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one.
    Loretta looks impressed. She never thought of it like that before.
    Ash says that doesn’t mean she’s wrong about the mirrors. Everybody knows about it. She saw it on TV.
    Sicilee isn’t really listening. She seems to be smiling at Loretta and Ash, but really she is gazing beyond them, to a table at the side of the room where today Cody Lightfoot sits with Clemens Reis and his loser friends, looking like a movie star visiting a homeless shelter at Thanksgiving. Why is he sitting with them ? They’re nobodies. They’re less than nobodies. They’re crustaceous growths on the skin of society. If anybody else – anybody , even Kristin, even her own mother – was to eat lunch with Clemens, Sicilee would be so grossed out that she would never be able to speak to them again. But that, of course, is not the way she feels about Cody. All that really bothers her is the fact that he isn’t sitting with her .
    Last week ended no better than it began. Even though Sicilee shares a classroom with Cody Lightfoot every day, she knew him no better on Friday afternoon than she had on Tuesday morning.
    She watches Cody put the Thermos back into his old-fashioned workman’s lunchbox and take out a small container as though he is doing something truly remarkable that no human teenager has ever done before. Sicilee stifles a sigh. None of the boys she considers her friend ever brings his lunch from home. None of them wears his hair the length Cody does, or dresses the way Cody dresses – or causes Sicilee’s heart to miss a beat when he smiles either.
    Cody removes half a sandwich from the container. Her eyes follow the sandwich as it moves towards his squashy, kissable lips. Sicilee’s own sandwich sits untouched on her tray. She has less interest in food right now than in learning to weave straw baskets.
    “Don’t you think so, Siss?” asks Loretta.
    Sicilee nods automatically. “Uh huh.”
    Last Friday, Sicilee finally managed to be right behind Cody as they left English, and asked him, conversationally, about changing schools in the middle of the year. “It must be such a drag,” said Sicilee. “Starting all over again, I mean.”
    Cody said that it wasn’t a problem. He embraces change.
    To stop herself from saying that she wished he’d embrace her , Sicilee offered to show him the town.
    But this wasn’t a problem either.
    “I’ve been here before. You know, visiting my dad. So I know my way around.”
    But Sicilee still wasn’t daunted. She invited him to a party on Saturday night. “You know,” said Sicilee, “so you can meet everybody.”
    “Everybody?” Cody grinned. “That’s going to be a pretty big party.”
    Unsure as to whether or not he was making fun of her, Sicilee laughed. “You know what I mean.”
    “To tell you the truth, I’m not really a party person,” said Cody. And then (just when she was starting to think that, for some unfathomable reason, he was being deliberately dense) he gave her a smile that could have heated every house in Clifton Springs for the rest of the winter, lowered his voice intimately and added, “I’m much more into one-on-one.”
    Now, as she watches him lick something from his fingers, Sicilee wonders again what he meant by that. Was it a come-on? Did he mean one-on-one with her? Or did he mean one-on-one with someone else?
    Cody brushes crumbs from his mouth. His hand is wide and solid, the fingers delicate and long. Sicilee gulps her flavoured water, stifling a sigh.
    If he meant he’d rather see her alone than with dozens of strangers, then why on Earth doesn’t he ask her out? It’s not as if she hasn’t given him plenty of encouragement. The only way she could do more to bring attention to herself would be to wear bells. Risking sweat and dishevelment, Sicilee rushes to English every day in the hope of sitting beside him. She used to lurk at the back of the class with Kristin, passing notes or checking her texts, but now she puts herself right near