Now You See It... by Vivian Vande Velde Read Free Book Online Page A

and he knew I wasn't an enthusiast. But he jerked his head toward the bleachers, and I sat out the rest of the period.
    In the locker room, I made sure I was always in the middle of a cluster of girls so that Tiffanie couldn't corner me.
    Which didn't prevent her from smacking me on the back of my head with her geometry book as we all funneled out in the hallway. She tried to make it look like an accident, like she was just waving her book around while simultaneously walking, talking, and looking for her journalism homework paper. I knew she'd been hoping to knock my glasses clear off my face. Luckily her aim wasn't as good as Kaylee's had been. If there hadn't been all those other people around, I suspected Tiffanie would have tackled me and ripped those glasses off.
    Third and fourth period, Tiffanie and I had different classes, though I kept alert in the hallways. And, as the morning wore on, I tried to convince
myself that whatever was up with the glasses had worn off because everything looked as it should.
    But then when I went to the cafeteria for lunch, I saw the tiny blue guys again—pushing the long serving spoons so the handles would fall into the vats of soup and rigatoni, loosening the shaker cap on the bottle of Italian dressing, sitting on the pats of butter—I can only hope simply to melt them with body heat.
    And then there was Tiffanie—which did nothing for my appetite, because she still looked like the poster child for Dr. Frankenstein's Nursing Home for the Terminally Ugly. I hung so close to Shelley that when Nancy Jean, Anna, and Lisa—our usual lunch crowd—joined us, Nancy Jean asked, "You two a couple?"
    I spotted Julian paying for his lunch. I was all for getting a boy to join our table. Especially a gorgeous boy. Even if he only looked gorgeous through my lenses. I was just raising my arm when Tiffanie flounced up to him.
    Look out,
I wanted to warn him.
    I don't think I'd ever seen the two of them even notice each other before, but now I saw her witchy fingers clutching his sleeve. She stood on tiptoe and he leaned down so she could get closer to his ear.
    Tiffanie Mills whispering something to Julian York?
    He looked up.
    Right at me.
    Then, as though that had been coincidence, he continued to glance around the cafeteria, his gaze stopping at the table where he usually sat, like,
Oh, yeah, THERE'S my table.
    Tiffanie drifted away as though she'd never stopped him.
    The whole thing couldn't have taken more than five seconds.
    My arm fell back to the table. Nancy Jean, who'd started a story about Mrs. Robellard's fourth-period class, was still talking. Nobody seemed to have noticed anything amiss.
    They know each other,
I thought.
All this year, they've been pretending to be strangers, but as soon as she realizes I can see her as she really looks, she goes to HIM—the one other person who looks different through my glasses.
    I remembered how nice Julian had been outside of Mrs. Starr's office, worrying about a concussion, feeling my head for bumps.
    But then I remembered that I'd had the glasses up on top of my head. I remembered our hands knocking against each other as he, helpfully—casually—tried to remove my glasses.
    Had his kindness all been a ploy? Had he, too,
realized—before Tiffanie had—that I could see things differently through these glasses?
    Had he simply been trying to get them from me?
    I realized he and Tiffanie must somehow be in this together. Whatever
this
was.
    And I wasn't in this with anyone.

8. School Bus Madness
    "Earth to Wendy," Nancy Jean said. "Earth calling Wendy."
    I turned from gawking at Julian York and saw that my friends had all been watching me watch him.
    Shelley told the others, "Wendy has developed a sudden fascination with Julian."
    "No, I haven't," I protested. I didn't want Lisa, who can be helpful to the point of being annoying, to decide that it would be a friendly thing to wave Julian over to our table.
    But I didn't need Lisa to complicate