Wednesday is pretty much like Tuesday, except I write a different date on the top of my notes before totally zoning out in every class, trying to think my way out of the jinx. I avoid Zooey’s gaze for all of social studies and wait a full thirty minutes before heading out of school at the end of the day, but there she is: waiting for me on one of the large decorative boulders that mark the entrance to the courtyard.
“Oh, heck no,” I grumble as soon as I see her. Zooey turns at the sound of my voice and slides off the rock, slinging her backpack over her shoulder. I could run back inside the school, but she’s standing between me and the path to the library.
“You ditched me,” she says, sounding annoyed and a little impressed, once I’m directly in front of her.
“Look,” I say, sighing, “I told you I couldn’t work on our project yesterday. And I can’t today, either. I have to get home.”
She gives me a funny look and says sarcastically, “Don’t be too excited about working together or anything.”
“Trust me, I’m not,” I reply testily.
Zooey doesn’t even extend the energy to make a full eye roll. She just flicks her eyes up and to the left. “Obviously.”
“Sorry if you thought I was going to, like, fawn all over you,” I blurt out, a sickly shiver washing over me at the unfamiliar feeling of being mean to someone’s face. Is this how Zooey feels all the time? “I’m not one of your followers.”
“I don’t have followers,” she says sharply.
“Not anymore,” I respond icily.
Then I wince. Because Zooey winced. And I realize that I would make a terrible popular mean girl because I would just be hugging people ALL THE TIME, because how can you not after saying something that makes someone look the way Zooey looks right now?
“Sorry,” I mumble. And then I wonder, who has Zooey been hanging out with since she was defriended? I mean, that was last week, like, a whole lifetime ago. “So … ” I falter. “Who are you, like, hanging out with now?”
“None of your business. Who do you hang out with?” she shoots back.
I blink at her, her question bringing up an answer to a question I hadn’t even thought of asking, and my attention goes from the hurt feelings of Trepan’s Grove former Teen Queen to my own surreal set of circumstances. “Do you know who I hang out with?”
Her top lip goes all squirmy. “You are so weird.”
“No, really,” I say, suddenly desperate. “Do you know who my friends are?”
She lets out a huff of air. “Do you? I think that’s the real question.”
I just blink at her.
“Fine,” she says. “No, I don’t know who your real friends are. Happy?”
“Not at all,” I say, my voice small. I take a deep breath and add this new tidbit of information to my list. Nobody else remembers my friendships either.
Zooey sighs again. “So … can we go now?”
I blink at her. “You still … you still want to be my partner? I mean, we were just, like, really mean to each other. I, for one, am still smarting. I think … ” I pause, pretending to think. “I think maybe we should just go our separate ways and ask Ms. Lyle if we can do independent projects instead.”
Zooey does the thing I’ve gotten used to since our first conversation yesterday: She watches me through half-shut eyes, like she’s trying to bring me into focus.
“No,” she says. “That doesn’t work for me. We have to turn in the topic of our paper on November first. That’s in two weeks. We have to start now. And we’ll get docked if we don’t work together.”
“Fine.”
We walk out of the courtyard and start down the sidewalk, our feet shuffling through the fallen leaves, which have dried out a bit since yesterday. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see she’s looking at me. “Are you about to cry?” she asks, a little accusingly.
“No!” I answer, giving my face a good rub. “I’m just allergic to nature.”
From our right comes another voice. “Hattie!” I look over to see Ms. Thackary, our gym teacher and field hockey coach, sailing over the stone wall that borders the practice field. She manages to jog easily up the steep slope to the sidewalk.
“Oh, great,” I groan. I can’t believe I forgot about practice again. Zooey takes this opportunity to step away and text.
“I’m so sorry I missed practice,” I say before she’s even in front of us. She’s barely panting at all!
“What do you mean?” she asks. “Practice for what?”
A shivery feeling crawls up my back. “Field hockey?” I answer as a question.
“We’re full into the season,” she says brightly. “If you want to play next year, sign up! But I hope to see you at basketball tryouts next week.” She gives my height an up-and-down glance. “We could really use someone like you.” She smiles and nods at Zooey, and then jogs back down the hill, leaping over the stone wall as she calls out the next drill for the team.
“Holy cannoli,” I whisper. Did that just really happen? Did she really forget I was ever on the team? If she did, why didn’t she forget me, too? Then I remember. The day of field hockey sign-ups, Piper was the one who wrote down my name on the paper Ms. Thackary hung up outside the gym. This just keeps getting weirder and weirder.
“So let’s get to the library,” I say as Zooey and I start walking again.
“Not the library,” she says firmly.
“But that’s where all the books are!” I say. Then I follow her gaze down the sidewalk, where the last kids from school, including the Ts, are turning toward town, most likely heading for the library to work on their own projects.
“All the books and all the jerks,” she answers, ignoring my surprised look at the fact that she’s actually acknowledging what happened last week in the cafeteria. “Let’s go to the historical society instead.”
A lightbulb goes off in my head.
“Wait. They have books about Trepan’s Grove there, right?” I ask. I start to walk faster.
“Uh. Yeah. It’s the Trepan’s Grove Historical Society.”
“So they’d have books about the jinx, right?”
“The Harvest Jinx? Yeah, I guess. Why?”
“That’s what we should do our project on!” I say, realizing that if I can convince Zooey of this, she can help me find a way to break the jinx.
“The jinx?” Zooey scoffs, leading us under the blinking yellow traffic light that hangs over Main Street, and into the parking lot in front of the Trading Post. “Why? It’s just a dumb kids’ poem. I thought we could do it on women’s rights in Colonial times.”
I hesitate. That actually sounds really interesting. I glance up at the glassed-in porch of the Trading Post. “Oh, are we getting candy first? I could actually use a grape Fizzy Fuzz.” My mouth waters at the thought.
Zooey shakes her head at me and points hard at the small painted HISTORICAL SOCIETY sign hanging by the door of the Trading Post. I’d never noticed it before.
“I have to call my mom,” she says. “I’ll meet you upstairs.”
“Great! I’ll get started!” I say, yanking open the screen door and hurrying through the porch and into the Trading Post. I do a quick scan of the place and wonder how it is I never saw the hand-painted wooden sign next to a door on the back wall, reading TREPAN’S GROVE HISTORICAL SOCIETY. ATTIC.