Lux: The New Girl Read online

  “It’s a really cool place,” Lux said, putting down her fork for a minute. “I mean, you saw how the hallways were painted when we went in for my interview—all those colors? But that’s just the beginning. There’s this courtyard where everyone eats lunch. Everyone calls it the Yard, and it’s way better than any school cafeteria.”

  “A courtyard, in the beginning of March?” her father asked.

  “Well, it’s enclosed. Kinda like a greenhouse?”

  “Ah, I see.”

  “Yeah. And I met a few cool people, too,” she said before taking a big bite of her tamale. “There’s this girl named Tobyn who is at Savage for singing. Sometimes she just sings in the middle of the hallways. She’s always dancing, too, and I think she could do either if she wanted. She has an older sister who is in this band, and they have gigs all over the city.”

  “Wow. That’s pretty impressive. Did her sister go to Savage, too?”

  “She did, a few years ago, I think. And then there’s this girl named Micah who’s there for visual arts. She’s really sweet. And Noelle is there for cello, but she also takes a lot of classes in other subjects and is in a million extracurriculars because she’s, like, such an overachiever.”

  “See, Luxana? These are the sorts of people you should have been surrounding yourself with this whole time. I knew if you just made the right kinds of friends and got your priorities in order, you could turn things around.” Her father looked proud and it made her chest swell. She decided not to mention that her new friends were also epic pranksters. “How are your classes?” he asked next.

  She described how the classrooms were all painted a different bright color, just like the hallways, and how she liked most of her teachers. It made her feel light, talking to him the way she would have spoken to her mom. She thought that maybe moving in with him was a better idea than it initially seemed.

  He smiled and said, “Your teachers seem impressed with you. And I heard you’ve shown some interest in joining the school paper.” Lux nodded at first, but then she frowned at him and stopped chewing.

  “Wait. How do you know that?” she asked.

  “I checked in.”

  “With who?” Lux asked, setting her fork on the edge of her plate.

  “With your teachers. I just made a few phone calls. Oh, don’t look at me like that, Lux. I told you things would be different now that you’re living with me. And it’s obviously working—having a bit more structure. You seem to be doing remarkably well.”

  Lux didn’t know why his checking in on her made her angry, but she could feel the back of her neck getting hot. He didn’t trust her. And in that moment, their pleasant evening fell away, and she remembered all at once why she couldn’t trust him, either.

  She’d never forget the morning she woke up to find him and all of his things gone. It had been so sudden that she’d wondered if he’d died.

  “Where’s Dad?” she asked Genevieve in a panic.

  Her mother sat in their kitchen, sipping a cup of coffee. “Oh, honey,” her mother said. She turned to Lux with tears in her eyes, and Lux understood instantly that her mother’s sadness had more to do with Lux’s surprise than her own. “This has been a long time coming. He’s gone, but we’re going to be fine.”

  Lux tore her room apart looking for a note from him. An explanation of where he’d gone and why. But she didn’t find one.

  “Did he leave anything?” she asked her mother later. “Like, anything for me?”

  Genevieve looked at her daughter. “I told him if he didn’t have the guts to stay and face you, he better not leave anything behind for you to find.”

  Lux hated Genevieve for that for a long time. Until she realized that her father chose to go rather than wait a few hours for her to wake up. And when she’d asked him to explain himself, and told him a note would have been better than nothing at all, he could only say, “Your mother thought this would be best.”

  He’d left her once without so much as a goodbye, and so it felt easy to imagine him disappearing from her life again if she didn’t live up to his expectations.

  Now, Lux wanted to throw salsa at him and storm out—she wanted to be the one who left. “I wish you hadn’t called my teachers,” Lux said softly.

  Her father pressed his lips together. “Honey, I’m just trying to set you up for success. When you have kids of your own, you’ll understand.” Lux hated when he dismissed her like that, but she suffered her way through the rest of the meal, and when they got home, she went to her room and didn’t come back out.

  LUX’S JOURNAL

  —March 10—

  I’m still at Dad’s.

