For Want of a Pencil

Lucky for me, the gym teacher has a sense of humor about my wrecking the basketball hoop.

“Are you hurt?” she asks, as I pick myself up off the floor.

“No, ma’am. I’m fine.” Other than wanting to crawl into a hole where Sabrina can’t stare into my soul, that is. “Um, am I going to have to pay to fix the hoop?” Thoughts of having to explain why I need extra money to my parents raise a lump in my throat. They’re already paying for my little apartment.

By now the rest of the class have all stopped their own games to watch the gym teacher scold me. So much for blending in. I’m such a moron. I’m only glad Sophie isn’t awake to witness this after everything I’ve told her about keeping a low profile.

The gym teacher turns the bent hoop over in her hands, careful of the screws still sticking out of the brackets. “No, the school has a budget for replacing worn athletic equipment. These hoops have been around since I was a student here, so I’m not surprised this happened.” She raises her voice so the whole class can hear. “And this is why dunking is against the rules! Don’t show off, or you’ll just make an ass of yourself or get hurt.” She raises an eyebrow at me. “Right, Clark?”

My face gets hot as I hear some of the girls giggle. Sabrina isn’t one of them. “Right, ma’am.”

Changing back into my school uniform in the locker room, I get more than a few congratulations from guys in the class, who think I'm either a secret genius athlete, hilarious, or both. Foley keeps to himself by his locker, and I have no doubt he's going to snitch to Blaine about everything that went down during the game. Oh, well. I have bigger things to worry about than Blaine. Like Sabrina, for instance.

History is our last class of the day, and I find it hard to focus on the lesson again today. Not because I'm worried about someone watching me, like yesterday, but because today someone definitely is watching me, and isn't bothering to be subtle about it. I can practically feel Sabrina's eyes burning two laser-sharp holes in the back of my head. There's no sense in even pretending to take notes, the teacher lecturing at the front of the room just sounding like vague mumbling noises that can't punch through my anxiety.

"Clark?" Sophie stirs in the back of my mind. "What's wrong? I'm getting seasick in here."

"Sorry, Sophie," I reply, tapping my pencil eraser on the desktop. "I messed up during gym class and now Sabrina won't stop staring at me."

I feel the now-familiar cold lurch as Sophie pokes her head out the back of mine to check on Sabrina. "No fooling! What did you do, hit her in the face with the ball? Trip her up running laps?"

"I might have used some of your power by accident, and broke one of the basketball hoops."

A jolt of surprise jumps up my spine from Sophie. "Really! While I was sleeping? I didn't know I could do that."

No kidding. I wonder how many more times we're going to find out about some bizarre ability she has.

"Alright, class," the teacher says, interrupting our debrief. "You'll have the rest of the period to work on the group assignment. Get into pairs, and remember, the more you get done now the less you'll have to do after school."

What group assignment? I stare blankly down at the worksheet on my desk. When had we passed this around? One more thing I tuned out this afternoon in favor of panicking about Sabrina.

I look up from the worksheet and nearly choke on my own tongue at finding Sabrina looking down at me. "Grchk?!"

"Hi, Clark," Sabrina says, one eyebrow climbing up to her hairline. "Let's work together on this assignment."

Apparently I'm not the only one surprised to see her standing in front of my desk, because half the class erupts into whispers.

"Isn't that the weird new kid?"

"She never picks a partner, why..."

"Are they friends or something? Sabrina doesn't have..."

For a moment, Sabrina takes her attention off of me, turning to cast a chilly look over the rest of the class. They quiet down and go back to their own work faster than if the teacher had told them. Once people have rearranged themselves, Sabrina takes the vacated desk next to mine, shoving them together with a scrape of metal on linoleum.

"Uh, okay," I say, not that it seems I have a say in this one way or the other. Silently, to Sophie, I say, "Hey, Sophie? Maybe leave my body for now. I don't know what happened in the gym, but I don't want to risk a repeat now, alright?"

Sophie's worry rings through my back teeth, but she agrees. "If you think that's best, Clark."

"I do. Don't interact with anyone, just hang out nearby."

I cough to disguise the uncomfortable shudder as Sophie leaves. Strangely, though, Sabrina is already started on our assignment and doesn't appear to notice. I follow suit, hastily flipping to the right page in the textbook since I'd fallen way behind the pace of the lecture.

"So, why did you transfer to this school, anyway?" Sabrina asks, barely looking up from her worksheet. She's already done with the first three questions, which I copy down for the sake of catching up. I have a feeling she won't mind. She obviously doesn't even need a partner to get through these.

I shrug. "It's a top-ranked school. The public school I was in last year isn't."

"Understandable," Sabrina says. She glances at my worksheet. "It's 1846, not 1886. Were you on the basketball team at your old school?" she asks while I erase my mis-copied answer.

It didn't take her long to get to the basketball topic. Well, it's my fault for trying to go all NBA all-star on her in the first place. "I was on the team in middle school, but it takes up a lot of time, so I stopped."

Sabrina pushes a lock of hair behind her ear. Even right after gym class, it's still perfect. "You should try out for ours. I'm on the junior varsity team. It looks good on college applications to have extracurricular activities."

Does she even like basketball? She opens her mouth to ask something else and I hold up a hand desperately. "Can you slow down a little? I'm not good at multitasking and I don't want to make you do all the work here."

"Oh, I don't care about that at all." It still takes me aback how blunt she is. Sabrina turns her worksheet a quarter-turn so it's easier for me to read while she's writing. "You can think of your reply as you're copying. The conversation will go smoothly that way."

Predictably, my attempt to halt the interrogation fails, but it turns out not to be such a big deal. Rather than dig into the basketball thing like I worry she will, Sabrina switches back to asking mundane things about my hometown, what I like about this city so far, whether I watch Lawson's Brook. Dumb things like that. Not for the first time, I find myself wondering if I overreacted, and she's a relatively normal girl I'm projecting my paranoia onto. If it weren't for Sophie floating aimlessly around the classroom and shooting dirty looks at Sabrina the whole time, I could almost convince myself this is a normal conversation.

Before long, we reach the end of the worksheet, where it asks for an essay that we're supposed to turn into a short presentation. I hate assignments like this. Can't we just turn it in for the teacher to read?

Sabrina gnaws the end of her pencil, brows furrowed. "We'll need more material than what's in the textbook for this," she announced, shutting her book. "We can go down to the library for that, maybe use one of the computers to print out visual aids."

I'm a fast enough learner to know that arguing or even questioning this course of action is pointless. We're going to the library, I guess. I gather up my things. Sabrina does the same, and the force of her bag landing on the desk knocks my pencil onto the floor where it rolls just out of my reach.

Not eager to tip my desk over and make a fool of myself twice in one day, I glance up at Sabrina, who's already up and ready to leave. "Would you mind snagging my pencil?"

Before Sabrina can take a step forward, my pencil seemingly lifts itself off the ground as Sophie swoops in to pick it up and place it neatly on top of my notebook. My heart leaps into my throat while Sabrina's stuck blinking at an empty space where the pencil used to be. She looks around a bit, as if wondering if it rolled off somewhere.

"There you go, Clark!" Sophie grins, unseen and unheard by anyone but me. Unlike my pencil.