The Secret Hour - By Scott Westerfeld Page 0,3

way and then the other. They clicked softly as she arranged them into unreadable patterns.

A book arrived on Jessica's desk, breaking the spell that Dess's fingers had cast.

"When you get your book," Mr. Sanchez announced, "carefully fill out the form attached to the inside cover. That's carefully, people. Any damage you don't record is your responsibility."

Jessica had been through this drill all day. Apparently textbooks were an endangered species here in Bixby, Oklahoma. The teachers made everyone go through them page by page, noting every mark or tear. Supposedly there would be a terrible reckoning at the end of the year for anyone criminal enough to damage their books. Jessica had helped her dad do the same thing for their rental house, recording every nail hole in the walls, checking every electrical socket, and going into detail about how the automatic garage door didn't go up the last foot and a half.

Moving had been annoying in all kinds of unexpected ways.

She began going through the textbook, dutifully checking every page. Jess sighed. She'd gotten a bad one. Underlined words, page 7. Scribbles on graph, page 19...

"So, how do you like Bixby so far, Jess?"

Jessica looked up. Dess was leafing through her book distractedly, apparently finding nothing. Half her attention was still on Jess.

The speech was all ready. Everyone in Oklahoma seems very nice, and it's much warmer than Chicago. But somehow she knew that Dess didn't want the speech.

Jess shrugged. "The water tastes funny here."

Dess almost managed to smile. "No kidding."

"Yeah, to me anyway. I guess I'll get used to it."

"Nope. I was born here, and it still tastes funny."

"Great."

"And that's not all that's funny."

Jess looked up, expecting more, but Dess was hard at work now. She'd skipped to the answers at the back of the trig book. Her pen leapt from one to another in no apparent order while her other hand fiddled madly with the amber beads. Occasionally she would make a change. She noted each one on the form.

"Several moronic answers corrected by nonmoron, page 326," she muttered. "Who checks these things? I mean, if you're going to be all new-mathy and put the answers in the back, they might as well be the right ones."

Jessica swallowed. Dess was checking the answers for chapter eleven, and they hadn't even started the book yet. "Uh, yeah, I guess. We found a mistake in my algebra textbook last year."

"A mistake?" Dess looked up at her with a frown.

"A couple, I guess."

Dess looked down at the book and shook her head. Somehow Jessica felt like she'd said something wrong. She wondered if this wasn't Dess's way of hassling the new girl. Or some weird way of showing off for her benefit.

Jessica went back to her own book. Whoever had owned it last year had dropped the class or had just lost interest. The pages were pristine now. Maybe the whole class had only gotten halfway through the book. Jessica hoped so - just leafing through the final pages of dense formulas and graphs was starting to scare her.

Dess was mumbling again. "A handsome rendering of the gorgeous Mr. Sanchez, page 214." She was doodling on one corner of a page, marking up the book and then recording the damage.

Jessica rolled her eyes.

"You know, Jess," Dess said, "Bixby water isn't just tasty. It gives you funny dreams."

"What?"

Dess repeated herself slowly and clearly, as if talking to some textbook-answer-checking moron. "The water in Bixby - it gives you funny dreams. Haven't you noticed?"

She looked at Jessica intensely, as if awaiting the answer to the most important question in the world.

Jessica blinked, trying to think of something witty to say. She was tired of Dess's games, though, and shook her head. "Not really. With moving and everything, I've been too tired to dream."

"Really?"

"Really."

Dess shrugged and didn't say another word to her the whole class.

Jessica was grateful for the silence. She struggled to follow Mr. Sanchez as he zoomed through the first chapter like it was old news and assigned the first night's homework from the second. Every year, by law, there was at least one class in her schedule designed to make sure that school didn't accidentally become fun. Jess was pretty sure that beginning trigonometry was this year's running nightmare.

And to make things worse, she could feel Dess's eyes on her the whole period. Jessica shivered when the last bell rang and headed into the crush of the loud and boisterous hallway with relief.

Maybe not everybody in Oklahoma was that nice.
Chapter 3
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