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Problem was, her then was also her now.Ī sudden commotion and gasps from the throng could only mean one thing, Charlotte figured. Charlotte studied them all like a lab experiment, verifying for herself yet again that she didn’t fit in with any of them, now or then. Even the loners gathered, by conspicuously not gathering, dotting the periphery of the lot, asserting their collective individuality together. Jocks, nerds, goths, geeks, preps, stoners, posers, joiners of every stripe closed ranks with their own kind. She watched clique after clique assemble in the parking lot like schools of hungry piranhas, eyeing each other warily, at an impromptu outdoor Christmas party that nobody planned to attend. It was similar to lava flowing from an active volcano.Ĭharlotte found shelter against the brick façade of the high school and let the maelstrom pass. Students scrambled for daylight, what was left of it, and spilled out through every exit, down onto the concrete staircases and walkways, and out onto the front lawn. The hyperhormonal hurricane she’d had a brush with earlier in the hallway deepened to a Category Five dismissal.

Annoyed looks from teachers, suspicious stares from hall monitors, and threatening What are you looking at? glares from other students goosed her farther and farther down the hallway just as the last bell of the day, the last before Christmas vacation, before Christmas Eve, sounded. Attracting attention had never been a very successful endeavor for her before, but she hadn’t had to worry about all that for a while now, and she was a little rusty.

She stopped to peer into several classrooms, careful not to be seen. Returning to Hawthorne as a visitor as she had before-or as a tenant, so to speak, in Scarlet’s body-was one thing, but this was something else entirely. She felt like a girl with a new car driving right past her worst enemy’s house, not that she’d know, of course, but that’s what she imagined it would be like. But like many things that come packaged with a smile and in pretty paper, some gifts, once opened, can leave you wondering what the giver was really thinking, or not thinking, about you.Ĭharlotte wandered the halls for a good long time taking it all in. We try our best to value the act, the intention, the effort undertaken even above the thing itself, and receive it with an appreciative grin if not a wholehearted embrace. It is often said about giving that it’s the thought that counts.