Starcrossed

snapped, suddenly alert and aware of how strange she was acting.
    She smiled bashfully at them both to try to take the sting out of her words. Matt had put his arm around her waist and she patted his hand softly to let him know he could release her. He gave her a doubtful look.
    “You’re really pale, and you’ve got circles under your eyes,” he said.
    “I got a little overheated riding my bike,” she started to explain.
    “Don’t tell me you’re fine,” Claire warned. Her eyes were flush with frustrated tears, and Matt didn’t look much happier. Helen knew she couldn’t brush this off. Even if she was going crazy, she didn’t have to take it out on her friends.
    “No, you’re right. I think I might have heatstroke.”
    Matt nodded, accepting this excuse as the only logical one. “Claire, you take her to the girls’ room. I’ll tell Hergie what happened so he doesn’t mark you late. And you should eat something. You didn’t eat any lunch yesterday,” he reminded her.
    Helen was a little surprised he remembered that, but Matt was good at details. He wanted to be a lawyer, and she knew that someday he would be a great one.
    Claire drenched Helen in the girls’ room, dumping cold water all the way down her back when she was supposed to just wet her neck. Of course they wound up having a gigantic water fight, which seemed to calm Claire down because it was the first normal response she’d had out of Helen in a few days. Helen herself felt like she had passed an exhaustion barrier and now everything had become funny.
    Hergie wrote them hall passes, so the two friends took their time getting to their first classes. Having a hall pass from Mr. Hergeshimer was like getting one of Willy Wonka’s golden tickets—a student could go anywhere and do anything for a full period and not one teacher would put up a stink.
    In the cafeteria they got oranges for Helen’s low blood sugar, and while they were at it they split a chocolate chip muffin. Helen choked it down and miraculously started to feel better. Then they went and stood in front of the six-foot-tall fan in the auditorium to cool down, taking turns singing into the whirling blades and listening to each other’s voices get chopped into a hundred pieces until they were both laughing their faces off.
    Helen felt so giddy after playing hooky on a Hergie hall pass and eating raw sugar on an empty stomach that she couldn’t even remember what class she was supposed to be going to. She and Claire were casually strolling down the wrong hallway at the wrong time when the bell signaling the end of first period rang. They looked at each other and shrugged as if to say, “Oh well, what can you do?” and burst out laughing. Then Helen saw Lucas for the first time.
    The sky outside finally exhaled all of the wind that it had been holding for two days. Gusts of stale, hot air pushed through every open window into the sweltering school. It caught loose sheets of paper, skirt hems, unbound hair, stray wrappers, and other odds and ends, and tossed them all toward the ceiling like hats on graduation day. For a moment it seemed to Helen that everything stayed up there, frozen at the top of the arc, as weightless as space.
    Lucas was standing in front of his locker about twenty feet away, staring back at Helen while the world waited for gravity to switch back on. He was tall, over six feet at least, and powerfully built, although his muscles were long and lean instead of bulky. He had short, black hair and a dark end-of-summer tan that brought out his white smile and his swimming-pool blue eyes.
    Meeting his eyes was an awakening. For the first time in Helen’s life she knew what pure, heart-poisoning hatred was.
    She was not aware of the fact that she was running toward him, but she could hear the voices of the three sobbing sisters rise into a keening wail, could see them standing behind the tall, dark boy she knew was Lucas, and the smaller, brown-haired boy next to him. The sisters were tearing at their hair until it came out of their scalps in bloody hanks. They pointed accusing fingers at the two boys while they screeched a series of names—the names of people murdered long ago. Helen suddenly understood what she had to do.
    In the split second it took for her to close the gap between them, Helen saw the other boy lunge at her, but he was stopped by Lucas, who threw out an arm and sent him flying back into the lockers behind them. Then her whole body