Remote. Alienated. Estranged. Lost.

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That was my normal feeling entering the doors of Truman High, but with Jenny missing, I felt it more viscerally.

Mindy and I eventually fell asleep on Jenny’s bed and woke before Mom did in the morning. Thank Toby for that. I’d gotten the poor neglected outdoor dog housebroken in record time. Now three dogs saw us off--Ted, Toby, and Bozo--as Mindy and I were hauled away in the yellow school bus. Mom put an orange hunting jacket on Toby first, just in case anyone should recognize him as the dog formerly owned and abused by Ken Feckers.

Ty Chrystie smiled at me as I opened my locker. “So. I hear you got an especially cruel and unusual punishment for bringing Alicia Angel to her knees.”

I blinked at him. “Do tell.”

“The Snow Ball!” He pointed at a poster advertising the holiday dance, never again to be called a Christmas party.

“Your point is?”

Ty’s speckled face drew down into a frown. “Jeeze. You really did black out in Mr. Cook’s office, didn’t you?” He waited for a response, but I had none. “I heard him before he shut the door. Instead of getting a suspension, which for you is a free pass to get out of school, he said you’d have to attend the school dance.”

I shook my head. “No way. It’s like Homecoming, with the lockdown. Once you go in, there’s no getting out until the dance ends at midnight. I kid you not. That’s not a party; that’s incarceration.”

“Aunt Velma says I have to go. I don’t wanna go if you don’t go.”

I got the books I wanted and shut the locker door. “Ask Breanna.”

My gaze traveled the hallway in search of Ethan. He’d been so enthralled with Lexi, he forgot I existed.

“Breanna said she’ll go if you go, and not as anyone’s date. A lot of girls do that, I guess.”

There. I caught sight of Ethan, smiling down at cute little Lexi. Stupid Ethan!

Behind Ethan, I spotted one of the Jenny posters he had taped to a door.

“Ty. It's nice of you to think of me." Mom had drilled me to be polite, even if she hadn't curbed my violent impulses. "I’m on a mission to track down a weird Catholic guy Jenny mentioned in her diary. And a woman who works at Hooters. Mom and Dad keep telling me I can’t have the car, so I’m stuck. But I was thinking I could pass as a boy, and we could go there for the cheeseburgers some night after school.”

“Or just Grandpa and I could go.”

“You wouldn’t know what questions to ask.” I didn’t like how much he sounded like a parent. “Sara Lacey hasn’t gotten back to me yet on anything. The more time goes on, the harder it is to find clues, and the deeper Jenny goes into deep space.”

Ty brightened at that. “You doubt my portal theory. You distrust physics.”

“Naturally.”

Just as naturally, Ty managed to bring up the mysteries of deep space over lunch. Outer space is a nebulous term, he was saying: "out there somewhere” could be close to home, within the solar system, within sight, but deep space feels very very far away--a falling off the edges of the map. I was back to sets of knowns and unknowns and it made me angry. I hated the not-knowing of anything, from the answer on a test to the whereabouts of my sister.

On the way back to class, I drifted toward Dale Zubrod. A wicked idea had come to mind when I caught him leering at Lexi’s cute little backside wiggling up the cafeteria stairs. I leaned up to his ear. “She likes you,” I said in my best imitation of mean-girl confidential. “She’s only putting the moves on Ethan in hopes you’ll notice her and try to win her away from him.” He scowled at me. “Don’t believe it? Try asking her to the Snow Ball.”

“She’s going with Frasier.”

“Not if you ask her, she isn’t. Try it. You’ll see.”

I sprinted off to Mrs. Schaffer’s room and her morbid Emily Dickinson poems and depressing stuff like Ode to a Grecian Urn, where Keats goes on about lively maidens dancing in ancient clay though they've been dead for thousands of years. I hated poetry almost as much as I hated Shakespeare. Math was so underestimated, so undervalued, so beautiful, so pure, so true. There. I waxed poetic! Maybe.

Bert Russell said it better though. Ok, Bertrand. Hey. I often thought of dead writers as my best friends. Bertrand Russell (1872-1970). The math-loving atheist who aid math has "supreme beauty," like that of the Grecian Urn that had Keats in such a snit. Pure mathematics, "capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show."

When the last bell rang, Ethan was staring at his locker as if it were his beloved grandma’s tombstone. I couldn’t resist. I punched him in the arm. “Hey.”

“Hey.” His eyes didn’t light up for me like they did before Lexi came along.

Eh. Let him grieve a while. He’d get his head on straight again sooner or later.

I smiled all the way to the bus.

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