Principal Archer’s short, hare-like nose wiggled as he thumbed through the jumble of folders and loose pieces of paper cluttering his desk. “That’s odd. We don’t have any record of your transfer, Ms. Specter.”

“Oh I’m sure it’s on its way,” I said from across the desk.

“What school did you say you were transferring from?”

“Woodrow Wilson.” The name was the first that came to mind. Schools were often named after presidents, and Woodrow Wilson had been in office when I died. “Ruth Specter of Woodrow Wilson High School.” I decided to go with my given name. Daisy was the name my father had given me when I was a wee thing. I’d picked him a gerbera daisy from our front yard, and he’d decided the name suited me better than the name of his mother-in-law.

Principal Archer typed something into the computer.

“Dear oh dear,” he said. “There are over 200 Woodrow Wilson High Schools.”

“You don’t say?” Guess I picked right.

“We better narrow it down. What city?”

“City?” If he found the school, he’d soon discover that Ruth Specter never attended it. “Oh you won’t find it on there. No, my school doesn’t use computers.”

“Really?” He looked incredulous. “How extraordinary.”

“It’s hard to believe, I know. But good old Woodrow Wilson High has some very old school ideas. I’m afraid computers are simply too new school for them.”

“I’m afraid we can’t accept you as a student at Happy Valley High until your records arrive.”

“Can’t you just enroll me in a couple classes until then?”

“I’m sorry, but my hands are tied.”

Angry, I stood and planted my gloved hands firmly on the desk, but when I tilted my head down, the opaque sunglasses covering the black holes where eyes should have been, slid down the bridge of my nose.

Principal Archer went white as a sheet as he peered into the abyss within me.

“Oh dear,” I said. “You weren’t supposed to see that.”

“Where are your eyes?”

“Same place as my hands.” I tore off my right glove to reveal nothing underneath. “In a pine box six feet under.”

It was the last thing I wanted to do, but the only thing I could do now that he’d seen what I was. I couldn’t let him scuttle my plans, not when I’d worked so hard, and with so much at stake.

He gasped as I plunged my handless hands through his skull, deep into the warm gray matter of his spongy brain. His body went stiff as a rod, and I closed my eyeless eyes in concentration, strolling the halls of his mortal mind. It took only a moment to find the fresh memory. I plucked it like a pie from a sill and replaced it with something far more useful to me, and a lot less traumatizing to him.

It wasn’t something I enjoyed doing, this rummaging around someone’s mind. I learned how to charm quite by accident, long before I even became a level 5. But that’s a story for another time.

I withdrew myself from Principal Archer’s mind, pulled the glove back onto my handless hand, and slipped my sunglasses back into place. It took what seemed like an age for the man’s stupor to wear off.

“I’m sorry,” he said, looking dopey and bewildered. “My mind seems to have wandered off for a moment. What was I saying?”

“You were telling me how you’d spoken to someone at my old school. That they’d be sending along my transcripts in the next few days.”

“Yes, that was it.”

“And that you’d be delighted to enroll me at once.”

“I can’t think of a single reason why we shouldn’t.” He paused and thought for a moment, tilting his head to the side as if a good reason might slide out his ear onto his desk, but coming up empty, he shrugged and grinned affably. “Welcome to Happy Valley High, Ms. Specter.”

#

“You’re weeks behind.” The physics teacher, a fidgety man with sparse gray hair, barely looked at me. “You have a good deal of catching up to do.”

“There’s nothing I can’t do once I put my mind to it,” I said, making my voice deeper, more gravelly and guttural than normal, like an old spinster who’d smoked three packs of unfiltered cigarettes since she was 6 years old. I didn’t want whichever boy was Cole to judge me just yet. I needed to do a little reconnaissance first.

“As long as your pre-calculus is up to snuff,” said Mr. Marriott, “you should be fine.”

“Pre-calculus?”

There were a couple chuckles behind me, but the teacher only raised an eyebrow. “Math,” he said.

“Oh, of course. My last teacher, Miss Graves, gave me high marks in arithmetic.”

The chuckles were joined by a chorus of snickers and one rather galling snort.

He looked up at me through his bushy eyebrows and said, “I was thinking more along the lines of algebra and trigonometry.”

“I’m proficient in both,” I lied.

“Fine, fine,” he said. “Take a seat.”

I turned and faced the class. Most eyes veered away as they might have if they saw some especially grisly dead thing on the road ahead. Others stared in fascination. Those were my kind of people.

