20 Million Tiny Particles

3. Mariah

It goes without saying that the first person I told about the Sheridan Highgate Incident was Mariah.

We'd known each other since fourth grade, when the Hawk family first moved to town and Mariah sat next to me in reading group.

Mariah was just like me in all of the right ways, and nothing like me in the wrong ones. It wasn't that we were exactly the same as one another, but that we were something like a mirror to each other. She could show me all the things I couldn't see in myself on my own.

"I think she feels sorry for me," I mused, sitting on Mariah's floor a few hours after Sheridan had invited me to her party.

Mariah was on her back lying on her bed, her legs sticking up to press against the wall beside a Beyoncé poster in a gold frame. She was scrolling mindlessly on her phone but paying attention nonetheless. "I don't think she feels sorry for you," she said. Then she paused and turned her head toward me. "It is weird, though."

"Right?" I agreed, turning toward her too. "We've never talked to each other. Except maybe, like, 'can you turn in your yearbook money before Friday or we're going to give your book to someone else,' you know?"

"I had a class with her," Mariah admitted.

"She's like, two years ahead of us."

"Yeah, she was in my trig class sophomore year."

"Oh, yeah, I forgot you were in the advanced class. But, no —"

Mariah anticipated my next sentence and cut me off, as she had a tendency to do. "She was held back a year in math," she clapped. "She took it as a senior."

I nodded. "Makes sense." Mariah was smart — valedictorian smart. We'd both been straight-A students for as long as I could remember, but Mariah took her grades and her general excellence to the next level. Valedictorian. National STEM competition winner. Basketball team starting shooting guard. The works.

"What's she like?" I wondered, going back to Sheridan.

Mariah shrugged, going back to scrolling through her phone. I saw her double-tap a photo on Instagram as she said, "She's fine."

"No," I pressed. "Like, what's she like?"

"I don't know, why do you care?"

"To know if I want to go to this party or not," I explained.

Mariah pushed her phone into the comforter, pulling her torso up to turn and look at me more directly. "Wait. You're thinking of going to this thing?" Her deep brown eyes bugged at me. She thought I was crazy — it wasn't the first time that I, still the most practical person in almost any room, seemed irrational to Mariah Hawk, the queen of logic and reason.

I nodded in defense of myself, but I couldn't think of a great reason why. I averted eye contact and whimpered, "I was invited."

Mariah flopped back down. "Fine, go then."

But she knew I was unsure. I took the bait. "Why don't you think I should?"

I could tell she was rolling her eyes even though she wasn't looking at me. "Because you don't know her. And you're going to go and not know any of her friends, and you're going to feel weird, and you're going to spend the whole night being antisocial and judging everyone and texting me."

"But you'll come with me, right?"

She gave me a look — the look. "Okay," she said, not in a conciliatory way but in a I guess I'm going to have to talk you out of this stupid plan using a different strategy kind of way. She popped her feet off the walls and rolled over on her belly, her head toward the foot of the bed where I sat. She began punching at her phone screen more deliberately.