On Thursday, Tommy asks if he can sit with Syx and Roxanne during lunch.
Roxanne hesitates. Tommy is pretty quiet, usually. He hasn't ever said anything mean to her or Syx to their faces, she knows. He still joins in when everybody laughs at Syx, but—
—people can change, right? There's good in everyone and everybody deserves a second chance.
Roxanne looks over at Syx. He's regarding Tommy through narrowed eyes, but when he catches Roxanne's gaze, he gives a hesitant nod.
"Okay," Roxanne says.
Tommy sits down.
"Are you going to be friends with us now?" Sys asks, tilting his head critically.
Tommy, opening a pudding cup, stops. His mouth opens and closes a few times.
"Uh, yeah, sure," he says.
"Hm," says Syx.
He doesn't ask Tommy if he wants to be friends with Minion.
"All right, so—" Syx says, "you understand the basic configuration of an atom?"
Roxanne nods. Tommy yawns.
"The neutrons and the protons," she repeats, "are in the middle, in the nucleus, and the electrons move around them."
"Right," Syx says, "and you know about the charges thing, that protons—"
"Are positive and electrons are negative," Roxanne says.
"Exactly! And neutrons?"
"Don't feel feelings and think unsweetened oatmeal is okay."
Syx grins.
"They're neutral, yes," he says, "they don't have a charge. Well! Let's talk about bonding! Bonds are what stick the atoms together to make molecules. In Ionic bonding—atoms always want to be balanced, you see? If they have too many electrons, they are too negative—" he makes a tragic face, "'—woe is me! Despair and suffering!'" Roxanne laughs and Syx smiles back at her, "—and if they have don't have enough electrons, they're too positive—" he bounces up and down in a parody of excitement, "'Wow, I am just so happy I think I might die!' Neither of those things are good! That's why an atom always wants to have the same amount of electrons as it does protons. To be balanced. With me so far?"
Roxanne nods; Syx looks over at Tommy, who shrugs.
"Good, okay—well, let's say that—Roxanne, you're an atom, all right?" She nods. "And—" Syx looks at Tommy, "—would you like to be an atom?" he asks politely.
"Uh, no thanks," Tommy says, wrinkling his nose.
"Right," Syx says, sounding unsurprised. "So you're an atom, Roxanne, yes? And you've just lost one of your electrons, so you're too positive."
"'Wow!'" Roxanne says, "'I'm just so happy I think I might die!'"
"Exactly! And I am an atom that has too many electrons, which means I am too negative." He makes the tragic face again. "'Woe is me! Despair and suffering!' So, neither of us are balanced. We both want to be balanced, so what do we do?" He holds up a finger dramatically, and then reaches down and grabs Roxanne's hand. "We bond! Now, we are a molecule! Now we are balanced. And that's it, that's an Ionic bond! Do you get it?"
"I think so," Roxanne says, frowning slightly. "But what about the neutrons?"
Syx waves a dismissive hand.
"The neutrons aren't important in bonding; they're just sitting around eating unsweetened oatmeal, or something. Now, in Covalent bonds—"
"—hold my ha-and!" Tommy says in a sing-song voice to Wayne, "I'm sa-ad."
Wayne snickers meanly and the other kids, as if they've been waiting for his cue, all laugh, too.
Beside Roxanne, Syx is very still, his knuckles pale around the pencil that he's clutching.
"Oooh, of course I'll hold your hand," Annie says, in a nasty, high-pitched voice, and—is that supposed to be Roxanne that she's pretending to be? "I love you so much, I think we should get married."
Roxanne feels herself go hot, and then cold.
"Maybe if we hold hands long enough," Lisa chimes in, not to be outdone, "you can turn me blue like you."
Everybody laughs again, and then Wayne butchers a song on the ukulele for music class.
Tommy is picked fourth for dodgeball, right after Annie and before Lisa.
Sam S., who Wayne says has the wrong kind of shoes, is picked last.
He asks to sit with Roxanne and Syx during lunch three days later.
Syx shrugs and looks away.
"Okay," says Roxanne.
Syx doesn't ask Sam S. if he's going to be friends with them now.
Sam S. comes to school on Monday with new shoes; his parents, he says, bought them as an early birthday present.
He also brings invitations to his birthday party; his parents are renting a hotel room and ordering pizza and there's going to be swimming.
He gives the first invitation to Wayne.
(There are invitations for everyone but Syx and Roxanne.)
Sam S. gets to sit next to Wayne that day at lunch.
Derick, who doesn't ever share the candy bars his mother sends in his lunchbox, gets picked last for dodgeball.
Derick gives his candy bar to Wayne the next day and doesn't ever ask to sit next to Syx and Roxanne at all.
Wayne unwraps the candy bar and divides it into different sized pieces. With great ceremony, he begins handing out the pieces to the children that surround him.
"Derick gets the biggest piece," Wayne says, "since he's such a good friend. And Sam S. gets the next one because it's going to be his birthday soon—"
"Can I have the next piece?" Annie asks eagerly.
"No!" Lisa says, elbowing her out of the way. "The next one's for me, cross-eyes!"
Wayne laughs and hands the piece of chocolate to Lisa.
Syx, watching the division of the candy bar, scowls darkly. Roxanne feels herself frowning, too.
Roxanne dips her brush in the green paint again.
They're doing oil paints in art now; Miss Simmons told them that they should paint 'a place they'd like to go'.
