I, Emma Freke

“Let's say you were the hands on a clock with the least popular time being one o'clock all the way up to the most popular time being twelve o'clock. What time would
you
be?”

The school psychologist, Ms. Fiddle, studied me as if I were an experiment about to bubble over.

“Do you mean what's my favorite time of the day?”

Ms. Fiddle shifted in her big cushy office chair and stared down at her binder.

“Let's do this a different way,” she said in a fake, perky voice. “Look at the clock on the wall behind me.”

It was a flat white clock with two pencils telling the time.

“Now,
who
would you say is the most popular girl in your grade?”

I had to think about that one as there were lots of incredibly popular girls in the sixth grade.

“Um. I guess it's a tie between Savannah Lipton and Akira Washington.”

Ms. Fiddle rolled her eyes.

“Just pick one.”

“The very most popular one?”

“
Any
one,” she said sharply.

“Should I still look at the clock?”

“No,
yes
—wait,” she groaned. “Okay. Let's try this one more time.”

Ms. Fiddle forced herself to speak in a really calm voice, but it was too calm, sort of like the pause just before lightning strikes the ground and explodes.

“If Savannah Lipton, let's say, represented a time on the popularity clock, what time would she be?”

I glanced up at the wall and said very carefully, “Twelve o'clock?”

“That's right!” she hollered like a game show host. “I mean, good.”

Then she rolled her chair so close to me our knees practically touched.

“So if Savannah is twelve o'clock, the most popular hour, what time are
you
?”

At that very moment a fly buzzed across the room and landed on Ms. Fiddle's shoulder. I could tell she knew it was there, but she ignored it and stared right into my eyes.

“Um. One minute past twelve?” I said in a tiny voice, because I wasn't sure if there was a correct answer or if she really had no idea how invisible I was in middle school.

Without turning her head she reached across her collarbone and smacked the fly dead, then flicked it off her shoulder.

“We were not including minutes,” said Ms. Fiddle, arching one eyebrow so high it made that side of her mouth droop. “Just
hours
.”

But before I could correct my answer, Ms. Fiddle whipped her chair around and began typing on her computer. I sat silently and waited for directions. I never knew where she was going next with these sessions.

Suddenly, she stopped to look back at me over her slit glasses.

“You may go to your next class now, Emma. We'll meet again on Thursday from 10:35 until 11:21.”

She returned to her typing as if she had a deadline in about six seconds.

“Excuse me, Ms. Fiddle?”

“Hmm?” she replied without missing a letter on her keyboard.

“Do the minutes count on Thursday, or should I come from ten o'clock to eleven o'clock?”

Not five minutes later, I was ducking behind a dumpster out in the school parking lot. I waited there until I heard the indoor bell signaling the next class. I knew the halls would be flooded soon, and no one would bother to look out a window at someone escaping across the pavement and into the woods.

I did this twice a week whenever I had a session with Ms. Fiddle. All my teachers knew I went to the school psychologist for “socialization skills,” so on my session days, they all basically lost track of me. Or at least, they figured I wasn't their responsibility. And Ms. Fiddle never checked to see if I actually returned to class. She just flicked me away like that dead fly.

It was the same on my walk home. No one ever stopped to ask me why I wasn't in school as I strolled down the sidewalk along Harbor Street. It may have been because I was invisible in the outside world too. But I think it had more to do with the fact that I was five feet ten inches tall, almost six feet if I stood up straight (which I never did). So I guess everyone assumed I was basically grown up, even though I was just turning twelve in five days.

The reason I ignored kids my age and they ignored me was pretty simple. I just didn't fit in. Not with the geeks, the emos, the gossipers, the preps, or even the losers. To them I didn't exist. Even the teachers seemed to avoid me. And Ms. Fiddle was only interested in studying me like a misplaced giraffe caged with a pack of hyenas.

Life wasn't always like this. In fact, when I was younger and shorter and dumber, I usually had one or two friends to play with at recess. My grades were good but nothing special. Then my height and brains took off one summer as if someone watered me with too much fertilizer. Even my dull hair turned redder.

To make matters worse—to make matters
impossibly
worse—my name is Emma Freke.

Like, if you say it slowly,
Am a Freak
.

For some reason, my mother, Donatella, chose my name without saying it out loud. And I never could figure out if my weird name made me more of a freak or if I would have been a mega-freak anyway.

As I rounded the corner of Driftwood Lane, I saw the C
LOSED
sign in our store window. Donatella must have overslept. I checked my watch. If I hadn't ditched school, I would be sitting down to an early lunch. Alone, of course.

We owned a little shop, Freke Beads & More, and lived on the second floor just above the giant sign. As if having the last name Freke wasn't bad enough, my mother decided to plaster it across the one place where we spent most of our waking
and
sleeping hours.

She had taken over the building a long time ago from my grandfather, Lorenzo Salvoni, who had used the same space to sell his homemade Italian pastas and meals for more than forty years. He still lived with Donatella and me but had nothing to do with the beads. I don't think he even understood why people would buy beads. And the “More” part of our business was pretty vague to me as well. Donatella claimed she specialized in whatever made people feel
centered
. That included almost anything from tea leaf readings to foot massages.