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at least three interesting facts or stories about your partner,” Mr. Holm had insisted. “No boring stuff!”
    Mazie, who sat on the other side of the room, waved at Marylin to move her chair over so they could work together. But Mr. Holm made them count off like kindergartners, one-two, one-two, and Rhetta was one and Marylin was two, and that made them a pair.
    Rhetta had turned around and looked Marylin straight in the eye. “I’ve got twenty-three interesting facts about me right off the top of my head. You ready to write?”
    Marylin had nodded mutely. She pulled hernotebook and a pen out of her back pouch. She noticed that Rhetta’s fingernails were alternately painted sparkly black and silver. It was actually sort of cool-looking, although not really Marylin’s style.
    “Fact number one: I am a Gemini,” Rhetta reported. “Sign of the twins. Which is important, because I have a twin, only I don’t know where.”
    “Were you adopted?” Marylin asked. She hadn’t meant to get involved in an actual conversation with Rhetta, but she’d heard stories about twins separated at birth, how one twin would break his arm and the other would feel the pain all the way on the other side of the country. She’d always secretly wished for a twin, although one who lived with her, with whom she could communicate telepathically and also trade clothes.
    Rhetta shook her head. “No, I mean like a soul twin.”
    “A soul twin?”
    “Yeah, someone who’s just like me, who really gets me, you know? I haven’t met my soultwin yet, but I will one day. They’re for sure an artist like I am. Do you like graphic novels?”
    Marylin wasn’t sure what a graphic novel was, so she shrugged. “I don’t know.”
    And then Rhetta did something that surprised Marylin. She put her hand on Marylin’s wrist, her silver and black fingernails sparkling like a handful of diamonds. “I think you’ll like them if you give them a try. You’re not like those other cheerleaders, I can tell.”
    “How do you even know I’m a cheerleader?”
    Rhetta grinned. What was surprising was that she had a very friendly grin, and two dimples that Marylin was automatically envious of. When she smiled you could see how Rhetta Mayes must have looked when she was a little girl, before a veil of black hair and clothing had descended over her life. She had been cute, Marylin could tell.
    “I saw you sitting with those girls at lunch, and I knew you were the cheerleaders. You can always tell. So’s she”—Rhetta nodded toward Mazie—“but she’s got a really cruddy aura, if you want to know the truth.”
    Then she reached her hand into her big black bag and pulled out a sketchbook. “This is the second amazing fact about me,” she said, handing the book to Marylin. “I’m doing a graphic novel. I plan on publishing it when I’m finished.”
    Marylin opened the sketchbook. Inside, she discovered, was a world of fairies, some of them beautiful, others with squinched-up, mean faces, all of them looking so alive, Marylin was surprised they didn’t fly off the pages. There were airborne fairies and fairies perched in trees, fairies having conversations with each other, and fairies dancing in circles around flowering bushes. The pages were laid out like a comic book, and the fairies spoke in balloons, except that there weren’t any words yet.
    “I’m not great at writing,” Rhetta admitted. “I’ve got an idea for a story, but when I try writing it down in a script, it sounds dumb. Not like people—or fairies, really—would talk at all.”
    Then she leaned toward Marylin again. “You want to do it? I bet you can write, can’tyou? I can tell by looking at you that you have a way with words.”
    Marylin sat back in her seat. How did Rhetta Mayes know this about her? She couldn’t, of course. They’d never seen each other in their lives before today. Rhetta couldn’t know that Marylin had a journal she wrote in every night, or that she