Holly Black (38 page)

We’re guessing what they
sounded
like.

Roar.

It’s the closest we can come to the sound.

Maybe
Grawr
.

But there’s not much difference between the two, and still that’s as close as we can come.

We know so much and we know nothing, absolutely nothing, nothing at all.

Again, like with guys.

I tried to explain this to Sooz. Sooz is my best friend.

Sooz is my
only
friend, really.

We were at Sooz’s house, doing our homework in her room. Other kids were out doing things, but we had no after-school activities. It was early in our freshman year and I had tried to start a Fossil-Hunters Club, but there were no takers. Sooz wanted to join the art club because she’s all about the art, but it was all poseurs, so she quit.

I was on the bed, reading. She was at her desk, madly sketching away. Part of her assignment was not using the computer. Which, to Sooz, is like saying, “Here. Draw this with your nose.”

“First of all,” I told her, “we know they definitely exist. We have proof of that.”

“Duh.”

“And then, well…for guys
and
dinosaurs, even though we have evidence of them and their habits, they’re still a mystery to us.”

“This is about Jamie,” she said knowingly.

And it was.

Jamie Terravozza.

See, there were certain things I knew for sure. I knew that the dinosaurs lived from 65 million to 230 million years ago. I knew that Compsognathus was the smallest dinosaur ever discovered—about the size of a chicken. I knew that the theropods were the only dinosaurs to survive the entire Age of Dinosaurs—first on the scene, last to die off. I knew that predators evolved early stereoscopic vision to aid in the hunt and that Troodon had the highest brain-to-body-mass ratio of any dinosaur.

I knew that they shook the earth when they walked.

I also knew that I was in love with Jamie Terravozza.

He was a junior and on the baseball team, while I was a mere freshman, and a geek. But it didn’t matter.

He sat across the aisle from me in biology. I felt out of place—it was all seniors and juniors in there because it’s an advanced class and there I was, this freshman girl. A Compsognathus among Carcharodontosaurs.

I remember the moment when it happened, when I fell in love. One day Mrs. Knight asked us why animals never evolve with three limbs instead of four or two or six or eight. I raised my hand. I was the only one. I said, “Bilateral symmetry” as soon as she pointed at me. Zik Lorenz—another baseball player—chuckled and said, “What’s this about bisexual?” My cheeks burned and everyone laughed but me. And then I noticed Jamie. He wasn’t laughing either. He just rolled his eyes.

I couldn’t believe it.

He flashed me a grin, then scribbled something on his notebook and slid it to the edge of his desk so that I could see it:

IGNORE HIM. HE’S AN IDIOT.

I loved him for that.

There were no other notes after that. Every time I went to answer a question, though—the too-smart freshman in a room of upperclassmen—he would nod his head a little bit, like it was okay.

God.
Love
.

The problem, of course, was that he had a girlfriend already: Andi Donnelly. A junior. Captain of the girls’ soccer team. Drop-dead gorgeous in all the ways boys like.

Sooz sighed and threw down her pencil. “Coprolite!” she said. “This is just one big piece of coprolite.”

(In second grade, I made the mistake of telling Sooz the scientific term for petrified dung.)

“Coprolite, coprolite, coprolite!” She crumpled up her paper. “I suck. I have coprolite for brains. You do it.” She threw the paper at me.

“No way. Uh-uh.” I was a decent artist—you have to be, if you want to be a paleontologist, all of those bones and fossils to sketch while on a dig—but I was mechanical. I could draw something right in front of me, but I couldn’t invent. I couldn’t draw the pictures in my brain, the way Sooz could.

I looked at the piece she’d thrown at me. It was gorgeous. Just not up to Sooz’s impossible standards.

She sighed again. “Who knew high school would be this hard?”

“What? It’s not hard. We’re both doing…”

“I mean guys,” she said. “Jamie.” She looked at me. “You know—dinosaurs.”

The next day, sitting at lunch, Sooz read
A Song Flung Up to Heaven
. I read
Scientific American
. That was how we rolled.

“Apatosaur in the house,” Sooz murmured.

I followed her gaze. Andi had sashayed into the lunchroom. Jamie followed, carrying two lunch trays. He always did that for her. I loved the way he balanced both trays so carefully, but casually, like it was nothing. His arms went all taut and on days when he wore short sleeves (like that day), I could see the tension in his biceps and their hardness.

He had a tattoo of a flaming baseball on his left arm, just below the cuff of his T-shirt. I saw it all the time in biology because he sat to my right and I looked at it all the time and it was like it was tattooed on my brain.

