THE GIRL IN THE BACKGROUND

The first meeting of the Sutter Falls High School student council for the 2004–2005 school year was called to order at 2:47 p.m. on the second Tuesday of September, and Maggie Holm wrote that down, because somebody had to.

She wrote it in the green spiral notebook she had bought at the Kroger on Route 33, with a margin ruled in red on every page so she could note who had moved and who had seconded. Nobody had asked her to rule the margins. It was simply that Maggie had noticed, early in life, that there were two kinds of people in any room, the ones things happened to and the ones who wrote down what happened, and she had noticed with equal clarity which kind she was.

“Present,” she said, when she got to her own name, and checked the box.

Through the open door of Room 114 came, at 2:51 p.m., the sound of Brittany Vance breaking up with Tyler Brandt.

It was not a quiet sound. Brittany Vance had never in her life done a quiet thing, and she was not going to start by the trophy case outside the gym with half the junior class pretending to get drinks from the water fountain. “You told Kayla you might go to Ohio State,” Brittany said, at a pitch that carried. “Might, Tyler. After everything.”

“Babe. Babe. It was a hypothetical.”

“Our entire relationship is not a hypothetical!”

Inside Room 114, the student council president, a tall anxious boy named Greg Lutz, tried to talk about the homecoming budget. Nobody listened. The two sophomore representatives had gone to stand near the door, where they could see.

Maggie wrote, under Old Business, the words Homecoming budget: $1,140 in account (per Mr.Lindell), and underlined the number, and did not look up.

Everybody in Sutter Falls, Ohio, had been following the Brittany-and-Tyler story since the eighth grade, when he gave her a promise ring from Claire’s that turned her neck green. Maggie had noticed, around the same age, that the show did not need her to watch it, and that the minutes did.

“I’m done,” Brittany announced, in the hallway. “I’m done, Tyler Brandt. Don’t call me.” And a moment later came the particular squeak of expensive sneakers going fast on a waxed floor, and then Tyler’s voice, lower and wretched, saying “Britt, come on,” and then the whole hallway exhaling at once.

“Okay,” Greg Lutz said, into the quiet, rubbing his forehead. “Okay. Um. Homecoming.”

“Eleven hundred and forty dollars,” said Maggie. “The DJ wants four hundred. Decorations committee asked for three-fifty, but they can do it for two-fifty if we reuse last year’s balloon arch, which is in the band room closet behind the tubas. I checked.”

Greg looked at her with the damp gratitude of a drowning man who has been handed an oar. “Can you put that in a motion?”

“I already did,” Maggie said, and turned the notebook so he could see.

She had Chemistry sixth period, with Mr.Petrakis, on the second floor in the room with the eyewash station nobody had ever used and the periodic table so old it did not yet include a few of the heavier elements, which Mr.Petrakis had added himself in black Sharpie. He was a round, gentle man in molecule-print ties.

“Lab partners,” he said, rattling a Folgers can full of folded slips. “This is a marriage, people. One semester, one Bunsen burner, one grade. The can chooses.”

Maggie drew a slip. She unfolded it. It said, in Mr.Petrakis’s round blocky handwriting, KOWALSKI.

She looked around the room. There was no Kowalski in it.

“Danny Kowalski,” said Mr.Petrakis, peering at his roster, and then at the empty stool at the back table, and then at the clock. “Who is, as ever, somewhere else. Miss Holm, you have my condolences and my confidence. Table six.”

Maggie took her things to table six. She laid out her notebook, her graph paper, two sharpened No.2 pencils and a calculator, and she was reading the first lab, Density of Common Substances, when the door opened and a boy came in sideways, the way you come into a room when you’re hoping nobody will notice you’re late, which of course meant everybody did.

He had a strawberry Pop-Tart in his mouth, half gone, and a backpack with the zipper open and a sketchbook sticking out of it, and dark hair that looked as if he’d cut it himself, possibly in the dark, and a gray Kowalski Tire & Brake T-shirt with a small grease stain on the hem, and when Mr.Petrakis said “Mr.Kowalski, how kind of you,” he took the Pop-Tart out of his mouth and said, with great earnestness, “I’m so sorry, Mr.P, there was a thing with a raccoon,” and something about the way he said it made half the room laugh and the other half believe him.