There must have been twenty-five or so students. I would have counted, but I was so nervous, my arithmetic was failing me. Miss Graves would have been so disappointed.

I carefully walked down the long aisle toward the only available seat in the last row, concentrating on each step: Left, right, left … My right ankle buckled under me, but I recovered quickly and hoped nobody was paying attention.

Two girls, both fetching, whispered cruel secrets to each other and giggled while looking at me. A third girl, who was not only comely, but perhaps the prettiest thing I’d seen in life or death, with jewel-like eyes and a perfect button nose, took aim at the pair with a scolding gaze. I knew who the leader of this pack was.

The pair wiped away their superior smirks as if they were soldiers dressed down by their sergeant. That same girl looked me square in the face and offered a warm and inviting smile. It was a welcome haven.

I strained to flatten my lips into what I hoped was a grin, which caused her own to falter. But with grace and poise denoting good breeding, she recovered quickly, and gave me a nod of much needed moral support.

I dropped into the seat and glanced over at the pupil to my right, wondering if he might be Cole. The ginger-haired boy covered the side of his face nearest me like half a set of horse blinders, presumably so he didn’t have to look upon my grotesqueness. He wasn’t exactly God’s gift to womankind. The boy had a piggish nose and no chin to speak of, and his eyes were altogether too far apart.

The boy on my left, however—once you got past the scruffiness, the slouched posture, the earphones in his ears, and the overall unkempt quality of his person—wasn’t at all bad to look at. I imagined he rode a motorcycle and had a switchblade tucked into his leather boots, though now that I looked, he wasn’t wearing boots at all but black canvas high-tops. He was athletic. Not muscle-bound, but muscular, lithe, and strong, a physique no doubt built in the yard of some juvenile detention center.

He gave a polite half-smile and turned back to his textbook. He was sketching a girl’s face on the inside of the back cover, a face that somehow felt familiar, though for the death of me I couldn’t place it. Maybe someone on television.

“Are we boring you, Broderick?” said the teacher.

There was no answer. Whoever he was addressing must’ve been ignoring him. “Mr. Cole,” the teacher shouted.

Finally, the delinquent beside me rolled his eyes and gave an exasperated sigh as he pulled out one of his ear buds and turned his attention to the annoyed Mr. Marriott.

“Either take them out or get out.”

The boy pulled out the other ear bud and gave a flat smile that said, Happy?

Mr. Cole? That’s what the teacher had called him. Surely this couldn’t be my Cole. When the boy glanced over at me, I quickly averted my fixed gaze.

“And you, Ms. Specter,” said the teacher. “No sunglasses in class.”

“Oh I’m afraid they’re ever so necessary,” I said. “Medically speaking.”

Several students shifted in their seats, but not the nice girl. She placed her hand over her heart, and her face bloomed with what I assumed was kind-hearted pity. Poor girl. Poor disfigured, monster of a girl.

Mr. Marriott cleared his throat. “Ah, that’s fine then. I’ll just need a doctor’s note.” The man’s attention snapped back to Broderick Cole, who’d slipped on his own dark sunglasses when I wasn’t looking.

“They’re necessary,” he said in a challenging tone. “Medically speaking.”

Mr. Marriott threw up his hands. “Let’s just continue the lesson, shall we?”

Cole lowered his head and winked an almost sky blue eye at me, opening a small window into his mysterious soul. If I’d had toes at that moment, they would have curled. It really was Cole, in the flesh.

He shifted his attention to the nice girl. Her face puckered and she shook her head in disapproval. Clearly these two had history. Was this the girlfriend? If she was my competition, I didn’t have a prayer.

#

Cole was halfway out the door before the bell stopped ringing, his olive drab messenger bag slung over his back. It reminded me of what some of the soldiers leaving for Europe during World War I had carried as they’d boarded the train and headed East. Some of them never came back.

I wanted to call out to him, to shout out his name and tell him it’s me, the girl he wanted to kiss, the girl who loved him, the girl who ran away because she was scared she wouldn’t be seen—but he was already gone.

It was the same story for English, World History, Art, and French III, the only class in which I did not feel woefully unprepared. Monsieur Stumphy told me my accent was superb, but that some of my grammar was rather old fashioned, hardly a surprise considering I learned mostly by reading Gustave Flaubert, Victor Hugo, and Alexandre Dumas.

