I couldn’t help being curious to know what someone like Nia would have in her locker. She was so serious—it wouldn’t have surprised me if there’d been a bound set of Supreme Court cases or a collection of Save the Whales bumper stickers in different languages. While Mr. Thornhill rifled through the unexpected amount of junk piled high inside—books and notebooks, two pairs of broken sunglasses, a bunch of empty candy wrappers, a bag of marbles, some Mardi Gras beads—I
snuck glances at the postcard of the poster for a movie called The Thin Man taped next to a picture of a Mayan or Aztec warrior-looking guy on the inside of the door under a magnet in the shape of a fish with the word DARWIN written inside it. Pretty surprising stuff compared with what I’d imagined.
Mr. Thornhill didn’t find anything that would have definitively proven Nia’s guilt, and it obviously pissed him off. He slammed her locker shut and started walking. Hal and I followed a few paces behind. When I looked around to see what had happened to Nia, she was standing, staring at the closed door of her locker. A minute later, she turned and ran to catch up with us.
As soon as she was walking alongside me and Hal she said,
“I—”
“Not now,” said Hal. His voice was somewhere between a whisper and a hiss. “But—”
“Not now,” he said again.
Hal’s face remained completely blank as we stood in front of his locker, where there was a stencil of another animal—some kind of cat or maybe a lion—also in pale gray, also in the lower right-hand corner. He was wearing a long-sleeved white T-shirt, and he looked almost bored as he leaned his hip into the wall of lockers next to his own, toying with one of the cuffs while Mr. Thornhill rifled through his stuff. Hal’s locker was really organized for a boy’s—there were books and notebooks neatly lined up, and hanging on the inside of the door was a small pouch with a bunch of colored pens in it. At one point,
Mr. Thornhill took what looked like a sketchbook off the shelf and held it, closed, for a minute, looking at Hal as if to see if he’d flinch.
I flinched for him. I mean, Hal’s a great artist and I can barely draw a stick figure, but my artistic talents (or lack thereof) aren’t the reason that if Mr. Thornhill ever looked through my Scribble Book, I’d die of shame. The whole thing is just so … personal. It’s the closest thing I have to a diary, and the only person I’d ever let see it was Amanda. I realized that if I hadn’t left it at home today, Mr. Thornhill, Hal, and Nia might have had the opportunity to look at my most private thoughts, and I wondered if that was the kind of thing Hal sketched. If so, he must have been crying inside.
But Hal’s face remained blank as Mr. Thornhill raised the book slightly, then lowered it, as if he were weighing the decision to open it, literally and metaphorically. After a minute, he slipped the book back where it had been and slammed Hal’s locker shut, too. Hal stayed behind to lock it after Thornhill had walked away, and when I turned back to check if he was following us, I saw him standing with his head leaning against the cool metal.
I could feel my heart beating in my throat as we turned the corner into the science wing, where my locker was. I never go to my locker until after first period since all of my first period classes were about as far from the science wing as you can get without actually leaving the town of Orion. The last time I’d been here was yesterday, right before math, my last class. I’d actually been standing right here when I got Amanda’s text—
My locker is halfway down the hall, and it seemed to me that the trip was definitely proving Zeno’s Paradox—you can’t travel from point A to point B because the distance must be divided by half each time, and you can divide distances in half indefinitely until you’ve proven you can’t move forward at all. I watched the numbers climb from 100 to 110 to 120 and then, finally, 128. My locker.
I scanned the scuffed, metal surface, but I didn’t see anything in the corner where Hal’s cat and Nia’s bird had been. I had time to feel an instant of confusion and disappointment when suddenly my eyes caught a shape, the same gray color as theirs had been, up on the top right-hand corner.
It was a little bear. And in spite of myself, I let out a tiny gasp of amazement.
“You’re getting the bear.”
It was weird to be out of school so early, but since math class was canceled, Amanda convinced me to go with her to Lakshmi’s Henna Tattoos. She’d said it was because she was thinking about getting one, but almost as soon as we walked in the door, the focus changed from which tattoo she might get to which one I would.
“Amanda, I’m not getting anything. I don’t even have any money on me.” I added the “on me” quickly, though the sentence would have been equally true without it.
“It’s my treat.” She walked over to the wall where the tattoo designs were displayed. There were hearts, anchors, letters, and words. Some of the designs were enormous, like a skyline
of New York City with the Empire State Building in the middle, some were tiny, like the peace signs and doves I associate with hippies.
Amanda focused on a spot on the wall. “I think this is the one.”
“You’re crazy,” I said, but I went over to see what she was looking at.
“Remember, the bear is your totem.”
Amanda had already taught me about totems. Apparently we have animals that can protect and guide us. Usually it takes a while to figure out which animal spirit we’re associated with, but because of my name, Amanda had immediately known my totem was the bear.
Most people are named for normal things like family members and important historical figures. Not me. I’m named for a constellation. No, really. Callista is for Callisto, also known as Ursa Major (the Great Bear). I know, you’ve never heard of it. No one has, unless your mom, like mine, happens to be a world-famous astronomer. If you’ve ever heard of anything even remotely connected with Callisto, it’s the Big Dipper (which, sorry to burst your bubble, isn’t actually a constellation, it’s an asterism), which is part of Callisto. My mom is named Ursula, for Ursa Minor, the Little Bear (of which, yes, you guessed it, the Little Dipper is the most famous part). Technically, I’m named for both Callisto and Ursula, since I’m Callista Ursula Leary.
I looked at the bear on the wall. It was a small brown bear standing on its hind legs, its right front paw reaching up as if it
were about to grab some honey or whatever it is bears reach for. The bear was cute, the way bears are, but there was also something brave about it. It looked strong and steady, like nothing could knock it over. Without realizing what I was doing, I reached my hand up and touched the plastic display.
I hadn’t noticed Amanda watching me, but when I turned my head, her eyes looked deep into mine.
“You were destined to have this tattoo.”
I laughed. “You can’t be destined to have something that’s going to disappear in a few days. Destiny’s about bigger stuff. You know, things that last. Things that are permanent.”
“But nothing is permanent,” said Amanda. “The only permanent thing is change.”
Everything seemed to stop for a second, to freeze, as if all the energy of the universe was focused on me, on my face and my arm and my locker right in front of me. I couldn’t quite catch my breath, and I felt my hand lift