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“Poison. Venom. Obsession. I think it’s sick.”
    “Then buy your girlfriend perfume like Pale Linen or Whiff of Spring,” said Wing. “Boring, dull, characterless slop.”
    “Got to get the girlfriend first,” said Hesta. She jeered at Timmy.
    From her new vantage point, deep inside, distant and speechless, Dove saw them all differently, as if they were changing colors—turning blue and green and silver in front of her eyes.
    “What happened to your voice, Dove?” said Luce, frowning. “You sound like a different person.”
    Wing smiled.
    From way in the back of the eyes, Dove watched that smile cross the room and hit Luce. Or bite her.
    Luce flinched. And then leaned forward, frowning, intense, staring.
    She can see me in here, thought Dove. So could Hesta. How weird that must be! They can tell it’s not me looking out, and yet it is me looking out.
    If only she could telegraph a message to her friend. Help! I’m a prisoner at the back of the mind!
    But if Dove sent a mental message, it was not received, because Luce lowered her gaze rather than accept the double image: the twinned eyes. Luce doodled studiously on her notebook, drawing pyramid after pyramid, dividing each triangle into the huge stone blocks from which they had been built.
    “You have the right idea, Dove,” said the teacher, “because you have chosen a subject that certainly covers thousands of years, but I simply do not feel that the history of snakes and mankind is deep enough for every one in the room to pursue for a month. But it’s a start. Other suggestions, class? Let’s have a good idea, now.”
    Wing blinked long and intensely, like a door shutting.
    It was shutting in Dove’s face; Dove could not see out during the blink; she was in the dark—the darkest, evilest dark imaginable.
    Dove tried to scream but Wing was using her mouth. Dove ran forward to rip the door open, but of course there was not really any place to run to. All that happened was that she annoyed Wing’s thoughts, like pebbles in a shoe.
    Wing opened her eyes. The light came back into Dove’s prison and Dove got a grip on herself.
    He turned me down! said Wing, up inside her thoughts where Dove was.
    The force of the thoughts tipped Dove over again.
    I had a brilliant idea , said Wing, the sort of idea I’ve always wanted to express in class when you were saying something dumb, Dove, and he turned me down!
    She was in there all along, thought Dove, listening to me.
    She could hardly bear it: her private thoughts exposed to this person all her life. There had never been any privacy! Not even in the dark, or in her room, or in her very own head. Wing had been living there, like a squatter in a tenement.
    I’ll fix him! said Wing, staring at Mr. Phinney. Dove’s eyes had to go where Wing’s did, and Dove, too, had to stare at Mr. Phinney, and him, too, she saw differently: a teacher trying so hard that he was trying too hard, and the class had stepped back from him.
    Dove’s heart ached for Mr. Phinney, and she wanted to speak up and rescue him, and give them all a project that would make Mr. Phinney happy.
    But the rage of Wing—the venom—pierced Dove’s prison like an acid bath, drowning her.

Chapter 8
    W ING WAS HAVING A TANTRUM: dancing, stomping, hitting, and storming.
    “I’ll fix him!” said Wing. Wing was panting.
    Oxygen leaped into the lungs and coursed through the body, like a bright angry wind blowing Dove backward.
    The condominiums stood still and watched, their miniblinds like a million flat eyes.
    No human eyes looked out; all human eyes were at work. Whatever else people did in this complex to entertain themselves, looking out the windows was not one of their pastimes. They did not know their neighbors, they did not wish to know their neighbors, they hardly even qualified to be neighbors.
    One look at Wing, face contorted, rage exploding, fingernails raking, would convince accidental watchers to return to not watching.
    Dove tried