He came to table six. He sat down on the stool beside hers. He looked at her things, laid out in their neat row, and then at her.

“Hi,” he said. “I’m Danny. I think I’m your problem this semester.”

“Maggie,” she said. “Was there really a raccoon?”

“There’s always a raccoon,” said Danny Kowalski. “Do you have a pencil? I had a pencil. I had, like, four pencils this morning. I don’t know where pencils go. I think there’s a place.”

She gave him one of her two No.2 pencils. He thanked her as if she had given him a kidney.

The lab was not complicated. You weighed a thing, dropped it into a graduated cylinder, read how much the water rose, and divided. Maggie read the numbers aloud and Danny wrote them down, and for about ten minutes it went fine.

Then she looked over and saw that he had written the mass of the aluminum cube in the column for the volume of the brass one, and that where the calculations were supposed to go there was instead a small, beautifully inked drawing of Mr.Petrakis as a heroic knight, riding a Bunsen burner into battle, his molecule tie streaming behind him like a banner.

“That’s the wrong column,” Maggie said.

Danny looked down. “Oh no.”

“And that’s not a calculation.”

“No,” he agreed, with real sorrow. “That’s a knight.”

She meant to be annoyed. But the knight had such a noble, doomed expression, and Mr.Petrakis’s comb-over was flying so bravely in the wind of the charge, that she felt a laugh come up in her chest and had to press her lips together to keep it there.

Danny saw. He grinned at her, sideways, a crooked grin with one chipped front tooth in it, and she looked away fast and fixed the columns.

They turned it in at the bell. Danny stood shoving loose papers into the open mouth of his backpack like a man feeding a mailbox in a hurricane.

“Hey,” he said. “Here.” And he held out her pencil.

It had teeth marks on it. Small, even, apologetic teeth marks, all the way around the yellow paint near the eraser. He looked at them as if seeing them for the first time.

“I chew,” he said. “When I think. I should have warned you.”

“Keep it,” said Maggie.

“No, I’ll get you a new one. I’ll get you a box. I’m going to owe you a lot of pencils this year, I can feel it.”

She went out into the hall, into the end-of-day roar, and in the middle of it Brittany Vance was crying into the shoulder of the new boy, the transfer from Toledo, the one in the leather jacket whose name was Jesse Cole and who had been in Sutter Falls for exactly eight days and was already, by general agreement, the most dangerous thing that had ever happened to it. People were walking slower to look. Maggie walked around them.

It was not until she got home and sat down on her bottom bunk that she found the lab worksheet in her folder instead of in Mr.Petrakis’s basket. They had turned in the wrong copy. They had turned in her clean draft, and she had the one Danny had written on.

She looked at it for a long time.

Down in the margin, below the knight, below the corrected columns in her own neat hand, was a second drawing she had not seen him make. It was a girl at a lab table, with her hair tucked behind one ear and her mouth pressed tight against a laugh, and a No.2 pencil held up in her hand like a scepter. He had given her a small crown made of graph paper. He had gotten her nose exactly right, which nobody ever did, because nobody ever looked at it long enough.

Underneath, in careful block letters, it said: MAGGIE HOLM, KEEPER OF THE PENCILS.

The first quiz came back the following Friday, and Danny Kowalski got a forty-one.

He did not seem surprised. He looked at the red number on the top of the page the way a farmer looks at hail, as something that came from above and could not be argued with, and then he folded the quiz in half and in half again and put it in his back pocket, where Maggie suspected it would go through the wash.

“It’s fine,” he said, when he saw her looking. “It’s a quiz.”

“It’s twenty percent of the quarter grade,” said Maggie, who had read the syllabus twice.

He was quiet for a second. Then he said, not to her exactly, but to the Bunsen burner, “My dad says if I don’t pass chem, I’m done with art. He’ll pull me out of Ceramics and Drawing Two and put me on co-op at the shop full-time. He says a C in chemistry is a sign from God that I’m supposed to rotate tires.”

“A forty-one isn’t a C.”

“No,” Danny agreed. “It’s more of a sign from God.”

Maggie looked at the