Read Fly on the Wall: How One Girl Saw Everything for Free Online Page A

whispers.
    “What?”
    “When I was young I thought I'd be young forever.”
    “Uh-huh,” I say. He's so small and gnarled up, he seems like a gnome—or a fairy.
    “Now here I am,” he continues, “and my legs don't work good, and my eyes don't see good, I'm hunched over. You'd never believe I used to be an ice dancer.”
    He seems like he wants a response. “I believe it,” I say.
    “I took my wife ice dancing every weekend at Rockefeller Center.”
    Now he might be lying. “I bet you were good at it,” I offer.
    “I learned when I was a boy. We lived in Vermont. You know where Vermont is?”
    “Sure,” I answer, though I've never been there.
    “Lake froze over in the winter,” he continues. “Everybody knew how to skate. It was like walking. You learned when you were a baby.”
    “I've never done it,” I say, though I've watched the skaters spinning around at the rink in Central Park.
    “But you see the ice dancing on TV, right?” he asks. “When they have the Olympics?”
    “Oh, yeah.”
    “What are you, teenager?” he asks.
    “Sixteen.”
    “You think you'll be like this forever, but you'll change before you know it,” he tells me. “Change before you know it.”
    “I'd love to change,” I say. “Sixteen is horrible.”
    “No, no,” he says, the way old people do when they're thinking about being young. “Sixteen is a treasure. You treasure it.”
    What does he know about my life that he thinks I should treasure it?
    For all he knows, I might have abusive parents,
or be pregnant by some rapist,
or have some horrible wasting disease.
I might be an orphan, or a crack addict, or—
But the truth is I'm none of these things.
    I force myself to smile back at him. “This is my stop,” I say, standing up. “Have a nice day.”
    “Goodbye.” He pulls a folded-up newspaper out of his pocket.
    I dart out of the train and push through the crowds to the stairs. On the way up to the fresh air, I feel a squish underfoot and look down to see my flip-flop in a pile of white goo. It's all over my heel and the bottom of my shoe.
    Hell, what is that stuff?
Could be gel-type shaving cream,
or industrial radiation waste,
or some nasty liquid insecticide,
or beef aspic.
It burns my foot.
    Maybe it's vomit from someone who's only been eating oysters;
or a dead jellyfish,
or the waste of some enormous subway cockroach.
Ugh.
    I yank off my cotton sweater and use it to wipe everything clean, and run into the first bodega I see when I get out of the subway. If I buy something, they'll give me a plastic bag that I can put my slime-covered sweater in, so it doesn't touch any of the other stuff in my backpack.
    The bodega is tiny; it seems to deal mainly in lottery tickets, pervy magazines and gum. In the back, there's a cooler full of ice and bottled soft drinks—lots of which I don't recognize. They don't carry Coke or Snapple or any of the usual stuff. Just grape soda, celery soda, orange, coconut and fruit punch. I grab a celery one because I like its green color. I pay for it, and a packet of tissues, and ask for a plastic bag.
    Outside, I finish wiping off my foot with a tissue and shove the gook-covered sweater into the bag.
    What a day. Three dramas already and it's barely eight a.m. I open the soda and drink it as I head up the steps to Ma-Ha. It has a strange, overly sweet taste, and I toss the half-empty bottle in a trash can and slide into drawing as the bell rings.

b y eight-fifteen, everyone's self-portraits are up on the board. Kensington is yammering on about Taffy's picture, which shows her bare feet on a wooden floor, like in a dance studio. They're covered with blisters andBand-Aids. It's not that bad, actually. Better than I would have expected from her.
    A fly is buzzing around the room.
    Poor beastie. Trapped in here with no snacks and no fresh air. How did it get in?
    The windows are always closed and you have to get a teacher to unlock them if you want one open, because some idiot