LITMIR.BIZ

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       “Ready when you are,” Charlie announces.

       Chills crawl down my spine. “I feel like I’m in a Macy’s window display right here. Can’t we move?”

       “Fine!”

       Charlie picks a different spot, still on the far end of the roof, but not so close to the alley. Just as I start, he yells, “Wait up.”

       He motions Josh over, placing him and Clarissa so there’s a barrier between me and the party. That’s so no one can stumble into the shot.

       I begin again. Being videotaped is like being onstage. Nerve-racking at first but then the movement, and adrenaline, of performance take over and something magical happens.

       Two songs later, Josh approaches. “Can I join you? Or does that mess with your concentration?”

       Out of the corner of my eye, I see Charlie give me the thumbs-up. “Guess not.”

       Josh’s face lights up. Did he do this on his own—or did Charlie send him? Either way, I worry that my freestyle is boring, so I kick it up a notch by double-timing everything. Josh sweats buckets trying to keep up.

       After another song, I’m done. I head for the Styrofoam cooler and check out the party. Sorezzi’s in the southeast corner, surrounded by a circle of “admirers.” Clearly, he came to the party to do a little business of his own.

       Clarissa bustles over. “Charlie let me see the playback. The outfit’s perfect. I’m sure he’d let you see—”

       “Yo!” Sonya weaves over to us, well on her way to getting trashed. “Having fun?”

       “Sonya!” Clarissa squeals. “Did you see Charlie shooting Ali?”

       “Uh-uh. I was talking to Laura Hernandez. Why? What happened?”

       She spots Charlie but it’s Josh, intently watching the playback, who makes Sonya’s face turn brittle. It suddenly penetrates that she spent most of the reggae concert talking to Josh.

      Uh-oh. Sonya has a habit of crushing on the wrong guy and getting scorched in the process.

       “Nothing happened,” I inform her. “And to answer your question, it’s an awesome party.”

       “I guess.” Sonya’s buzz is gone. She ducks down, roots through the cooler. “Laura asked about Jacy. Is he coming?”

       “Haven’t talked to him since Wednesday. We sort of had a fight.”

       Clarissa’s eyes widen in expectation of a gossipy score. “What about?”

       “Who knows? You know how Jacy gets. I stopped by the apartment earlier today, but nobody was home. Again.”

       Sonya pulls a forty from the cooler. “Maybe he went to the Shore. Don’t his parents have a place in Wildwood?”

       “Yes, but you’d think he’d have mentioned he was going. Or texted back. I’ve left, like, three messages.”

       “It’s Jacy we’re talking about. He probably left his phone charger under a heap of dirty laundry.” Clarissa shudders. “I don’t know how he gets away with that.”

       “If they’re at the Shore, why didn’t his folks hold the mail?” I demand.

       “Because they forgot?” Sonya pops the top from the forty before she and Clarissa head off to find chips.

       I think about Jacy’s red eyes, Mrs. Strode’s mascara-streaked cheeks. The kiss that wasn’t a kiss. Something’s going on, and I want to know what it is.

       It takes two days for Charlie to edit the party footage. After he posts, I watch it in the privacy of my bedroom.

       Charlie invented a character. Shyboy101. He saw me at the band shell but was too afraid to approach. Then he shows up at the party. The camera pans across the back of Sorezzi lighting up and there I am. As I dance, drink beer and talk to my friends, we hear shyboy’s voice-over.

       “There she is—dancergirl. But she doesn’t even notice me. To her, I’m invisible. Should I go up to her, say something? Not a chance! All I can do is watch from afar. Hoping that one day, she’ll see me.

       “Until next time, this is shyboy101.”

      It’s surprising how real it looks. Like there’s truly a shyboy who never met dancergirl, let alone talked to her.The fact that I didn’t look at the camera really does make shyboy seem invisible. And since everyone, well, everyone except maybe Luke Sorezzi, has felt like a nobody at one time or another, the audience can’t help but root for shyboy to talk to the cool girl.

       Cool girl being…me?

       Which is a joke. I‘ve never been anyone’s idea of cool, unless you count the Fairy Tale Dance kids. The little ones think I rock, but that’s not saying much. Still, it’s fun to see myself on the screen—although I spend the next four views critiquing my dancing. Not bad, but I could do better.

       The only drawback is that I can’t show Mom. She’ll kill me if she discovers both the weed and the beer. She has a serious thing about underage…well, underage anything.

       Then there’s Strode. Wherever he is, if he doesn’t have his cell, I certainly hope Jacy’s got his laptop—and a decent connection to the net.

      Chapter 7

       My heart races. Breathing is quick, shallow. Adrenaline courses through my body—but not the good kind of performance adrenaline. It’s the get-out-of-here-quick kind. Fight or flight, the bio book called it.

       But there’s no one to flee from and nobody to fight. Unless you count the ratty stuffed animals I share the bed with.

       Why am I having nightmares? Even spookier is that I can’t always remember what’s in them. All I know is that suddenly I’m wide-awake, practically screaming because someone stares at me. Like I’m a jellyfish in the Coney Island Aquarium. Or one of Los Desaparecidos, The Disappearing Ones, in the Spanish III documentary on Argentina.

       There was this part about torture that’s hard to forget. The police used electric prods and then buckets of water to fake-drown the prisoners. Sometimes they kept the lights on 24/7. Watched the captives constantly, waking them up whenever they fell asleep.

       When we saw the film, the lights-on thing hadn’t seemed so bad. At least not compared to other kinds of torture. Now I’m not so sure.…

       Being stared at 24/7? Oh, yeah, that would drive me nuts. I’d tell anyone anything just to get them to leave me alone.

      Chapter 8

       Turns out, Brooklyn has its own Los Desaparecidos. Or at least three: Jeremy Carl Strode and his folks.

      On the morning after Labor Day, I walk to WiHi alone. Jacy’s never missed a first day of school in his life. That, along with the lack of sleep, makes me crazy.

       I get a bit distracted when I see the mob scene. The high school’s wide marble stairs are filled with nervous freshmen, high-fiving sophomores and juniors, cheek-kissing seniors. Everyone stalls, knowing that the instant you step through the doorway, summer is truly dead.

       A whispered conversation catches my attention.

       “That’s dancergirl!”

       “Told you she goes here.”

       Two ninth-graders eyeball me. Obviously, Charlie’s videos made the rounds of the new kids but someone should have told them that staring is so middle school.

       It’s like that all morning. Seniors nod in the hall like they know me, people in class who I’ve never talked to before start up conversations. It’s wild to suddenly be Miss Popularity and takes the sting away from the fact that I get nightmare Mr. Han for Algebra II. Even Jacy had a hard time

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