Janie loved those two words. Since the milk carton, her life had been chaos. Yet here she was, safe inside senior year, the two final semesters every teenager daydreamed about. All bad things were behind her. Yet as September moved into October, she felt that the other kids were growing more aware of her. She was being watched. Janie was easy to spot: a mass of tangled red curls took up more than their fair share of hair space. But it wasn’t her hair they turned to look at. It was her kidnap self. For a few weeks, Janie had been able to convince herself that everybody in this school was used to her. But they weren’t. It was bad enough to be stared at by kids she barely knew, but even her friends were watching her intensely, as if they were about to paint her portrait and needed detail. Talk about paranoia, thought Janie Johnson. Your usual abnormal person thinks her enemies are after her. I think my friends are after me. She made herself smile when people eyed her. She did not duck behind tall classmates or hunch down in a sea of shoulders.
