Fly Away (Firefly Lane 2)

But by the spring of my junior year, I started noticing the other kids, the ones I hadn’t seen before, the ones who lived on the wrong side of the tracks. One day they were invisible like me, and the next day they were everywhere, dressing like James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, greasing their hair back, rolling packs of cigarettes in their T-shirt sleeves. Black leather jackets moved in alongside the lettermen’s sweaters.

Hoods, we called them at first, and then greasers. It was supposed to be an insult, but they only laughed and lit their cigarettes and mocked their “betters. ” Almost overnight, rumors started swirling of fights and rumbles.

Then a “nice” boy was killed in a drag race and our community erupted with the kind of swirling, ugly anger I hadn’t imagined was there before.

It spoke to me, that anger. I didn’t realize how angry I’d been until it was in the air, infecting everyone. But as always, I held it inside. While I walked down the hallways—alone in a crowd, my books held close—I listened to the two groups taunting each other, the boys in black leather yelling out, Here, chicky-chicky, to the girls in pleated skirts, who bristled and walked away faster, their gazes hot with superiority.

On the Monday after the accident, I remember being in home ec, listening to Mrs. Peabody drone on about the importance of a stocked cupboard for a young housewife. She positively glowed when she told us how we could impress our drop-in guests with only Vienna sausages and a few other handy ingredients. She promised to show us how to make a white sauce, whatever that was.

I barely listened. I mean, who cared? But the “it” girls—the ones who spent their days draped in lettermen’s sweaters and tossing their heads like horses in the starting gate, they were perched on the edges of their seats, taking notes.

When the bell rang, I was the last to leave the classroom. It was always better that way. The popular kids rarely bothered to look behind them.

I made my way cautiously through the minefield that high school hallways could be for the unpopular.

It sounded like traffic buzzing around me, only it wasn’t cars making all that racket, it was the popular kids, talking all at once, making fun of everyone else.

I walked woodenly to my locker, hearing their voices raise. Not far away Judy Morgan stood by the water fountain, surrounded as she always was by her bouffant-haired pep-squad friends. A golden virgin pin decorated her Peter Pan collar.

“Hey, Hart, nice to see your hair is growing back in. ”

My cheeks flamed in embarrassment. I put my head down and fumbled with my lock.

I felt someone come up behind me. Suddenly the hallway went quiet. I turned.

He was tall and broad-shouldered, with enough curly black hair to set my mother’s teeth on edge. He’d slicked it back, but still it wouldn’t be controlled. His skin was dark—unacceptably so—and he had strong white teeth and a square jaw. He wore a white T-shirt and faded jeans. A black leather jacket hung negligently from one hand, sleeves draping on the floor.

He reached for the pack of smokes in his rolled-up sleeve. You don’t care what a bitch like her thinks, do yah?

He lit his cigarette, right there in the hallway. The glowing tip sent fear slicing through me, but still I couldn’t look away.

She’s crazy, Judy said. Perfect for you, greaser.

Principal Moro came bustling down the hallway, pushing through the crowd, blowing her silver whistle and telling everyone to get to his or her classroom.

The boy touched my chin, made me look up, and it was like seeing a different guy altogether. He was just a kid with slicked-back black hair, smoking a cigarette in a high school hallway. I’m Rafe Montoya, he said.

Dorothy Jean, was all I could get out.

You don’t look crazy to me, Dorothy, he said. Are you?

It was the first time someone had asked, really asked, and my first thought was to lie. Then I saw how he was looking at me and I said, Maybe.

The smile he gave me was sadder than anything I’d seen in a long while and it made this ache start up in my chest. That just means you’re paying attention, Dorothy.

Before I could answer, Principal Moro was taking me by the arm, pulling me away from Rafe, dragging me down the hall. I stumbled along beside her.

I didn’t know much about life back then, but I knew one thing for sure: good girls from Rancho Flamingo did not talk to boys with dark skin named Montoya.

But from the second I saw him, I couldn’t think about anything else.

It sounds cliché, but Rafael Montoya changed the course of my life when he said those words to me. It just means you’re paying attention.

I said them over and over in my mind as I walked home from school, studying them from every possible angle. For the first time ever, I wondered if maybe I wasn’t crazy or alien. Maybe the world was as unbalanced as it felt to me.

For the whole next week, I moved through my ordinary routine in a daze. I slept, I woke, I dressed and went to school, but all of that was a camouflage. I was always thinking of him, looking for him. I knew it was wrong, dangerous, even, but I didn’t care. No. That’s not right. I embraced the wrongness of it.

I wanted to be a bad girl, suddenly. The good-girl thing had been such a disaster. I thought that being bad might break me out.