Unseen World (9780393245004) by Moore Liz

Author:Moore, Liz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc

One day, Ada and her classmates were invited by their science teacher to stay after school to work on their group projects for the science fair, scheduled for the following weekend. (She had taken, in every way, a backseat on this project; her group was constructing some sort of model of the layers of sediment beneath the earth, a topic that did not interest her in the slightest.)

A particularly ambitious girl named Maria Donohue worked away at a trifold poster while Ada and her two other partners watched her. A soda bottle, stripped of its label and filled with colored sand in uneven stripes, stood next to her on the desk. As he made his way around the room, Mr. Tatnall, their teacher, nodded approvingly and complimented Maria on having such neat handwriting—a skill that was highly valued by the faculty at Queen of Angels—and then announced to the class that it was nearly time to go home, that anything that remained to be done would have to be finished on their own time.

Melanie, Theresa, and a girl named Janice Davies converged as they made their way toward her swiftly, catching her as she walked toward her locker to retrieve her coat.

“Are you going home now?” said Theresa, and when she nodded, the three of them followed Ada out the door without a word, as if they had made some collective decision in advance, without informing her of it.

It was colder out that week than it had been, and the weather reminded her often of David, whose favorite season was approaching. She and her classmates walked together, the other girls laughing at this or that, impersonating their teachers—a favorite pastime—or other children in their grade. At times they shrieked so loudly that it stopped Ada’s heart. She could not get used to this fact about girls her own age: their volume, their exuberance, the outlandishness of their humor; the way they invented wild, improbable scenarios in their heads and then speculated about enacting them; the silliness of them; the sheer joyful foolishness, except when they were around boys. When they were around boys they reduced themselves, their voices, their bodies, made them smaller, making way for the male antics that occupied a place of precedence in the center of any room. Ada could barely keep up with their swinging, shifting moods. They seemed to her like birds in flight, like starlings, changing direction with such collective unspoken force that it seemed as if they shared a central root system, a pine barren joined together invisibly beneath the earth.

Ada did not know where any of them lived. She had never been to their homes, but she had heard, vaguely, that Melanie and Theresa lived on the same block, a nice one near the school, with well-kept houses. She began to worry, therefore, when they continued to walk with Ada past where she thought they might have turned off. At some point her three companions lapsed into first silence, then whispers. They walked a step behind her.

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