This Is How I Find Her by Sara Polsky Read Free Book Online

for six years.
    The last time we did was the first day of sixth grade. In the hallway next to my locker, James and I held our schedules up side by side, the edges of the pages overlapping. No classes together.
    â€œI already checked with Leila,” James said. “We’re in most of the same ones.”
    I frowned. I hadn’t seen Leila in a few days, since my mother took us out for that drive. When I’d called to ask about her classes, Aunt Cynthia told me Leila was busy getting ready for the first day of school—I pictured her curling her hair with her new curling iron and trying on makeup, which she said everyone started wearing in middle school—and that she’d call me back later. But the only person who called was my mother’s social worker, Jeanine, whose “How are you, Sophie?” sounded far too grown-up to be Leila on the other end of the phone. My mother finally made me go to sleep, promising I’d see Leila at school soon enough. But I hadn’t found her in the halls that morning either.
    The bell rang then, and James and I jumped back as a torrent of people rushed past us. Most of them carried identical bright pink schedules, which flapped where they’d been folded into thirds and stuffed into envelopes. The other sixth graders clutched their schedules tightly; the seventh graders tried to be less obvious about double-checking their classroom numbers on the way to first period.
    James and I headed in opposite directions for class, James calling over his shoulder, “See you at lunch, I guess?”
    â€œOkay,” I called back, grinning in his direction over other people’s heads. I couldn’t tell whether he heard me through all the noise.
    But when I got to the cafeteria, all the seats around Leila and James were already full. They took up two tables next to each other, with some of the boys James knew from band—the people he hung out with when he wasn’t with us—surrounding him, and a few of Leila’s louder, peppier friends clustered around her. And then there were people from other elementary schools who I’d never seen before, but who had somehow already found their way to Leila’s table, as if she were a magnet pulling them in. I tried to catch her eye, but she didn’t look back at me. With her new purple eye shadow and curly hair and her loud laugh, she seemed like a stranger.
    As I squeezed past everyone, looking for an empty chair and holding my lunch tray up so it wouldn’t spill, Leila’s friend Kelly, who was sitting next to her, leaned across the table toward me.
    â€œHey, Kelly,” I said. I stopped with my tray over the head of the girl across from her, hoping one of them would move their bags off the chairs so I could sit down.
    â€œSophie. Hi,” Kelly said. But her voice was stiff, only fake-friendly. I recognized it because it was a voice Leila sometimes used when she was talking to someone she didn’t really like. Kelly’s eyes flicked away from me, back toward the girl I was standing behind.
    I opened my mouth to ask Kelly if I could take the seat next to her. But then she glanced at me again. She lifted up one finger and circled it around her ear, making a few loops—the universal sign for crazy.
    She mouthed something to her friend too, but I didn’t even try to decipher it. My brain could come up with enough of its own words. Words like wacko. Insane. Bonkers. Even once Kelly stopped, I kept seeing those spirals, her finger circling around her ear, sending me a message. I didn’t know whether she was talking about my mother or me, but I was sure she meant one of us.
    I stayed where I was, my tray with its square slice of pizza and carton of milk still suspended over everyone’s heads, my next breath frozen somewhere in my chest. I waited for Leila or James or anyone to ask Kelly what she was doing or tell her to stop or even just invite me to sit down. But no