  I guess it’s getting a little bit better. I called Mom tonight and told her about the first few weeks of school, she seemed happy for me. Maybe I’ll really get to move back in with her soon if I stay out of trouble.

  If I do move, I hope I get to keep going to Savage. Even though I hate Mr. Van Ness with every inch of my body, everyone else is pretty cool, especially Micah, Tobyn, and Noelle.

  Yesterday, Emmett said I don’t seem like them . . . I’m not sure what that means, but I think I kinda want to be like them. Or at least fit in with them.

  Speaking of Emmett . . . I’m photographing him for the paper, and even though I’ve been trying to keep my distance from boys, this assignment is making that . . . difficult.

  I spent an hour in the studio with him today, taking pictures of his charcoal sketches and watching him smear the black lines he drew into hair and cheekbones and dark eyes. He asked to draw me, but that would be waaaay too embarrassing.

  This would all be fine—taking his picture and having classes with him and even his flirting—if he wasn’t so damn cute! And he’s nice, too. He helped distract Van Ness the last time he was laying into me. It’s impossible to ignore him, as much as I want to.

  I’m going to Micah’s tomorrow, and I’m really nervous. It’s the first time I’m hanging out with the “Flyy Girls” outside of school. I hope I don’t screw this up.

  Lux texted her dad while she waited for Micah and her friends the next day. Going to a friend’s house after school, she sent, and after he’d replied telling her to be home by “nineteen hundred”—seven o’clock—she stared at one of the words: friend. She didn’t know if Noelle, Tobyn, and Micah would consider her a friend the way she’d already started thinking of them, but the possibility made her insides ache a little.

  She felt jittery and nervous, so she took out her camera and started snapping pictures of everything while she waited for them. She turned to take a photo of the mural on the doors of the school, and to her surprise, a boy stepped in front of her camera.

  “Hi,” Emmett said.

  “Hey,” Lux said. “It’s you. But you’re wearing glasses.”

  He grinned and straightened the pair of wiry frames like he was a little self-conscious of them. “It is me. And yeah, I only use them for distance . . . like in class when I’m sitting in the back. Or . . . to see if the cute girl standing on the stairs is the same one who took pictures of me.”

  Lux squinted at him. Emmett looked like he might be blushing, but his dark skin couldn’t show it. This pushed him from the Kinda Cute box in Lux’s head to the Downright Adorable one. He cleared his throat.

  “Waiting for someone?” Emmett asked.

  “Yeah. But not you,” Lux said. She smiled to soften the words as they landed. She’d stopped herself from flirting yesterday afternoon when they shared the small studio space, but now that they were in the open air, she couldn’t help it.

  Emmett smirked. “Right. But if I asked you to take another photo of me, would you?”

  He leaned against the brick wall of the building. He tilted his head up to the sun and closed his eyes.

  Lux laughed, and he lifted one eyebrow. He said, “That was easier than I thought.”r />
  “What was?” Lux asked.

  “Getting you to laugh.”

  Emmett swallowed nervously and Lux watched his Adam’s apple scoot up and down his neck. Lux would love to have a boy like this: a soft and sweet boy who said nice things to her just because he’d thought them. But she couldn’t risk it. She’d do something wrong, the way she always did, and ruin everything. Or worse, he’d let her down and she’d never forgive him.

  Lux looked down at her camera and scrolled past the few photos she’d just snapped of Emmett. “I should actually go,” she said. She’d wait for Micah, Tobyn, and Noelle on the train station platform if she had to.

  “Cool,” Emmett said, grinning. “Me too. See you tomorrow, Lux.”

  Lux watched him walk away, and then she left in the opposite direction.

  * * *

  On the subway with Micah, Noelle, and Tobyn, Lux felt a little . . . lost. She could navigate the train system with her eyes closed, but finding her way into a conversation with these girls was another story.

  “Did you see Ms. Taylor’s socks today?” Noelle said to Micah.

