Free Amandine by Adele Griffin

on the way to mine. Mary was sitting alone at her desk. When I hissed her name and waved, she stared and didn’t wave back. As Amandine pushed past me into the room, Mary looked down.
    What was done was done.
    I tagged Mary down in the hall after first period. Hooked her arm as she brushed by. She veered up like a spooked horse and nearly caused a couple of girls to collide into her from behind.
    “Watch it,” one girl snapped.
    Which spooked Mary even more. Wheeling away from them, from me, she changed course and fled around the corner. I followed her into the sports locker room, which was empty.
    “Go away, Delia,” she called over her shoulder.
    “Mary, what is it?”
    She had pulled herself up into a huddle on the windowsill. Her overlong arms were wrapped around her knees with her nose buried into the space between. All I saw was hair. I stopped at what seemed to be a polite distance. From far away, the starting second period bell rang. I would have to be late to algebra.
    “What?” I stepped from one foot to the other. “What?”
    “That picture.” Her voice was muffled.
    “Picture?”
    “As if you don’t know!”
    “Where is it?”
    “What do you care?”
    “I do. What was the picture of?”
    Mary looked up, her face working hard to stay controlled. “You thought I’d throw it away, but I’ve got it. In case I want Mr. Serra to suspend you guys. It’s evidence, you know. Bet you never thought of that.”
    “It wasn’t me, Mary. Whatever it was, it wasn’t me.”
    “Ha, ha. Funny, funny. You even signed it, in your own handwriting.” She stared at me hard, then leaned back to fish inside her front jeans pocket. The paper she extracted had been folded prettily in an imitation of Mary’s own style. But the paper itself had the same thick creamy weight and texture as a page from Amandine’s Ugliest Things notebook.
    I unfolded it.
    Amandine had used my rotten eyeballs as starting point. She had encased them in a pair of thick scratched glasses and gone on from there. In her picture, Mary was monstrously tall and hunched and hulking, a nightmare of all the things most awkward about her. Her underbite pushed her chin out like the man in the moon; the knobs of her elbows and knees stuck out from the church choir robe in which Amandine had dressed her. The details were scrupulous; the three-colored friendship bracelet, the scuffed hiking boots that Mary always wore, her carrot-shaped fingers. Amandine had picked up on everything and had translated it into this creature.
    Our names were signed at the bottom-Delia Blaine, Amandine Elroy-Bell—under the neat capital letters that read
MARY WHITECOMB:
    HE UGLIEST THING AT JAMES DEWOLF HIGH SCHOOL.
    What made it bad was that it was so good.
    “You’re smiling.” Mary snatched the paper.
    “No.”
    “It’s not anything to smile about.”
    “No, I know.”
    “Why did you?”
    “I didn’t. I mean, all I did was the eyeballs,” I explained. “That’s why I signed my name. She did all the rest. She made the rest of you out of the eyeballs.” It sounded like a lie. I could hear my breath, shallow as a dog’s. Why couldn’t I ever say the right thing?
    “I’m sorry,” I told her, “but I promise, I really didn’t have anything to do with this picture of you, Mary.”
    “That picture is not me,” said Mary.
    “No, of course not, all I meant was … Please, I promise we can clear this up.” My voice whined, begging her. “We’ll go find Amandine. She can’t … she’ll answer for it. She’ll have to. She’ll have to apologize.”
    It was lunch or never. I pushed through the rest of my morning’s classes in a fog. It had taken some convincing, but Mary had agreed to meet me in the cafeteria so that we could brave Amandine together.
    Fury and fear squeezed into a knot inside me. I just hoped that Amandine would be reasonable. That she would see how her joke had struck too hard. That she would understand how she had not thought all the