"Anything?" Mara asked, and then, when Tess shook her head, added quickly, "That doesn't mean anything. Alvarez reads everything properly. You know she does."
Tess nodded and tried to smile. "I know. I'm just being stupid about it."
"You're not," Mara said. "Waiting is horrible. It's the worst part of anything."
She meant it, and Tess knew she meant it, and still the afternoon stretched. In history, Tess found herself rereading the same paragraph three times. In maths, the numbers slid politely off the page. By the last period, she had begun to rehearse, in her head, all the ways a person could be told no kindly: we loved the idea, but; the committee felt; perhaps next year. She also rehearsed, more quietly, the way a person might be told yes. She did not let herself stay in that second rehearsal for long. It felt too much like counting starfish before the tide went out.
After school, Mara had practice, and Tess walked home alone along the road that ran past the harbour. The tide was out, and the rocks were dark and shining, and the pools between them held small, whole worlds. She stopped, as she often did, and crouched for a minute to look. A tiny crab picked its way across a stone. A frond of seaweed lifted and settled in the shallow water, as patient as breathing. It steadied her in a way nothing at school had managed to do all day. The proposal was called "What the Tide Leaves Behind," and it was not only a title. It was the way she had learned to look: at what remained when the water pulled back, at what was small and alive and easy to miss, at what kept going in the quiet after something large had passed. She stood up with wet knees and cold fingers and walked the rest of the way home feeling, if not certain, then at least less unmade.
Wednesday began like any other school day, which was part of why what happened that day stayed with her so sharply afterwards. The morning was bright in a thin, cold way. Mara was already up, lacing her trainers, talking about a drill Coach Delgado had planned for the afternoon. Tess pulled on her sweater, packed her bag, and checked, without really meaning to check, that her sketchbook was where she had left it. It was. She did not open it. She did not need to. The pages she cared about most were already in the folder with Ms. Alvarez, or so she thought.
The first sign that something was wrong came not as a shout but as a change in temperature. In the corridor before first period, two girls Tess barely knew stopped talking when she passed and then started again too quickly, their laughter pitched a little too high. A boy she had sat next to in art last year looked at his shoes. Tess felt her stomach tighten, the way it did before a presentation, except there was no presentation to be nervous about, only the ordinary walk to her locker. She told herself she was imagining it. She had spent all of Tuesday imagining things, after all. Imagination was her habit and her work. It did not have to mean anything.
By mid-morning, she could no longer pretend. In the corridor between classes, someone's phone screen flashed as she went by, and she caught, out of the corner of her eye, a wash of colour she recognised. It was her own blue-green, her own careful line. For a second she thought she had left a page out somewhere, or that someone had borrowed her sketchbook and was showing a friend. Then she saw the caption underneath, in bold white letters, and the small laughing faces lined up beneath it, and her body understood before her mind had finished reading. The page was from her sketchbook. It was not supposed to be online. It was not supposed to be anywhere except in the art room, in her bag, in her hands.