  “Oh my God, no,” Micah answered, making a face as Noelle handed over her phone. Micah laughed at whatever played on the screen. Then she pulled her own phone out. “But did you hear about Tamera and Jason?”

  “Noelle,” Tobyn cut in, pulling out one of her earbuds. She’d been humming to herself like the other girls weren’t even there. “You have to hear this song.”

  If they weren’t underground, Lux would have just stared out the window and waited for the ride to be over. But she had nothing to look at down here but dark tunnel walls and other trains passing them on the opposite track.

  “Micah,” Noelle said, “are your parents gonna be home?”

  “Doubt it,” Micah said, then she finally turned to address Lux. “We can only go up to the roof when they’re gone,” Micah explained. “My mom’s weird about the roof. But Noelle loves it up there.”

  When Micah grabbed Lux’s hand and asked if she could borrow the gold nail polish, she nodded and relaxed her fingers a little. She hadn’t noticed how tightly she’d been clutching her phone.

  * * *

  They stopped inside Micah’s apartment for only a moment. It was smaller than Lux’s father’s apartment, but bigger than the one she’d shared with her mom. She, Tobyn, and Noelle leaned against the walls in the front hallway while Micah made hot chocolate for everyone and grabbed her photography stuff. They didn’t even take their coats off. As soon as the mugs were in their hands, they went to the roof.

  “It’s the golden hour,” Micah said to Lux. “Know what that is?”

  Lux looked out over the edge of the building at the city skyline. She had heard that term before and knew it had something to do with sunset; something to do with the quality of this exact light and how it’s perfect for taking a gorgeous photo.

  “Kinda,” Lux said. “That’s actually the name of this color.” She wiggled her fingers so they could see her nails again.

  “Really?” Micah asked. Lux nodded, sipped her cocoa, and turned to look at the other girls. “That’s why we had to get up here fast. Okay, so,” Micah said. She pulled out different lenses and quickly explained each one as she fitted them onto her camera and handed it to Lux so she could look through to see the subtle but important differences. Noelle and Tobyn were sipping their drinks and lounging on a few rusty chairs that someone had left up on the roof. Lux aimed the camera at them and snapped.

  The girls talked until the golden light sank toward darkness. Tobyn talked about her girlfriend, Ava. “I can’t believe she wants to go see my sister’s band. They suck, so you know she must really love me,” she said. They all laughed.

  Micah talked about her boyfriend, Ty, and her newest art piece. “It’s gonna just be different parks around New York. Focusing on the green in the city instead of all the gray. But I’m thinking about shooting it in black and white, and then painting buildings made of leaves? It’s kinda hard to explain. You guys will just have to wait and see it.”

  Noelle talked about her grandparents’ restaurant in Chinatown and how she had to work there after school tomorrow. Lux looked at her a little more closely now. Noelle had dark skin and wild, curly hair, but Lux could see other, minor features in her face, too—hints at the fact that her father was Chinese American.

  Lux mostly stayed quiet, afraid of giving too much of herself away too early. But she did say, “Is it true you guys released butterflies in the halls freshman year?”

  Noelle nodded, smirking.

  Tobyn said, “How’d you know?”

  Micah said, “God, it was beautiful. And we made sure the windows were open so they just flew straight through.” Lux laughed and snapped photos of them as they talked, then moved around the roof, taking pictures of the view.

  “Sophomore year, we hid cheap alarm clocks in every classroom. Like, really hid them. And set them all to go off at the same time,” Noelle said.

  “We got early dismissal because none of the teachers could find the clocks and disable the alarms,” Tobyn added. “It was epic.”

  “You guys do this every year?” Lux asked, and they all nodded. “Damn.”

  “So, you never really told us why you had to change schools in the middle of the year,” Noelle brought up again. Lux swallowed hard and lowered her camera.

  “I just had to move in with my dad,” Lux said. “My parents split up,” she continued, and she hoped that would be enough.

  “That sucks,” Micah said. “Sorry.”

  Lux shrugged. “It’s whatever.”

  As Tobyn changed the subject and Micah went back to her photography book, Noelle still watched Lux. It looked like she didn’t believe a word Lux had said.

