Surviving High School

CHAPTER ONE
    “Smile.”
    Emily Kessler willed the corners of her mouth to rise and her eyes to light up as she stared into the massive camera lens. If her photo turned out like usual, she’d be stuck with a miserable school ID card all year. She hadn’t looked happy in a picture in months.
    Smile , she thought. Smile.
    “Uh, great. Hold it just like that,” said the photographer, scrambling to find the button on his camera. Emily’s mouth was starting to hurt.
    “Just one more second—”
    Forget it , she thought. I’m doomed.
    By the time the flash went off a few seconds later, she was wearing her usual intense expression: awesome for scaringthe Speedos off the other swimmers during a meet, terrible for trying to make friends… or meet a cute guy.
    A few seconds later, the photographer apologized as he handed Emily her new ID.
    “I usually don’t say this,” he said, “but if you ‘lose’ this after a few weeks, they’ll send you back here to get another one.”
    “Thanks,” she said, accepting the card. She knew there’d be no point in taking him up on his offer.
    Out in the hallway, a line of other freshmen stretched into the distance and around a corner. Rows and rows of endless lockers went on as far as the eye could see, and Emily wondered which one was hers. She squinted at the sheet of paper the school had mailed her a few days earlier. Locker 1322? The number itself seemed overwhelming. Her middle school had only had six hundred students, less than half the number here at Twin Branches High.
    The students in line smiled, laughed, chewed gum, read over their schedules, chatted, and flirted. Emily watched them nervously. How could they possibly look so happy and calm?
    Somewhere, in one of these halls, Nick Brown was walking around, looking for his first class and getting ready to start his senior year. Nick Brown was here. And Sara wasn’t. It just didn’t seem fair. How could the world be like this, where you got a girl killed and then just showed up at school the next year as if everything was normal?
    Emily still didn’t understand how it had happened, really.Sara almost always walked or jogged home from school. Given the storm that night, she might have decided to get a ride, but why hadn’t she just called their parents? To ride home with some random guy from school—that wasn’t Sara’s style.
    The first few days after Sara’s death were a black hole in Emily’s memory. Whatever Emily had thought or felt back then, it was simply gone. A week went by before she’d had the courage to ask her parents about the details of what had happened.
    She’d walked into her dad’s office one evening to find him sitting in a chair and staring at the screen of a laptop that had gone into standby mode.
    “Dad,” she’d said, “why did she ride home with him—with Nick Brown?”
    The mention of the boy’s name had made her father cringe.
    “Your sister made a stupid mistake,” he said.
    “But why did she—”
    “Emily, enough!”
    He turned his attention back to his computer then, clicking it awake, and Emily had stood stupidly in the doorway, watching him type for a few moments before retreating to the solitude of her room. Emily’s father had always been intense, but something had changed in him after the accident, as if any joy he took in life had died along with Sara.
    And for all this, she had Nick Brown to thank.
    Just thinking about him made Emily’s throat constrictand her chest burn. Who knew what would happen if she actually saw him? The best she could hope for was to make it through the next year without bumping into him. Yeah, right. Twin Branches High School was big—but it probably wasn’t that big.
    As Emily turned to start looking for her first class, her best friend, Kimi Chen, ran up and snatched the freshly printed ID out of Emily’s hands. They looked down at the photo together: Emily’s brown hair was pulled back tight, and the flash shone off her forehead like it was a giant Ping-Pong ball. The worst thing was that her eyes, which were supposed to be blue, instead glowed crimson. The whole look was completely terrifying. Didn’t the school’s camera have red-eye reduction?
    “Scary!” said Kimi, wrinkling her nose. “You totally look like that girl who gets possessed by a demon in that movie. You know, the one where the priest gets thrown out the window?”
    “Great,” said Emily, snatching back the ID and burying it in her jeans pocket.