Roxanne is painting the treehouse that never got built in the backyard of her old house. Syx is painting something that Roxanne thinks might be the ocean, but it's a bit hard to tell because Syx has been on a modern art kick ever since he read that book about Expressionism. There's a lot of blue swirling brushstrokes which look like crashing waves and a dark shape which might be a ship, but Roxanne wouldn't swear to it.
He's absolutely engrossed in painting, squinting at the page, tilting his head from side to side to peer at it from different angles, paint splatters all over his hands and his clothes and his half of the table.
They're painting at their tables, instead of easels, today. The easels were an unfortunate casualty of Syx's latest experiment, an antigravity generator which, regrettably, exploded before he could even switch it on yesterday—something about one of the components being unstable; Roxanne hadn't exactly understood and Syx's explanation had been cut short when Wayne dragged Syx off to stand in the Bad Corner.
Roxanne and Syx's table escaped the inferno only slightly singed, but the easels were beyond saving. Miss Simmons had been quite bitter about that at the time of the explosion, and quite bitter again when she brought it up at the beginning of art class today, making a big production about how they would all have to paint at their tables since someone destroyed all of the easels.
Roxanne carefully paints the outline of a leaf. She draws back and regards it critically. She sighs. Too blobby again. Oil paints are difficult. She knows what she wants the picture to look like; she can imagine it perfectly in her head, but when she tries to actually—
"Can I sit with you?"
Roxanne looks up from her contemplation of her blobby leaves.
Lisa is standing next to their table, holding her half-finished painting and her brush.
Behind Lisa, Annie whispers something to Miranda and giggles viciously. Roxanne catches the words 'put down plastic first'.
Lisa goes scarlet.
There's a rumor going around the class that Lisa wets the bed. Roxanne is pretty sure Annie is the source of that rumor; she's never really forgiven Lisa for her 'cross-eyes' comment.
But regardless of whether Annie's the one who started the rumor, it's led to a shocking change in the social order of the classroom. Lisa, once a particular favorite of Wayne's, is now almost as much of a pariah as Roxanne. She's been picked last for dodgeball for a week and a half straight and Wayne makes her sit at the far end of the table and never gives her any candy during lunch.
And now she's standing next to Roxanne and Syx's table, looking embarrassed and miserable and ashamed, asking if she can sit with them.
Roxanne blinks and stares up at Lisa, hesitating.
"No," Syx says.
Roxanne glances over at him, startled. He's looking at Lisa with a hard expression in his eyes.
Lisa gapes at him for a moment.
"What?" she asks.
"I said no," Syx repeats firmly. "No, you cannot sit with us. You are not nice. I do not like you, and I do not want you to sit with us."
Annie gives a cruel peal of laughter. The whole class is staring now; Lisa's face contorts in an expression of fury.
"I'll sit here if I want to," she hisses, and slaps her paper down on the table.
Syx's mouth goes flat and thin.
"Syx," Roxanne says in an undertone.
"Better not sit so close," Syx says loudly, still looking at Lisa, "wouldn't want to catch the alien disease! Wouldn't want to wind up blue and bald and strange looking!"
"Syx," Roxanne whispers, "stop it, please."
"Isn't that what Wayne says will happen?" Syx asks. "Isn't that what you said would happen? It is; you mentioned it behind the supply shed that one day, don't you remember? You said—"
"Shut up, you freak," Lisa says, tears of rage in her eyes.
"—something like that, yes," Syx stands, shoving his chair backwards. "Well, the freak doesn't want you to sit at this table. Why don't you go sit with your friends?" He smiles, bright and sharp and glinting, like a knife. "Oh, that's right," he adds, "you don't have any."
Lisa inhales sharply.
"What's happening here?" Miss Simmons asks.
Lisa turns to her, but Syx speaks first.
"I don't want her to sit at this table," he says.
Miss Simmons raises her eyebrows.
"Well," she says,"that isn't very nice, is it?"
"She has never been nice to me," Syx says, chin going up.
"We have a strict no-bullying policy in this classroom," Miss Simmons continues, as though Syx hasn't said anything at all.
Syx laughs. It's not a very happy sound.
"If you cannot refrain from bullying Lisa," Miss Simmons goes on, over the sound of Syx's choked, half-hysterical laughter, "then I don't think you need to participate in the rest of art class." She picks up his painting and smiles, all sugared venom. Then she folds the page in half, rips it very neatly down the middle, and drops it in the wastepaper basket.
Roxanne jerks to her feet, but Syx is already beside her, grabbing her wrist, holding her still. He shakes his head, just once, and then he's yanked away, up into the air, by Wayne, who pushes him into the corner with rather more force that is necessary. Syx's forehead smacks into the cabinet shelf when Wayne shoves him.
"There, now," Miss Simmons says, smiling around the classroom. "Let's get back to work, then!"
Everybody turns back to their pages and their paints. Lisa sits down at Syx and Roxanne's table.
Minion rolls his sphere across the table to Roxanne. She reaches out and places her hand on it. She's shaking, and she feels oddly hot and cold at the same time.
There's blue paint on her wrist from where Syx grabbed her, Roxanne notices distantly.
Miss Simmons threw away his painting. She threw it away.
"All I wanted to do," Lisa says, with a virtuous air, "was sit at this table."
"Shut. Up," Roxanne says through gritted teeth.
"You should be nicer," Lisa says. "Or I'll tell Miss Simmons that you're bullying me, too."
Roxanne goes still for half a second, and then picks up Minion's sphere.
"You do that," she tells Lisa. "I don't want you sitting with me, either," Roxanne announces loudly, to the room at large. She turns back to Lisa and smiles. "Have fun sitting all alone," she says, and she takes Minion and goes to stand with Syx.