  Instead of heading home right away, Lux hopped on the train back to her old neighborhood. The art show was coming up, and after trying out the techniques Micah had shown her on the roof, she wanted to look through the camera lenses and stuff she’d left behind in her bedroom to see if she’d need any of them. She also wanted to see her mom. But when she got off at the stop closest to her old apartment, she spotted a group of girls from her old school hanging out on the platform.

  Ignoring them would be easy enough, she thought, but then she noticed Bree and a few of Simone’s other friends in the group. Her heart sped up instantly, and her mouth went dry.

  “Luxana Lawson.”

  Bree had spotted her, and she said Lux’s name like it was a curse word. All the other girls turned to look and started heading toward her.

  None of them had done a thing during the fight at school besides pull up the cameras on their phones, but now, all at once, they seemed set on hurting her just like she’d hurt Simone. Lux wondered if they hung back at school because they’d actually read the student handbook and knew they’d get expelled for fighting. Now that she thought about it, maybe Simone pissed her off on purpose, hoping Lux would get angry enough to hit her first. Simone’s whole plan could have been to get her kicked out of school so she could have her precious spot on the double Dutch team. The thought made Lux hot with rage, but even she knew she couldn’t fight all seven of the girls who were coming her way.

  “’Scuse me. Sorry. MOVE!” She pushed past and through everyone around her. It was rush hour, which helped and hurt Lux—it kept the girls from catching up with her too quickly, but it slowed down her progress, too.

  She made it to the lower platform and ducked behind a trash can a few feet away from the stairs. A train pulled in just as she started to pray for one. The girls’ loud voices bounced off the walls of the stairwell as they moved toward her.

  Lux chanced a glance around the trash can before flipping up the hood of her jacket and rushing onto the train the second the doors opened.

  Lux didn’t let herself breathe until she heard the doors of the train clos
e. Through the subway window, she saw the girls exit the stairway and stumble onto the platform—just a minute too late.

  The train and Lux were going in the exact opposite direction of her dad’s apartment. She’d be cutting it close to her seven o’clock curfew, and she hadn’t even gotten to see her mom. But at least she didn’t get jumped.

  * * *

  “If you can’t make it back here by curfew,” Luke said when Lux walked in at 7:02 p.m., “you’ll lose the privilege to go anywhere after school.”

  He was feeding Lillia, and the infant sucked at the bottle like her life depended on it. Her father didn’t even look up at Lux as he spoke—he kept his eyes on the baby. Lux double-checked the time, and yep, she’d gotten in as close to seven as she’d thought she did. She’d even run part of the way home.

  “You serious?” Lux said. Tired both from the long day at school and from being chased, Lux started to feel like nothing she did would ever be good enough for her father.

  “I am very serious,” he said. He finally looked away from his four-week-old baby and up at his seventeen-year-old daughter. “Don’t let it happen again. I also checked in with some of your teachers this week and I got a bad report from one of them. I’m not happy, Luxana.”

  Lux rolled her eyes (she knew it had to have been Van Ness), and her father put the bottle down. He stood up and stepped closer to her so quickly that Lux took a step backward. “Don’t let that”—he pointed to her rolling eyes—“happen again, either. And you need to get your priorities straight at school, or your mother and I will have to . . . reconsider . . . what the plan will be for you next year.”

  He didn’t say military school, but Lux knew that was what he meant. She wanted to tell him she didn’t care, that he could send her wherever he wanted. But before their fight got any worse, another voice entered their conversation.

  “Luke,” Penny said. She sounded sleepy as she stepped into the kitchen, but her eyes looked serious. “We talked about this. Lux is doing well. Let’s maybe not jeopardize that with threats?” Penny looked at Lux and smiled. Her father handed Lillia to Penny and sat back down. She wished he’d decided to back off on his own, but she didn’t hate the feeling of someone in this apartment being on her side. “Why don’t you head to your room?” Penny said to Lux. “I’m sure you have some homework to do before dinner.”