The worst part about the day, other than missing or throwing away every opportunity to speak to Cole, was that I had to speak in that same ridiculous smoky voice in every class we shared, which was all of them.

When the bell rang this time, I was closest to the door and got there just in time to precipitate a collision with Cole, spilling my books at his feet.

“Sorry,” he said, and right on cue, he crouched to help me pick them up.

“Non, non,” I said as if I had a frog in my throat, “en Francaise, si vous plait.” It had been Monsieur Stumphy’s refrain throughout the class.

“Uh … Je suis désolé?”

“Tres bon.”

He straightened and handed me my books. I clutched them against my breasts, such as they were.

“You’re pretty good with French stuff,” he said.

“But not so great with world history. I still can’t believe Prussia isn’t a country anymore. What a shame. Prussian blue has always been one of my favorite colors. Did you know that it got its name from the color of the uniforms the Prussian infantry wore, and that the pigment responsible for the color is also an antidote for certain poisons?”

His mouth tilted in an amused smile.

“Sorry,” I said. “I have too much time to read.”

“Funny how we have all the same classes together. Almost like it was planned.”

“Ha! That’s funny. You’re funny … Broderick, is it?”

He rolled his eyes. “Broderick Cole Jr. But please never call me Broderick or Junior. My friends call me Cole.”

“Nice to meet you, Cole. I’m …” Your Daisy, whose soul you’ve laid bare a thousand times in her sleepless dreams. “Ruth.”

“Huh. You don’t seem like a Ruth to me.”

“Oh? What do I seem like?”

Before he could answer, the nice girl from physics slipped her arm through his.

“We need to talk,” she said to him in a low voice.

“There is no we.” He pulled his arm away. “See you around, Ruth.” He flashed a sweet smile that fell away as it brushed against the girl.

You can bet on it.

“Ruth,” said the girl, inspecting me. “Like the Book of Ruth—from the Bible.”

“I suppose so.”

“Always putting the welfare of others before herself,” she said with felicity. “I totally identify. I’m Kynzlee by the way.” The effervescent girl might’ve been an auctioneer with how fast she spoke. “As class president, I wanted to give you a proper welcome to Happy Valley High.”

“Thank you. That’s very kind. But I should be going.”

She followed me into the hall. ”Are you new to the area?”

“Lived here all my life,” I said. “But I was home-schooled before this.”

“Oh my heck! So, like, all of this must be so strange for you.”

“Actually yes.”

Kynzlee gave an understanding nod. “You’re so brave. I don’t think I could … I mean with your …” Kynzlee’s mouth snapped shut.

“You and what’s his name—Cole, is it? Are the two of you …?”

“A couple?” she said in a way that was altogether too strident. “Of course.” She hooked her arm around mine and made a face as if she’d just taken an unexpectedly sweaty hand. “Anyway, Cole’s been going through a tough time lately, so I’ve been giving him some space. Boys need that. Not that you wouldn’t know that,” she added. “I’m sure boys were falling over themselves at your last school.”

“Only father.”

She looked shocked.

“Home schooled, remember?”

“Oh right.” She led me to a glass case stuffed with trophies, plaques, and photographs.

“That was him Freshman year.” She pointed to a picture of the football team. Cole was on one knee in the front row, a cheerful smile on his face, a football helmet under his arm. “The year after that we won the state championship, and last year we did it again with him as captain of the team.” She pointed to another picture. The all-American boy with the self-assured smile was a far cry from the brooding criminal I’d just spoken to.

“What happened to him?”

Kynzlee painted on a saccharine smile and pulled me away from the trophy case. “Who can say?”

We stepped outside in time to watch Cole mounting his motorcycle in the parking lot. He might’ve cobbled the old thing together himself. He started it with a kick, and it grumbled to life.

“Golly.” I might’ve drifted away if Kynzlee hadn’t been mooring me to the ground.

“I have an idea,” she said. “Come to dinner at my house.”

“Oh I couldn’t impose.”

“My parents love to entertain, and my mom is, like, the best cook. It’ll be fun. Please, please, please? I’m stubborn as a mule and I won’t take no for an answer.”

One thing I never anticipated—in fact never thought possible—was making a friend, let alone one who was a rival for Cole’s heart. This life stuff sure had gotten complicated in the past hundred years or so. Although, I thought, teasing out the idea, she probably did know a lot about Cole, information she might be prodded to share—one way or another.

“Why not?” I said, though as I did so, a thousand reasons paraded across my mind like a tickertape.