Everyone but Dragonfly stares. Jordan's crushing Ally against the wall of E-wing, their faces glued together. Ally coos and runs her strawberry polished toes up and down along his black jungle boots like she's performing for the whole school.

Kaitlin and the Kaitlettes are all "Get a room!" but it's not like Kaitlin hides it when she and Zach smashface on the bleachers after practice.

Dragonfly is more interested in the tiny Chinese tiger that someone has painted on a post by her locker. These miniature paintings have been appearing for three weeks now, in all the ugliest corners of the school: Celtic knots and lotus blossoms and the Eye of Horus. Principal B keeps putting out threatening e-mails about defacing school property. Dragonfly thinks he really ought to give the unknown artist a job for brightening up his gray school and granting the inmates some reprieve from the monotony so they don't riot.

Dragonfly wishes she could paint. Instead, she makes beautiful things with origami. The inside of her locker is a vibrant treasure box of folded paper: roses and stars and swans perched and tumbled everywhere. Buried away at the back is a paint set she bought and used only once.

Dragonfly has black witchy hair. Spiky, wild witchy hair. She wears indigo-and-silver earrings with no makeup and a long rustly silk gypsy dress.

She carefully removes two purple butterflies from her history book and nestles them in with the cranes on top of Biology: An Introduction. Just as she slams her locker closed, Jenn comes crying about all the nasty things that Kaitlin wrote about Jenn and Brandon in the stall of the girls' bathroom. Dragonfly hugs her and strokes her hair while she sniffles.

Brandon appears like a bottle-genie and takes over on the hugs and shirt sniffles. He says he'll beat up Kaitlin for her if she wants. That's why they love Brandon, even if he is Lacrosse Boy and clueless about girlfights. Jenn just kisses him and says having a guy like him makes it all better, and who cares about Kaitlin, anyway. Brandon's so cute when he's mad, and Dragonfly says how lucky Jenn is to have him. Dragonfly used to worry about her, but she doesn't anymore.

Jenn still worries about Dragonfly, so that night she takes her out to Club Bangalore to set her up.

© 2011 by Tad Kershner