Lux woke up Monday morning to her father’s voice spilling into her room.
“Luxana. Up. Be dressed and in the kitchen by oh seven hundred.”
Lux groaned and looked at her clock. It was 6:45 a.m.
“You want me to be ready in fifteen minutes?” she whined. “Seriously? What for?”
“Look at the note on your desk.”
Lux couldn’t help it. She smiled at the ceiling before hopping out of bed.
Her dad used to leave her notes every morning when they lived together. Silly drawings, funny quotes, sometimes just ones that said things like, Shine today, Luxana Ruby Lawson. She didn’t think she’d ever get those notes back after he left. But maybe she was wrong.
Lux found a slip of yellow paper on her desk that read: Got an email from Augusta Savage admissions late last night. You’re in, baby girl! Good job.
“I’m what?” Lux shouted, and she could hear her dad laughing from the kitchen.
As Lux stepped into the kitchen, she could tell her father had a big lecture/pep-talk/first-day-threat-sesh prepared. And Penny looked frazzled because Lillia was screaming. The whole scene seemed like it would stress Lux out. So she just grabbed a banana and got out of the apartment as quickly as possible, but she tucked the note into her pocket. Lux wanted to keep the glimpse of the old version of her dad with her.
On the way to school, she read over the list she’d written in her journal, made one small change, then she recited it over and over to the beat of the song blaring in her headphones. Listen to Dad. Go to school. Make friends. Join a club. No boys.
When she saw the school again, though, with its flying flags and murals along the doors, most of the list flew from her mind.
Lux hadn’t noticed it when she came in for her interview, but Augusta Savage School of the Arts was in a short, colorful building, and it looked a little out of place. It sat squeezed between a dental office and a grocery store, on a tiny one-way street in Harlem. It seemed too cheerful and bright to belong on the otherwise gray block. Lux liked that about it—she didn’t feel like she fit in, either. She felt more excited than she wanted to admit. The school looked like it gave out second chances: a place where she might find her place. Lux had only one thought filling her head as she walked through the school’s front doors. The final item on her list, she realized, was the most important one. No one could know.
No one could know the real reason she had to transfer in the middle of the year or what had happened at her old school. No one could know how often she got angry, or that videos and photos of her latest fight existed. No one could find out about Simone’s broken nose. She’d been at enough schools to know that if people knew your history, you never got a real chance to start over.
She tried not to look lost or bring any attention to herself, but everyone else seemed to be doing the opposite. Lux noticed a rainbow’s worth of dyed hair, too many piercings to count, and dozens of instrument-toting and wildly dressed students as she walked a short distance down the main hall. When she found her locker, she unzipped her backpack and used her phone’s camera to check her makeup. Her pink lip gloss popped under the florescent lights. She looked good, she thought, especially for someone who’d only had fifteen minutes to get ready.
Lux opened her camera bag, checking to see which lenses she had with her. She didn’t have some of the ones she might need, and she felt more amateurish than ever, but she turned to scan the hallway with her camera in hand. She hoped taking a few photos would help her feel calm, or at least more like herself.
“Hey,” she heard a kinda cute guy say to her. “You dropped this.” He was handing her a lens cap. His hazel eyes were peeking out from his gingerbread-brown face, and his messy charcoal-black hair made him look like trouble. Dark-haired guys were a weakness of hers, but boys were a complication she couldn’t afford.
She could look, she told herself. She just wouldn’t touch. “Thanks,” she said, taking the cap from him and slipping it back into her camera bag. “Can I take your photo?”
He smirked and looked her up and down. Without blinking, she looked right back.
“Sure,” he said. “You new?”
Lux shrugged and lifted her camera, loving the weight of it. It made her feel invisible and seen all at once.
“Don’t smile,” she said, which always worked like a charm to break down whatever people tended to build in front of their faces the second they knew someone planned to take their picture.
The guy said, “What?” and laughed.