My bio notebook was filled with pages of me drawing that tattoo over and over again, applying my meager art skills to it as if it were a thigh bone from a brachiosaur found on a dig, and I was trying to capture it, pristine and perfect, before plastering it and shipping it off to a museum.

In the meantime, my sketches would be all the world would see.

Drawing that baseball, over and over…

“Apatosaur,” Sooz murmured. “Apatosaur.”

Her nickname for Andi. Apatosaurs had a terrible brain-to-body-mass ratio.

Jamie put Andi’s tray down in front of her. Nothing on it moved at all. He sat down across from her after accepting a quick kiss on the lips that was gone before a teacher could say anything.

“Ugh,” Sooz said. “Don’t you just
hate
her?”

“No. I just want to be her.”

And it was true. If I could be Andi, I would be the world’s
greatest
Andi. I
adored
Andi—her hair, her body, her walk. Her clothes. She wore clothes effortlessly, like she just woke up every morning and her clothes flowed onto her body. The right colors, the right fit, the right style. I loved everything about her. She was perfect.

And, of course, she had Jamie.

Sometimes I imagined that she and Jamie weren’t going out anymore. And Jamie and I started dating, and Andi was cool with it and we were all three great friends. Sometimes I imagined that she had
never
dated Jamie, that she was just this perfect girl without a boyfriend, and even though I had Jamie as
my
boyfriend, I was still friends with her, still nice to her, and I was never jealous if Jamie wanted to hang out with her alone because I trusted both of them.

“You need to get him out of your system,” Sooz went on, snapping me out of my fantasy world. “It’s weird. As long as we’ve been friends, you’ve always been single-minded. Dinosaurs, dinosaurs, dinosaurs, from Day One. Now you have this new obsession and I don’t know how to deal with it. Get back to your lizards.”

“They’re not lizards. They’re both from subclass Diapsida, but dinosaurs are archosaurs, while lizards are lepidosaurs. Two different things.”

Sooz grinned. “I love when you do stuff like that. I have no idea if you’re making it up or not, but it sure sounds good.”

Of course, I wasn’t making it up. None of it.

In kindergarten, when they asked what we wanted to be when we grew up, I said paleontologist. (Actually, I said, “plentyologist” because I couldn’t quite wrap my mouth around it yet…but I could
spell
it.) By first grade, I had the pronunciation down pat. Enough so that a boy once accosted me on the playground while I was sitting off to one side, reading a dinosaur book. “You’re not
really
a girl,” he said. “Girls don’t like dinosaurs.”

I blinked. “What do you mean? Of course I’m a girl. I’m wearing
pink
.” I pointed to my headband, just in case he didn’t get it.

Third grade: A-plus for my paper on theropods. Eighth grade—just last year—won the science fair with my project showing the difference between ornithischian and saurischian hips. I built my models painstakingly over a month, using books and Web sites for reference. I made Mom drive me to the museum in Washington DC two weekends in a row so that I could talk to one of the paleontologists there. Dr. Marbury liked me and let me e-mail him pictures of the project in progress. I wouldn’t let him help me, though. I had to do it on my own.

Dr. Marbury was so impressed with me that he said that—if my parents approved—he would take me on a dig with him. He had one scheduled for the summer of my junior year. I thought my eyes would pop right out of my skull. (Fortunately, that’s biologically unlikely. It
does
happen, though.)

That was a year ago and I still stayed in touch with him and he still wanted to take me and, honestly, nothing else mattered. I didn’t care that the other girls were getting into makeup and boys. I didn’t care that I only had one friend. I didn’t care that I wasn’t glamorous or that I was what Mom called a “late bloomer.” I didn’t care that boys didn’t think I was a girl. I didn’t care about any of it. I saved my money and I didn’t waste it on clothes or makeup or music from bands with hot guys in them or anything like that. Digs are expensive. I would need equipment. I would need
stuff
.

I didn’t care what it cost or what I had to sacrifice to get there. I just wanted to go on a dig. I wanted to be there, to find the remains, to brush away the dirt and the sand, to gently pry from the earth the bones of its past.

To sketch them and make them immortal.

The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago has one of the most complete T. rexes in existence, nicknamed Sue after the woman who found it. I just wanted a dinosaur nicknamed Katie—or even Katya.

That was all I wanted.

Until high school started.

Until Jamie.

Suddenly, I wanted something
else
. And I had no idea how to get it.

At her table, Andi got bored with food, apparently. She stood up and bounced a hacky sack from knee to knee, occasionally flipping up a foot to kick it up even higher. Everyone at her table watched and applauded. Even Jamie.