Until It Hurts to Stop by Jennifer R. Hubbard Page A

threat to you. Junior high’s over.”
“That’s what I thought . . . until she showed up here.” It’s bad enough to see her in the halls, in the cafeteria. But it’s worse to see her at Sylvie’s, or to watch her flirt with Luis and Nick at the water fountain. It’s like she’s infiltrating my circle, small as it is. Is that her plan—to cut me off from my friends, the way a wolf cuts a weak deer from the herd?
If anyone should understand, it’s Nick. Because our friendship started in the depths of the Raleigh Years.
    Nick went to Eastern District Junior High, and I went to West End. At first, we were just two kids whose mothers were friends. Back then, my mom had to work a lot of afternoon shifts and Phoebe didn’t, so I went to Nick’s house after school.
    We sometimes made halfhearted stabs at our homework, but mostly we raided the kitchen. One afternoon in seventh grade, I was eating cookies. They were chocolate mint cookies with a fudgy coating, and as I rolled that richness over my tongue I wondered how it could be so good while the rest of my life was so horrible. And I began to cry. I wasn’t sobbing outright, but I knew by the sudden salt in my mouth, and the way the kitchen blurred, that tears were creeping down my face.
    “What’s wrong?” Nick asked.
    I shook my head. Nick didn’t push, but he didn’t walk away from it, either. He could have shrugged it off or changed the subject. But he waited for me to tell him.
    “It’s those bitches at school,” I said at last, and rubbed the wetness off my face. I licked chocolate crumbs from my teeth.
He’d probably already gathered that I was on the fringes at my school, but Nick didn’t worry about things like that, about popularity and the social pecking order. Even if we’d gone to the same school, he might not have seen everything that was happening. His other friends were boys, boys he played basketball with. Sometimes I was amazed at how the guys at school seemed to live in a totally different world from the girls. They didn’t know much about our fights and gossip, our alliances and broken friendships.
“Raleigh Barringer and Adriana Lippold worst of all,” I said. “I wish they would die.”
Nick played with a twist tie someone had left on the table, bending it, knotting it.
“They never stop picking on me. They go after me in the hall, in the girls’ room, everywhere. They have a page about me online. They had another one before, and I complained to the host site and got it taken down, but they started up the same thing somewhere else. They make up lies about me. They tell me I’d be better off dead.”
Nick twisted the tie into a corkscrew shape, a helix.
“I’ve been reading about these poisonous mushrooms, and I keep imagining how I could sneak toadstools into their lunch and have them die in front of the whole school, their faces turning blue and their muscles cramping up—”
The words spilled out. I seldom talked this way because people (especially adults) always acted so shocked, so disapproving, if I said anything angry. But Nick leaned forward.
“Do poison mushrooms really turn your face blue?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “The book doesn’t say.” “But it tells you which ones are poison?”
“Yeah. Well, not all of them. Some of them, people aren’t sure. And some people eat mushrooms that other people call poisonous.”
He was still leaning forward, so I showed him the book. We paged through it, searching for all the fungi marked poisonous. Picturing the death throes of Raleigh and Adriana gave me a coziness in my stomach, even better than the cookies.
Or that’s what I thought then. Now I think that what made me feel better was the fact that Nick listened to me, that he understood, that he didn’t tell me I was awful for thinking this way.
“You know I’m not serious,” I told him, suddenly alarmed at how much I’d said, when the time came for me to go home. Would he tell his mother—or even