She snapped the photo. That single click eased a bit of tension out of her body. She wanted to take more pictures, but she didn’t want him to think she was weird. She also worried he’d do something to piss her off and the whole turning-over-a-new-leaf thing she had going would be ruined on her first day. So she just said, “Thanks again.”
She moved through the hall that way, using the camera to introduce and calm herself all at once. And she knew what they were thinking: Who’s the new girl taking pictures of whoever she wants? Where did she come from? And maybe even, Who does she think she is?
Lux sometimes wondered the same things about herself. In the past year, she’d tried being a loner, tried blending in, and tried fighting back. Now she would try being someone completely different. Someone likable. Someone who tried new things, and made friends, and who didn’t get angry all the time. She hoped it would work.
Just before first period, Lux found a copy of the school paper in the girls’ bathroom. As she walked to class, she flipped through it, scanning the photos more than the articles themselves. She could see that the photographer had talent, but they kind of lacked . . . range. The photos, no matter the subject, were taken from far away. It made everything seem big and important, but Lux thought getting closer for certain moments might make the stories seem more personal and the students more human.
She thought that maybe, if given the chance, she could do better. I do need to join a club, she thought. And how perfect would being the newspaper photographer be? She imagined how she would have shot a story on the second page about the fine-arts students’ last show.
When she looked up from the paper a second later, she spotted a group of pretty girls standing tall like they were royalty. They looked nothing like Danika or any of the other half-friends she’d had over the last year. They looked like they could be good for her—like the friends she had before her dad moved out, before she’d messed up at one school and then at another and her parents began to see her as a problem. Lux had been popular once, and popular girls were powerful. She had a feeling these girls were exactly what she needed to make sure what happened at her last school didn’t happen here.
Lux stuffed the paper into her bag, pulled out her camera again, and walked toward them.
“Hey.” She let her camera hang from one hand and reached out with the other. “I’m Lux,” she said, knowing she only had one opportunity to make the right first impression. Her nails sparkled just the way she’d imagined they would when she picked this nail polish out of her collection before her interview. Genevieve Lawson taught her daughter that she could overcome anything with the right manicure. She hoped the nails would continue to serve her well.
One of the girls smiled at her. She was dark-skinned and curvy, with short relaxed hair cut into a bob, and she had on a skirt with flowers all over it. The lightest-skinned of the three, in ripped jeans and a shirt that hung off one of her freckled shoulders, watched Lux but didn’t say anything. The last girl—the tallest and clearly the one in charge, the one Lux needed to impress—said, “Lux?” like she had misheard her.
Lux lowered her hanging hand and nodded. The way this girl looked at her made Lux feel all wrong—like she’d already messed things up.
The tall girl straightened her glasses, looked at her friends, then looked back at Lux. She sighed as if this whole conversation bored her, but then she said, “I’m Noelle. That’s Tobyn, and Micah’s the cute one in the skirt. You new? You seem new.”
Lux stepped a little closer to them. “I am,” she said. She lifted her camera and asked, “Can I take your photo?”
Noelle laughed. She doubled over and the tip of her high ponytail nearly touched the floor.
Micah smiled again. Tobyn frowned.
When Noelle stopped laughing, she said, “Well, that’s pretty weird of you, Lux. But I can respect a girl with balls. And let’s be real, we are pretty hot.” She looped one arm around Tobyn’s waist and flung the other over Micah’s shoulders. The bright streak of blue in Tobyn’s dark hair shone as she pushed out her lips, and Micah applied some gloss before smiling widely. They looked so damn perfect.
“Don’t smile,” Lux said.
Tobyn’s lips slipped into a smirk. Micah’s glossy mouth fell open in surprise. Noelle tilted her head to one side like she didn’t know what to make of Lux.
Lux snapped the photo.
“Thanks,” she said. “See you around?”
“Hope so,” Micah said, grinning.
“For sure,” Tobyn agreed.
“Looks like it,” Noelle mumbled, turning back to the other girls. It felt like Noelle wanted to say that these were her friends and Lux could find her own. But Lux was determined. She needed friends, and these were the ones she wanted.
And when she put her mind to it, Lux always got what she wanted.