What We Keep Is Not Always What Will Stay Read Online Free Page B

kids, and now we’re back to being at the low end of the food chain. I was pleased to see that Noah Michalski isn’t looking nearly as cocky as usual, either.
    Lily elbowed me. “Isn’t that Jesse Francis?”
    Jesse Francis looked like someone had taken the kid from the paper and overwritten him entirely with someone else who just looked like him. He was tall, with dark hair cut short and an Adidas jacket that might have belonged to him before he went into the army. He had on baggy khakis and you couldn’t see which leg was missing, but from the way he walked, I thought it was the left one. He looked not quite balanced, as though he was still learning to use the artificial leg. He had a pink piece of paper in his fist and was peering at it as if it might be in code. Everybody made a little space around him. Finally he said to a senior, “Hey man, where’s the Multipurpose Room?” and the senior pointed.
    “That’s what they renamed the cafeteria last year.”
    “Thanks, man.” Jesse nodded and headed that way, while the senior stood looking after him as if he had just talked with somebody famous or scary or both. A bunch of senior girls stared at him as he went by, too, and went into an Urgent Discussion Huddle as soon as he’d turned the corner.
    By the time we found our homeroom and got our schedules untangled and had lunch, the day was pretty much over. None of the teachers ever expect to get anything done the first day. Lily’s in most of my classes and we both have Drivers’ Ed, even though Lily already has a license. Drivers’ Ed is what you take in the tenth grade no matter what. I wonder if they’re making Jesse Francis take Family Living with the rest of the seniors. That’s the class where they have them carry a raw egg around all day and pretend it’s a baby.
    Turns out that Jesse Francis is in my art class. He was sitting by himself on the first day, folded up on a stool with his elbows on his knees. The studio is about half student desks and half stools at the work table. I was late and everybody else had dumped their bookbags and stuff into the empty seats and no one looked inclined to move their stuff for me, so I climbed up on the stool next to Jesse.
    He gave me a grave nod. He has huge dark eyes under dark brows and his skin looks like it’s stretched just a little too thin on his face. I nodded back.
    Mr. Petrillo, the art teacher, said that we were going to do freehand sketches of this apple—he held it up—just to get limbered up. So we did that, while he walked around the room looking at our apples.
    “Nice line … think shape , remember, this thing is round … don’t try to photograph it, child, loosen up … you, too, it’s not a blueprint …”
    I snuck a look at Jesse’s apple. It looked as if he had drawn it without ever lifting the pencil off the paper, just run the point around and around some real apple that wasn’t visible to anybody else.
    “That’s really cool,” I whispered. “How did you do that?”
    He shrugged. “It’s just a trick.”
    Mr. Petrillo liked it. He pinned it up on the board as one of the ones that had captured the essence of apple.
    “What are you doing in beginning art?” I whispered.
    He shrugged again. “I needed an elective.” He kind of smiled. “It’s better than marching band.”
    “Oh my God, I would think so,” I said, and then thought that might not have been the best thing to say. But he cracked a smile.
    “The leg makes me walk funny.” He lurched his shoulders from side to side like Frankenstein.
    I didn’t try to pretend not to know what he meant. Everybody in school knows, and he knows they know. “And the uniforms are dorky,” I suggested.
    “And the uniforms are dorky.”
    “Angie, a little more attention to your drawing, please,” Mr. Petrillo said.
    We didn’t talk anymore that day, but the next day when I saw him in the hallway, he grinned at me and gave me a little wave. I was kind of flattered he