As she fled the room, she heard Mr. Howe growl softly. “You seem to have lost sight that these are little kids, Kevin. You are here to teach, not to casually insult them, and you don’t make them a target by singling them out. If I hear about you picking on any of the kids in my grade, or the school for that matter, I will do my best to see to it you no longer work here. I may even feel it necessary to give you a more personal understanding of the effects of being bullied. Hands-on, so to speak. I trust my position in this matter is clear.”
Louise was not sure if Mr. Howe had been serious, but Mr. Kessler seemed to think he was. He avoided her and Mr. Howe for the next few days. She wasn’t sure if that meant he’d peacefully allow them access to the printers. Half-expecting him to sabotage the print runs, she did the two hologram projectors first. Only when they finished successfully did she feel confident in attempting to print the magic generator.
While everyone was working attaching the leaves to the first umbrella trees, she slipped away to the technical annex and programmed in the last job.
“This is the last one?” Iggy made her jump by suddenly showing up beside her.
She nodded, not trusting her voice to answer. She focused on making sure everything was set correctly before pressing the start button.
Iggy perched on the edge of the nearest art table. “You don’t like people paying attention to you, do you?”
“No.” She glanced toward the art room and discovered that all the teachers were focused on the rest of the class dueling with the newly made swords. It was the first time she’d ever been alone with a boy and it made her vaguely uncomfortable even though Iggy had been acting like they were friends.
“Most people actually don’t like being in the spotlight.” Iggy swung his legs back and forth, probably unaware that it made him look very much a little boy. He was, though, the oldest kid in both fifth-grade classes. “Sometimes they find ways to keep people from noticing them. Little things. Like not smiling so much, not looking people in the eye. It’s so little that they don’t always realize they’re doing it.”
Was he implying that she wasn’t meeting people’s gaze? Certainly, considering everything she’d been doing lately, she had been trying not to draw attention to herself. Had he just caught her at stealing printer time? He probably didn’t understand the programming, as it was years above what they were doing in class. She closed the window just in case.
“The problem is that those little things work too well,” Iggy said. “People start to ignore you. But because you’re not totally aware of what you’re doing, you start imagining that there’s a good reason that they don’t look at you. You think you’re ugly and awkward and all the horrible reasons why people wouldn’t want to look at you.”
“I don’t. .” And then she paused, as her breath caught in her chest with the realization that she did. Embarrassment burned up her face. He knew how she felt, like he’d found it written someplace and read all her secrets. “I don’t think I’m ugly.”
“Just not as cute as your sister?”
She ducked her head so he couldn’t see her blinking. Crying in school; only kindergarteners did that.
“Your sister is shy, too.”
“Jillian?” Louise snorted with disbelief. Jillian loved people watching her.
“She doesn’t like people looking at her, but if she can become someone else, have a part she can act, then she doesn’t mind them watching, because they’re not really looking at her.”
“That’s silly.”
“You don’t like acting because you don’t like becoming someone you’re not. That’s why you’re fine with being the stage manager.”
“How do you know? You barely know us. I bet, from behind, you couldn’t even tell us apart.”
“I think I could. Not a week ago, no, but now, yeah. Up to a week ago, you two were like some masked wrestling tag team. The villain type that always cheat by being in the ring at the same time.”
“You watch pro wrestling? You know that’s fake?”
“It’s theater. And yes, I watch it with my dad. I think he’s worried about me growing up with so many sisters, like I might be permanently warped by Barbie dolls and Disney princesses.”
“He’s afraid you might be gay.”
“I’m not! But, yes, in a nutshell, he’s worried I’ll get to like pink too much or something under the pressure. .” He trailed off, blushing red. “My oldest sister. When she’s home and she’s alone, she’s really beautiful. But as soon as she knows someone is watching, she does all she can to make herself invisible. I didn’t notice, not for a long time. I don’t know when it went from being shy to something else. I saw the cuts sometimes on her arms, but I didn’t understand what they meant.”
Something quietly awful had happened to Iggy’s oldest sister. The details were carefully hidden away, but it involved an ambulance outside the school late in the afternoon and her entire class going through counseling the following weeks.
“I’m not like that.”
“I know you’re not.” He kicked at the table leg. “You’re smart enough to figure it out. If you make yourself invisible, then people can’t see how beautiful you are.”
“You — you think I’m beautiful?”
His eyes went wide, and he blushed red. He hadn’t meant it. He slid down off the table, suddenly focusing hard on his shoes. She looked away, her throat suddenly seeming small and raw.
He started to flee, but he paused by the door. “I–I think you’re like my sister,” he stammered without turning around to look at her. “All alone, you’re beautiful. And I wish someone had been able to convince my sister of that when she was younger. It’s okay to be shy, but by trying to hide, you might start to hurt yourself without even realizing it.”
15: Crowd Sourcing
Jillian was being Peter Pan when the bell rang, announcing the end of last period. She was standing on one of the art room tables, practicing lines of the first scene with Elle as Wendy. Louise paused at the doorway, wondering if Iggy was right, that Jillian could only stand on the table, bigger than life, because at that moment, she was Peter and not Jillian.
Zahara shook her head at the lines. “I’m just saying, if he showed up in some girl’s bedroom in Queens, she’s not going to be all ‘Boy, why are you crying.’ She’d be either hitting him with pepper spray or calling 911.”
“It’s a fantasy!” Elle cried. “What part of fairies and pixie dust are you missing? It’s not operating in our reality.”
“Obviously, the Darlings just moved from some little town in England to New York City.” Giselle held up one sheets of the backdrop graffiti that would be seen through the nursery window. “One of their parents has been assigned a menial government job at the British Embassy. Probably their father. He’s the government type. Their mother is either a daycare aide or works at a Build-A-Bear or something like that.”
“We’ve already changed the play to the point of breaking!” Elle waved her copy of the script. “It’s a classic. It’s like rewriting Shakespeare.”
“People are rewriting Shakespeare all the time,” Zahara said. “And making them newly arrived from some farm town kills the whole ‘not in Kansas’ angle we’re going for with the sets! Our audience will relate more to Wendy if she’s just a little freaked out about having some mental case show up in her bedroom.”