The Night Gwen Stacy Died Read Online Free Page A

long legs.
     This physical evaluation was not Sheila’s own. These were only the facts; these were
     the parts of her body that boys’ eyes rested on when they glanced in her direction.
     Otherwise, everything about her was expected. She was on the skinny side, and tallish—but
     not so tall that her height summoned attention—with long, light brown hair. Light
     brown, dirty blond—the same hair everyone had.
    She had one ally in the cafeteria: Anthony Pignatelli. Anthony was the only real friend
     she had hung on to since the start of high school. She knew some people assumed they
     were a couple, and as far as Sheila was concerned, people could say whatever they
     wanted about her and Anthony Pignatelli. He was a normal kid, and he made her laugh.
     Which was more than you could say about most people.
    To the untrained eye, the cafeteria might appear to be simply a place for students
     to eat, but in fact, it was composed of two disparate social spheres, universally
     referred to by their relative size: Small Caf and Large Caf. Small Caf was crowded—skinny
     girls shared metal folding chairs at the most populated tables—because it was preferable
     to squeeze together than to surrender one of their own to Large Caf. Large Caf, by
     contrast, was underpopulated. Empty chairs abounded. Much in the way that a deserted
     city with formerly big ambitions might feature large parks and grand, sweeping avenues
     but a few too many boarded-up windows as a result of its waning population, the space
     in Large Caf made it quite easy to detect who was eating alone; who had shimmied a
     folding chair up to the end of a table to seem a part of it but was, in fact, not;
     who clearly must be recognized—even by the residents of that respective Large Caf
     table—as extraneous.
    Freshman year, before Sheila had understood all of this, she’d sat at a Small Caf
     table while half its residents were still in the lunch line—a table of girls. The
     girls did not make any attempt to remove her, but when the table had reached capacity
     and Jessica Reynolds had to pull up a folding chair from another table, someone finally
     leaned in and made contact. “Who are you?” the girl asked.
    “Sheila,” Sheila said.
    “Sheila,” the girl repeated slowly amid laughter, nodding as if homing in on some
     shared truth.
    Sheila took a bite of her sandwich. This had been back before she completely gave
     up on the entire student body. This had been back when she still cared about things
     like what other people thought.
    “To Sheila,” someone raised a Pepsi in the air, and the table drank to her.
    Sheila forced a smile.
    Then someone else raised her drink, and it happened again. It happened six times during
     the lunch period. Sheila finished her sandwich and never stepped into Small Caf again.
    She was wary of groups. There was an impenetrable exchange of glances, an unspoken
     etiquette to which she had never felt privy, and tables in Small Caf obviously operated
     by these same unknowable rules. Sheila had always preferred the company of intense
     and loyal outsiders. If there were only two people in a given conversation, there
     was not as much room for error, margin for misinterpretation. As a child, her only
     friend had been a reclusive raven-haired girl in the neighborhood named Amelia. Amelia’s
     father was perpetually away on business, and her mother had a habit of sleeping until
     noon and spending the day pacing around the kitchen in lacy pajama shirts, refilling
     her glass from an endless supply of a blended drink. Amelia’s family was from Miami,
     and the way that Sheila’s own mother pronounced the word
Miami
, Sheila had the impression it was an untrustworthy landscape: polluted and dangerous.
     She had always thought Amelia’s mother very glamorous, but Amelia did not agree. Amelia
     was not allowed to come out of the house and play until her mother woke up, so Sheila
     would often spend the long late morning