Ultraviolet by R. J. Anderson

shoulders, which made him look like a cartoon vulture, and shook his head.
    “Oh, yeah, I forgot.” Kirk tapped the back of my hand. “Show him your arms.”
    Until now, Sanjay’s behavior had struck me as simultaneously sad and funny. This, however, hit all too close to home. Feeling like I’d swallowed an icicle sideways, I stretched both my arms across the table, turning them palms up, then down again.
    “See?” said Kirk. “She’s good.”
    Sanjay relaxed. “Okay.”
    “What was that about?” I asked.
    I expected Kirk to answer, but to my surprise, Sanjay did. “They look like us,” he said, “but they’re not really human. They’re here to spy on us and use us in their experiments.”
    “You haven’t seen any of Them around here lately, though, right?” said Kirk. “It’s just Dr. Wart.”
    “It’s War
d
,” said Cherie, with an exasperated glance at Kirk. “You think you’re so cute.”
    “I’m not?” asked Kirk, adding “Ow!” as she kicked him under the table.
    It took me a minute to realize who they were talking about, but then I remembered. He’d given me pills for my migraine when I first came in. “The medical doctor, you mean?” I said. “The one with the mustache like a dead mouse?”
    Kirk hiccuped with laughter.
    “It’s not funny,” interrupted Sanjay, agitated. “He’s got the mark. He’s one of them.”
    My mouth went dry. “Mark? What kind of mark?”
    “Here.” He tapped the inside of his forearm. “They all have it. But only I can see it. That’s why they put me in here.”
    I slid back in my chair, more disturbed than ever. Sanjay was paranoid, anyone could see that. And yet his delusions and my experiences had at least one detail in common . . .
    “I am so sick of Tori Beaugrand,” said Melissa bitterly, as we left the auditions for our eighth-grade musical. “She can’t even sing, so how is it fair to make her Alice? I had that part wrapped.”
    In the corridor behind us the custodian was running his floor polisher, filling my head with a wobbly green noise that tasted like mouthwash. “I know,” I said distractedly. “You did really well.”
    And she had, though I’d found it hard to concentrate on her audition with Tori sitting just a few chairs away, buzzing at me. What I didn’t say was that Tori was by far the better actress, much as I hated to admit it. Melissa delivered her lines like a talented thirteen-year-old girl pretending to be Alice in Wonderland; but when Tori opened her mouth she’d not only convinced me that she was Alice, she’d made me believe that I was in Wonderland, too.
    “As if she needs another chance to show off,” Mel muttered, fumbling with the combination on her locker. “She’s already in the paper every other week for hockey, and I heard her tell Lara that her mom wants to get her into modeling—like I want to see her smug face every time I flip open a magazine? Ech.”
    I wished I could assure her it would never happen, but I couldn’t. Ron and Gisele Beaugrand were local celebrities in their own right, with plenty of media connections. Between their influence and Tori’s looks, it’d be surprising if she
didn’t
become a supermodel.
    “And there was Brendan staring at her with his tongue practically on the floor.” Mel’s running shoes hit the back of the locker, filling my vision with expanding rings of bronze. “He didn’t even look at me once.”
    “That doesn’t mean anything,” I said. “Sure, Tori gets noticed, but have you heard the way the guys talk about her? It’s not like they’re interested in her personality.”
    “Yeah, but that makes the whole thing suck even more,” said Mel, stomping into her winter boots and yanking a hat down over her curly brown hair. “ ’Cause right now they don’t care about
anybody’s
personality, as far as I can tell. And if they ever start caring—well, I can’t exactly compete with Princess Victoria there either, can I?”
    I couldn’t