I guess Tiff was a good influence on me because my grades started to get better, and I started to become less withdrawn, raising my hand in class and talking to my seatmates, so much that my mother got a note about it.
The hallway was always at the back of my mind, but I had no time for it now. I started getting invited to birthday parties, and though Tiff and I still spent breaks together, the imaginary world we shared had grown to include a few other classmates, who contributed to it during class hours by passing notes and sketches, which we taped to a wall hidden by the trash can, the growing pile of notebooks shared between Tiff and I, some of them at home, some stored in our school lockers.
“Who’s Anya?” Tiff asked one day. She was looking through the notebooks in my locker and had
