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notices. “Blue background, huh? Nice touch.”
    â€œLook at this!” says McKenzie Monk, sliding Nero’s color wheel over to Ruby.
    Ruby had figured out Nero a long time ago. He always did his assignments in a way that nobody else would and asked questions that nobody expected—especially the teachers, who then had to stop whatever lesson they were supposed to be giving and go off on some weird trail that Nero had started. Ruby knows his color wheel will be different, and it is.
    He had printed twelve pictures of himself in a T-shirt and pasted them in a circle, like a clock. With markers, Nero had colored in the shirts and added little thought bubbles that showed the complementary colors—with real compliments. “My, Nero. Don’t you look dashing in red?” floated above the head of the green-shirted Nero picture. “Hubba hubba. Yellow brings out your eyes!” bubbled up from purple Nero.
    Ruby had expected Nero’s color wheel to be different, but she did not expect that it would make her laugh. Ruby laughs a real out-loud laugh, which is something you can’t do underwater.
    When she stops laughing, all the little Nero faces start to blur. And Ruby has a bunch of thoughts.
    One of them is that there is something wrong with her eyes.
    Another is that there is something wrong with her ears, because when Lucy says, “Are you okay?” it sounds like she’s using a speakerphone.
    And another is that maybe there is something wrong with her hands, because they have dropped her pencil to the floor, and even though it makes sense for her to bend over and pick the pencil up, her hands are not moving. They are just sitting there on her color wheel, covering up all the complement lines. And there are drops of water landing on her hands and on the painted squares of color, too, and the red and the orange are mixing all up into some other color that Ruby doesn’t have a name for and for which there is no complement on her color wheel, and she knows she is going to get a bad grade now.
    â€œRuby?” That’s Mrs. Tomas talking. “Ruby? Did you hurt yourself?”
    She did not hurt herself. She hurts, she realizes, but she did not hurt herself.
    â€œWould you like to go see the nurse?” Mrs. Tomas again.
    Ruby would not like to see the nurse, but it does seem like she ought not to stay here. Like she should not be crying in Mrs. Tomas’s art room and ruining her color wheel.
    â€œWhy are you crying?” asks the nurse, whose name Ruby doesn’t know. She is just the nurse.
    â€œI don’t know,” says Ruby. As she says it, she realizes that there is only one thing she could be crying about, and that is Gigi. But she hadn’t been thinking of Gigi. She was just looking at Nero’s color wheel and then . . .
    â€œAre you sad?” asks the nurse.
    Gigi being dead is a sad thing, and thinking about it now makes Ruby feel sad—but she wasn’t feeling sad when she started crying. Still, Ruby Pepperdine, who is good at figuring things out, understands that this answer will not be useful to the nurse. And so she says yes. She says that she had been thinking of her grandmother, who had died just a few months ago, and that she got sad.
    The nurse asks a few more questions, like if she cries a lot and if she feels depressed and if she wants to talk to a counselor, but Ruby says no. All she wants is a few minutes more to cry in and then she wants to go back to Art and see if she can fix her color wheel.
    And the nurse smiles and says take all the time you need, and Ruby says thank you. And she takes some time, which is not all she needs but is all it feels like she ought to take.
    Â 
    Later, after school, after Ruby is done helping Aunt Rachel with the girls and has gone home for supper, and done her homework, and taken out the kitchen garbage, she pulls her color wheel out of her backpack to see if she can fix it.
    The color