly rust bucket of a truck that my Gramps insisted on maintaining. He leaned across the center console and flung open the door, calling out, loudly, “There you are, champ! I was wondering when you were going to get here!”

  “Sorry,” I muttered, walking quicker. My ears turned red with embarrassment. All I could do was hope that no one was paying me much attention, and that we could get out of here quickly.

  I climbed into the truck and closed the door of it behind me, maybe a little bit harder than I needed to; the whole cab shuddered.

  Gramps said happily, “I thought we could get ice cream first.”

  I perked up a bit. “Ice cream?”

  I hadn’t gotten my hands on anything like that since I moved. Back home, there was this super cute ice cream shop along the coast that sold a bunch of wild flavors. They had milk-and-cereal-flavored ice cream, lavender with honey, and even Earl Gray tea! In the summer, they sold bacon-and-maple swirl, and in the winter, they sold cranberry-bread-crisp flavor. And then one season they tried a wasabi-ginger ice cream, which I loved, but I guess no one else did because it only lasted a month and never came back on the menu.

  It was pretty obvious that this little nowhere town wasn’t going to have anything cool like that, but considering how hot it was, I would have settled for vanilla or chocolate or even strawberry. Neapolitan, maybe!

  “Yessiree,” said Gramps. “Since you had that big test today. Let’s whip out that card and take a gander at the pretty A. They still write it in blue ink? They used to use blue ink for the A’s when I was your age.

  I froze.

  Gramps kept talking, not noticing the tension in the car, “And then they did red for the failing grades, and black for everything in between.” The truck pulled out of the pickup lane and headed toward the main road. “When your father was in school, sometimes they did stickers. Did you get any stickers, champ?”

  My gaze dropped to my lap. “I, uh… I didn’t get an A.”

  “Oh,” said Gramps. He blinked his watery eyes, squinted them, and then flipped down the visor. It did absolutely squat to block out the sun. “Well now, that’s just fine, that’s just fine. Nothing wrong with a black mark. Bee’s keep the flowers alive and well!”

  I didn’t say anything.

  Gramps was silent for a moment, then suggested, “Seas have fish in them! You know how much I love fish? Ah, don’t tell your Grandma that. Annie can’t stand it. She’s allergic to shellfish, you know, and says if it doesn’t have a shell, it just tastes like the sea, and that’s all salt. And you know what she thinks about salt.”

  “It’s bad for your heart,” I muttered, staring down at the floor. I had never wanted to jump out of a moving car before, but as it turned out—the idea was sort of tempting to me.

  “Bad for your heart,” agreed Gramps. “Maybe we just get a single scoop, hmm? Call it encouragement ice cream. Say, what class was this for, champ? You know, I used to be a bit of an ace when it came to math. I know that school of yours is a fancy sort, but they still have math, don’t they?”

  “Yeah, they have math.” For a few long seconds, I considered lying to him and pretending that I had gotten a C. But then he looked over at me with those watery eyes of his, and I realized that it would be like lying to a happy dog about whether or not they were getting dinner.

  “Good, good. You know, people don’t think they’re ever going to use it but there are numbers everywhere, champ. Always a problem that needs to be figured out and at least half of those problems are number problems,” he prattled on as his hands gripped the wheel. “And the other half of them are word problems.”

  “It was for history,” I said. “Art history.” It was Mrs. Harringbone. I definitely didn’t regret drowning her in the wine when she handed me that paper. “And it wasn’t a C.”

  Gramps stopped guessing. He just waited. He was driving so slow that it had to be on purpose. Cars were swinging out into the other lane so they could pass us. There was a furry mouse-sized lump in my throat. I could feel the tail tickling at my heart, making it clench up.