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cross countless galaxies, braving unknown dangers ... all to lick Faith Wickstrum's lucky MarineLand pen and trash James Fenimore Cooper High's second-floor ladies' room?
    Maybe I groaned, but—if so—just the tiniest bit. And maybe I was rocking back and forth like one of the special-needs kids coming off her meds, but that was just to keep from groaning. I was feeling so miserable, I didn't even register the sound of footsteps coming down the nearby stairs until they reached the bottom.
    I
had
just registered that they'd stopped rather than gone on when someone asked, "You all right?"
    By squinting, I was able to make out Julian York. He was carrying a pile of papers, so I gathered he was running some errand for some teacher, and I was just
plain lucky that he had chosen this particular staircase to use.
    "I'm okay," I told him.
    He rocked back and forth a bit himself, maybe inwardly debating whether to accept that answer and continue on his way.
    "Really," I assured him.
    Obviously I did a superb job of hiding my distress. He came and sat down on the floor next to me. "Did you hit your head?" he asked.
    Actually, a head injury would explain a lot.
    I touched my face around the hairline, expecting my fingers to come away sticky, thinking,
Shelley, you could have mentioned that I had an open head wound.
"Where?" I asked, remembering the dead businessman asking,
What, am I beginning to leak or something? Is the steering wheel column sticking out again?
    "We all bounced around quite a bit," Julian said. "Backpacks were flying through the air. Things happened too fast to know
what
was happening."
    I came to suspect he was asking in a general sort of way if I was hurt because of what we'd been through—
not
because of a blood-gushing wound.
    Julian must have caught on that I wasn't touching my scalp because I was checking for lice. He said, "You
look
fine." He gave a slow, warm smile that was sweet enough that even an insecure girl like me
could take it as he meant it when he added, "Except, of course, for the fact that you look terrible."
    "Oh, well, in that case, thank you very much," I told him.
    Sitting this close, I could see that I'd been wrong in thinking, when I'd glimpsed him getting off the bus, that he was better looking than I had originally thought. He was too thin and his hair was thin, too, and a bit scraggly; its lightish brownish blondish color could best be described as
faded.
And his cheekbones were too prominent and his nose skinny and long. And yet I'd been right, too: It wasn't so much that his skin, though pale, was luminous; or that his eyes were a beautiful shade of green; or that his teeth were white and even. It was his expression—he was genuinely concerned—and that's hard to resist.
    He said, "I once got smacked in the head, and to this day don't exactly remember it happening. I kept telling people I was fine, but they could tell I was losing track of what I was saying halfway through and was too confused to even know I was confused. It was only when my trainer felt my head—and made me feel it—that we found this big, bloody bump. It only started hurting after that."
    Trainer? I wouldn't have picked Julian as the athletic type. He certainly wasn't on any of JFC's sports teams. Maybe at his old school—since he'd only
been here since September. Or at his middle school. "Soccer injury?" I guessed. Everyone plays soccer in middle school. Even
I
had played soccer in middle school.
    He froze, as though startled, and I thought maybe he
had been
a jock at his old high school—swimming or lacrosse or some sport we didn't have. Maybe he was even insulted that I had fallen back on that old standby, soccer. But then he said, "Um, yeah."
    Maybe he'd been considering. Maybe he really couldn't remember
anything
about it.
    Because, of course, there wasn't any reason I could think of why he'd want to lie about playing soccer.
    "I'm just saying," he told me, "if you're feeling queasy or something, maybe