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long black coat the guy should have stood out at Bixby. There’d been a lot of kids like him and Dess back in PS 141, but there were only three or four here. It was too warm and sunny in Oklahoma to do the whole vampire thing.
    Unless, of course, you were “photophobic,” if Dess had even been telling the truth about
that.
    Now the boy was looking at Jessica too, as if he and Dess were both expecting her to join them. The other girl at the table was staring off into space, headphones over her ears.
    Jessica looked around for somewhere else to sit. She wasn’t up for any more head games today. She looked for Constanza or Liz, but she couldn’t see them or any of the other girls from the library table. Her eyes searched for a familiar face, but Jess recognized no one. The horde of faces blurred together into a bewildering mass. The cafeteria slipped out of focus, the dizzying roar of voices assaulting her from all sides. Her moment of hesitation stretched out, suddenly transformed into total confusion.
    But somehow her feet kept walking, bringing her closer to Dess’s table. The girl and her friends were the only stable part of the room. Instinct carried Jessica toward them.
    “Jessica?”
    She turned, recognized a face out of the blur. A very attractive face.
    “I’m Jonathan, from physics class. Remember?”
    His smile cut through the fog enveloping her. His dark brown eyes were very much in focus.
    “Sure. Jonathan. Physics.” She
had
noticed him in class. Anyone would have.
    Jessica stood there, unable to say anything more. But at least she had managed to stop walking toward Dess’s table.
    A look of concern crossed his face. “Want to sit down?”
    “Yeah. That would be great.”
    He led Jessica to an empty table, in the corner opposite Dess’s. Her dizziness began to subside. She gratefully dumped her book bag and lunch sack onto the table as she sat down.
    “You okay?” Jonathan asked.
    Jessica blinked. The cafeteria was back to its normal self: loud, chaotic, and a bit smelly, but no longer a roller coaster. Her disorientation had vanished as suddenly as it had arrived. “Much better.”
    “You looked like you were going to take a spill.”
    “No, I… Yeah, maybe. Tough week.” Jessica wanted to add that she didn’t usually act like a zombie in front of cute guys but somehow couldn’t find the right words. “I think I just need to eat.”
    “Me too.”
    Jonathan overturned his lunch bag, spilling its contents onto the table. An apple rolled perilously close to the edge of the table, but he ignored it. It stopped just before falling to the floor. Jessica raised an eyebrow as she looked at his pile of food. It included three sandwiches, a bag of chips, a banana, and a carton of yogurt in addition to the wayward apple.
    Jonathan was thin as a rail. A hungry rail. He grabbed a sandwich from the pile, pulled off its plastic wrap, and tore into it.
    Jessica looked at her own lunch. As always, Dad had gotten bored last night and created something complicated. Grated cheese, ground meat, chopped lettuce, and tomato all occupied their own corners of a multisection container. A couple of hard taco shells were visible through the plastic of another. The tacos were already broken. Jess sighed and popped open the containers, dumping all the ingredients together and starting to mix them up.
    “Mmm, taco salad,” Jonathan said. “Smells good.”
    Jessica nodded. The spicy aroma coming from the meat had taken the edge off the fried smell of high school cafeteria. “My dad’s getting into southwestern cuisine in a big way.”
    “Beats sandwiches.”
    “That one looks good.”
    “They’re peanut butter on banana bread.”
    “Peanut butter on banana bread? All three? That’s a… time-saver, I guess.”
    “Saves slicing bananas. I can’t ever wake up early enough to make anything fancy.”
    “But three of them?” she asked.
    He shrugged. “That’s nothing. Some birds eat their own body weight