The Secret Hour

Unless, of course, you were “photophobic,” if Dess had even been telling the truth about that.

Now the boy was looking at Jessica too, as if he and Dess were both expecting her to join them. The other girl at the table was staring off into space, headphones over her ears.

Jessica looked around for somewhere else to sit. She wasn’t up for any more head games today. She looked for Constanza or Liz, but she couldn’t see them or any of the other girls from the library table. Her eyes searched for a familiar face, but Jess recognized no one. The horde of faces blurred together into a bewildering mass. The cafeteria slipped out of focus, the dizzying roar of voices assaulting her from all sides. Her moment of hesitation stretched out, suddenly transformed into total confusion.

But somehow her feet kept walking, bringing her closer to Dess’s table. The girl and her friends were the only stable part of the room. Instinct carried Jessica toward them.

“Jessica?”

She turned, recognized a face out of the blur. A very attractive face.

“I’m Jonathan, from physics class. Remember?”

His smile cut through the fog enveloping her. His dark brown eyes were very much in focus.

“Sure. Jonathan. Physics.” She had noticed him in class. Anyone would have.

Jessica stood there, unable to say anything more. But at least she had managed to stop walking toward Dess’s table.

A look of concern crossed his face. “Want to sit down?”

“Yeah. That would be great.”

He led Jessica to an empty table, in the corner opposite Dess’s. Her dizziness began to subside. She gratefully dumped her book bag and lunch sack onto the table as she sat down.

“You okay?” Jonathan asked.

Jessica blinked. The cafeteria was back to its normal self: loud, chaotic, and a bit smelly, but no longer a roller coaster. Her disorientation had vanished as suddenly as it had arrived. “Much better.”

“You looked like you were going to take a spill.”

“No, I… Yeah, maybe. Tough week.” Jessica wanted to add that she didn’t usually act like a zombie in front of cute guys but somehow couldn’t find the right words. “I think I just need to eat.”

“Me too.”

Jonathan overturned his lunch bag, spilling its contents onto the table. An apple rolled perilously close to the edge of the table, but he ignored it. It stopped just before falling to the floor. Jessica raised an eyebrow as she looked at his pile of food. It included three sandwiches, a bag of chips, a banana, and a carton of yogurt in addition to the wayward apple.

Jonathan was thin as a rail. A hungry rail. He grabbed a sandwich from the pile, pulled off its plastic wrap, and tore into it.

Jessica looked at her own lunch. As always, Dad had gotten bored last night and created something complicated. Grated cheese, ground meat, chopped lettuce, and tomato all occupied their own corners of a multisection container. A couple of hard taco shells were visible through the plastic of another. The tacos were already broken. Jess sighed and popped open the containers, dumping all the ingredients together and starting to mix them up.

“Mmm, taco salad,” Jonathan said. “Smells good.”

Jessica nodded. The spicy aroma coming from the meat had taken the edge off the fried smell of high school cafeteria. “My dad’s getting into southwestern cuisine in a big way.”

“Beats sandwiches.”

“That one looks good.”

“They’re peanut butter on banana bread.”

“Peanut butter on banana bread? All three? That’s a… time-saver, I guess.”

“Saves slicing bananas. I can’t ever wake up early enough to make anything fancy.”

“But three of them?” she asked.

He shrugged. “That’s nothing. Some birds eat their own body weight every hour.”

“Sorry, I missed the feathers on you.”

Jonathan gri

“That reminds me,” Jessica said, “thanks for saving me. That would have been a smooth move, falling on my face in front of the whole school my first week here.”

“You could always blame the Bixby water.”

Jessica’s fork halted a few inches from her mouth. “You don’t like it either?”

“I moved here more than two years ago, and I still can’t drink it.” Jonathan shuddered.

Jessica felt the fist of nerves in her stomach unclench a bit. She had started to think that everyone else in town had been born and bred here and that she was the first outsider they’d ever seen. But Jonathan was another stranger to this strange place.

“Where’d you move here from?” she asked.

“Philadelphia. Well, just outside, anyway.”

“I’m from Chicago.”

“So I heard.”

“Oh, right. Everyone knows everything about the new girl.”

He smiled, shrugged. “Not everything.”

Jessica smiled back at Jonathan. They ate quietly for a while, ignoring the roar of the cafeteria around them. Her taco salad really was good, now that she paid attention to it. Maybe having a house dad wasn’t so bad. And Jonathan’s quiet feasting on his sandwiches was somehow reassuring. Jessica felt comfortable in a way she hadn’t since coming to Bixby. She felt… normal.

“So, Jonathan,” she said after a few minutes. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“When you first got here, did you think Bixby was kind of weird?”

Jonathan chewed thoughtfully.

“I still think Bixby’s weird,” he said. “And not kind of—very. It’s not just the water. Or the snake pit or all the other fu

“What?”

“It’s just that Bixby is really… psychosomatic.”

“It’s what?” she asked. “Doesn’t that mean ‘all in your head’ or something?”

“Yeah. Like when you feel sick, but your body’s really okay. Your mind has the power to make you sick. That’s Bixby all over: psychosomatic. The kind of place that gives you strange dreams.”

Jessica almost choked on a forkful of taco salad.

“Did I say something?” Jonathan asked.

“Mm-mm,” she managed, clearing her throat. “People keep saying stuff that makes no…” Jess paused. “That makes too much sense.”

Jonathan looked at her carefully, his brown eyes narrowing even further.

“Okay, I guess this might sound a little nuts,” Jessica admitted. “But it sometimes seems like people here in Bixby know what’s going on inside my head. Or I guess one person does, anyway. There’s this girl—half the time she talks crazy, but the other half it’s like she’s reading my mind.”

Jessica realized that Jonathan had stopped eating. He was looking at her intently.

“Do I sound insane?” she asked.

He shrugged. “I had this friend back in Philadelphia, Julio, who would go and see this psychic every time he had five bucks to blow. She was an old woman who lived in a storefront downtown, complete with a purple neon hand in the window.”

Jessica laughed. “We had palm readers like that in Chicago.”

“But she didn’t read palms or look in a crystal ball,” Jonathan said. “She just talked.”

“Was she really psychic?”

Jonathan shook his head. “I doubt it.”

“You don’t believe in that stuff?”

“Well, not as far as she goes.” Jonathan took a bite but kept talking. “I went with Julio once to watch, and I think I figured out how it worked. The woman would say weird, random things, one after another, until something rang a bell with Julio and his eyes would light up. She’d keep pushing in that direction, and he’d start talking and telling her everything. His dreams, what he was worried about, whatever. He thought that she was reading his mind, but she was only getting him to tell her what was going on inside his head.”

“Sounds like a good trick.”