Every Road Leads Back to You

Two Different Worlds, One Hallway

Chapter Two:

They met at her locker the next morning because neither of them had the other's number yet, and because Amara had said "before first period" without specifying where, and Malcolm had simply guessed right.

"How'd you know where my locker was?" she asked.

"Everybody knows where the newspaper editor's locker is. It's the one with the New York Times clippings taped inside the door."

Amara shut the locker a little too fast. "You've seen inside my locker?"

"You leave it open between classes. It's not exactly subtle."

She didn't know what to do with the fact that he'd noticed that — noticed anything about her at all — so she changed the subject to the assignment, like she always did when a conversation got somewhere she hadn't planned for it to go.

"Ms. Okafor wants five hundred words. A profile. Something real, not just 'point guard, three-pointer, state championship.'"

Malcolm shifted his bag on his shoulder. "That's the only story people want, though."

"I don't."

He looked at her for a second too long. "Yeah. I'm starting to get that."

The first bell rang, scattering them in different directions — him toward the gym hallway where teammates called his name like a chant, her toward the journalism room where nobody called her anything at all. Two hallways. Two different schools, really, existing in the same building. Amara had never thought about how strange that was until she watched him disappear into a crowd that had never once made room for her.