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a girl who reminded me of Courtney. Then my mom started asking questions and I gave her some answers until somehow we were into what Jessica Feeney was like and I used the word
melted.
    My mother made a sound between her teeth.
    I stopped. I never meant to say it; it just came out.
    “I mean … not that,” I said. “Just, you know —”
    She was looking right at me now, her face drawing itself in like it does when she thinks something bad is happening to us.
    “What?” I said. I didn’t want to make too much out of it. All I wanted now was to get to my room and do homework.
    “The poor girl. What is she like — I mean, is she — nice?”
    “I don’t know. I guess she’s okay,” I said, slinging my pack over my shoulder again. “She doesn’t say much.”
    “She lives just over there.” She pointed at the wall of the living room.
    “I know.” I stepped into the dining room. I was sweating again, and my shirt was wet and I wanted to change.
    “Have you talked to her?”
    “I don’t know. It’s school. There’s stuff to do. Mrs. Tracy keeps us busy. Nobody talks to her much … there’s stuff to do….”
    “Well, it might help to talk to her.”
    I think I squinted at her. “Help?” What did that mean? “I don’t need help. I’m okay —”
    “Her. Help her.” She said this, shaking her head, as if she was going to say something more. But she didn’t say anything else right then. I stood for another few seconds, then I went upstairs to change and do my homework.
    After that first time in class on Monday, I had almost never looked right at Jessica Feeney. Not the next day or the next. It was really too hard to look at that face. It didn’t get any better if you looked at it; I mean, it didn’t get any easier to look at.
    She answered the teacher’s questions sometimes. Her voice was quiet and hoarse and not all that clear. She never raised her hand, but Mrs. Tracy called on her every now and again, and Jessica answered.
    During math, she left her desk to sharpen her pencil. Sometimes she went into the hall to her locker and was gone in the lavatory for a while, then came back. She moved around all right, even though her legs were always covered with thick stockings. Maybe it hurt for her to move, but if it did, she didn’t show it.
    Then on Thursday of that week, a whole bunch of strange things happened.
    I found that I started, in little bits, raising my head to look at her, but always when I knew she was turned the other way or couldn’t see me. I discovered that if you didn’t see the edge of her face or her hand or arm lying on the desk, she looked almost like any girl with dirty hair. It was sort of crushed and matted in the back. It almost began to feel as if there was a person in there.
    As if there was a person in there.
It seems stupid to even say something like that. But that’s what I felt. It was hard to think about her as being at all like the rest of us.
    Still, I remember letting out a deep breath the first time I found myself looking at her from behind. It was as if I had been holding my breath ever since she stepped into our class. When she was turned away, you could almost forget about the way she looked. It almost didn’t matter that Jessica Feeney, the horribly burned girl, was sitting one seat away from me at the head of row two.
    Jeff, on the other hand, and Rich, were acting as if there was something else to know about Jessica.
    There was, they said, the whole question of
how.

Chapter 9
    It was hot outside when I trotted across the yard in gym class and heard Jeff say, “How did she get that way?”
    “Yeah, how?” said Rich, who was standing with him. The look on his face showed that he’d been wondering things aloud, too.
    “So what burned her?” Jeff said to us. “That’s what I want to know. Nobody’s talking about it. How it happened. That’s the point.”
    The point?
    “Somebody must know,” said Rich, his eyes darting around and his head nodding