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was staring at it.
    “I’ve been thinking,” he said.
    Wendy thrust a spoon at her. Oneida flinched, badly.
    “Hey,” she said. Her mouth seemed to have dried up. She coughed. “Hey, what are you doing with—”
    “What does the back of this spoon say?” he asked. “Can you read it for me?”
    She gritted her teeth. “It says Oneida,” she said. “So what?”
    “
So you’re named after a spoon
.” And he grinned, a huge wolf grin that sent a cold charge up the back of her neck.
    “I’m not going to discuss this with you,” she said. “But let’s just say that both the spoon and I are named after the same geographic location and Native American tribe.”
    “Oh—oh, I see. What’s your Indian name, Chief Red Spoon?”
    “
Hey
!” she said, but Wendy just laughed.
    “Shouts with a Spoon?”
    “Get out,” she said. She knew she was blushing horribly and she hated it, hated it, hated it—hated this stupid body of hers and its stupid blood. She shoved Wendy hard. He held up his hands in a
don’t shoot!
gesture and backed up until he was on the porch.
    “See you around,” he said, “Sitting Spoon.” Then he cackled and kicked the porch door open. For the first time since making the word her own, since co-opting it out of a sense of personal pride, Oneida spat it out as a gasping curse as she watched Wendy disappear.
    “
Freak
,” she said.

    Less than thirty minutes later, the thunderstorm hit. Rain poured down the windows of the Darby-Jones in unbroken streams, splashing off thesills, flooding the driveway, dripping into a blue saucepan on the side porch that Oneida had to empty constantly. She tossed another panful out the door and returned to the creaky pink- and orange-striped beach chaise where she did her best thinking, hidden away from the hustle of the rest of the house, nestled among lawn chairs, coolers, and a cracked flowerpot she had painted with misshapen pansies in the first grade. She’d brought the E volume from the old set of
World Books
in the study; E was one of her favorites (
Egypt, Einstein, electricity, elephants
), but today she wasn’t interested, not really. Today she was a mess of nerves: because of Andrew Lu, because of Eugene Wendell, and because of the thunderstorm itself, which made the porch shudder and groan.
    She hated being teased. She hated that Wendy thought it was funny to upset her, because—why? Was she absolutely
hysterical
when she got upset? But she knew how to cope with being teased. What she couldn’t cope with were secrets, and Andrew Lu was a complete mystery, as inscrutable as the Chinese characters she had watched him doodle on the cover of his notebook. An echo of the voice she’d quelled at twelve piped up:
Why would he like you? Why would Andrew Lu, who is beautiful and brilliant and smells like coconut and coffee, whom strangers smile at when he walks through the hall, who has probably eaten sushi with real chopsticks and has traveled farther away than Syracuse—why would he like you?
    It was a question she couldn’t answer, so she slapped the encyclopedia shut, rolled on her side, and watched the rain pour down. Wind filled the porch screens like sails, and Oneida shivered in the light mist. It was barely four o’clock but it was dark, and the darkness made her feel tired and worn out. She closed her eyes. She didn’t see the yellow taxi rolling up the Darby-Jones driveway until it was close enough for her to hear the tires crackling in the loose gravel, popping like corn beneath the rain. At first she thought she was dreaming. She had never seen a taxi outside of television; there were no taxis in Ruby Falls. You could walk the entire length of downtown, past the convenience mart, post office, dry cleaner, gas station, library, Milky Way Bar and Grill, and town hall, in about fifteen minutes. The car had a checkered stripe running from hood to trunk. Gingerly, she craned her neck, still sore after flinching from Wendy, to watch the