The Edge of Nowhere by Elizabeth George Page B

eleven o’clock in the morning. Derric had told her to wait by the classroom door and he’d come for her and show her what the situation was in the new commons, so she stood outside the classroom and tried to look inconspicuous. But when he showed up, Jenn was with him, as if she’d heard his promise to show Becca where lunch was and had decided upon the best way to give her indigestion.
    Jenn was shooting her looks that recommended she drop dead as soon as possible, and Becca heard her say, “I can’t believe you’re supposed to have lunch with her, too.” She added a swear word that made her face shrivel when she said it. Becca felt Derric fend off the word, like someone holding up his hands against a rotten tomato, but he didn’t say anything.
    South Whidbey High School, Becca found, wasn’t at all like the school she’d been supposed to attend in San Diego. There, two thousand five hundred students were enrolled, and they had to eat in shifts. Here, it seemed that the whole student body ate together, with about six hundred kids in a sprawl from a rec room that was the new commons, opening into another rec room called the old commons. She trailed Derric and Jenn to it, and she recognized it from earlier in the day. She raised the volume on the AUD box to block the secondary noise of hundreds of whispers.
    Derric turned once to make sure she was following. Jenn turned him back, deliberately. Becca wondered if Jenn was trying to say the boy was her property. She wanted to tell her to go ahead and claim him. As long as she looked like a walking trash heap in makeup, there wasn’t much chance he’d be interested in her.
    Nearly every girl they passed said hi to Derric. A lot of the boys did, too. Only the boys didn’t called him Derric. They said Nyombe or Big Math or Der. All of this seemed very odd to Becca because if Derric was a freshman, everyone was supposed to ignore him.
    They got into the food line, Jenn placing herself firmly between Becca and Derric. When it was her turn to get something, Becca knew she had to be careful. Debbie hadn’t given her money for lunch—not that she’d expected it—and she had to use what she had as sparingly as she could. So she bought only a PBJ and ignored Jenn when she said, “Want to check my money , chick?” as they reached the cash register. But the remark was nothing more than throwaway nastiness because Jenn herself, as things turned out, had brought her own lunch from home. She’d only gone through the line in the first place to stay with Derric, it seemed.
    As they were making their way to a table, the sense that everyone liked Derric altered. A boy leaned far back from his seat the second Derric walked behind him. He did it fast and hard so his body crashed into Derric’s tray. He meant to knock it to the floor and spill the food, but Derric was too fast. He dodged easily. Still, the boy rose in a rush and said, “Hey, watch the hell out , asshole.”
    Becca recognized this boy from his spotty face and the ski cap rolled into a beanie on his head. He’d been with Jenn on the ferry, challenging her to cheat the cashier. He was sitting with a group of boys similarly dressed, with similar attitudes. Everything about them marked them as stoners. They slouched and smirked and waited for Derric to react.
    Jenn said, “Grip yourself, Dylan,” and shoved the boy out of the way.
    “Oooh,” Dylan said, “Big Der lets a girl protect him.”
    There was one of those silences in the immediate area as kids waited for what would happen next. Becca could feel the tension whip through Derric’s body as he considered how best to react. It wasn’t tough to see he could take the other boy down with his little finger. Dylan was as skinny as the handle of a shovel. He tried to hide this with baggy clothes, but he had the wrists of a ten-year-old.
    “Hey, I let girls do my homework, too,” Derric said. “You should try it, too, if you c’n find one willing.”
    “