THE TRUTH ABOUT DINO GIRL

by barry lyga

Okay, follow me for a second: Guys are like dinosaurs.

We don’t know much about dinosaurs. We know a lot, but not nearly enough. Just like with guys.

Of the twelve hundred or so genera suspected to exist, we’ve only discovered around three hundred and fifty. There are huge gaps in our knowledge. When you go to a museum or watch a movie and you see a dinosaur with a certain color pattern on its hide, that’s just someone’s speculation. It’s informed speculation, sure, but it’s still just guesswork. Because we don’t know.

We’re guessing what they looked like based on patterns imprinted on petrified mud. We conjure their motions from the interrelationships of their bones, figuring that if they fit together this way, then they must have moved this way.

We’re guessing what they sounded like.

Roar.

It’s the closest we can come to the sound.

Maybe Grawr.

But there’s not much difference between the two, and still that’s as close as we can come.

We know so much and we know nothing, absolutely nothing, nothing at all.

Again, like with guys.

I tried to explain this to Sooz. Sooz is my best friend.

Sooz is my only friend, really.

We were at Sooz’s house, doing our homework in her room. Other kids were out doing things, but we had no after-school activities. It was early in our freshman year and I had tried to start a Fossil-Hunters Club, but there were no takers. Sooz wanted to join the art club because she’s all about the art, but it was all poseurs, so she quit.

I was on the bed, reading. She was at her desk, madly sketching away. Part of her assignment was not using the computer. Which, to Sooz, is like saying, “Here. Draw this with your nose.”

“First of all,” I told her, “we know they definitely exist. We have proof of that.”

“Duh.”

“And then, well…for guys and dinosaurs, even though we have evidence of them and their habits, they’re still a mystery to us.”

“This is about Jamie,” she said knowingly.

And it was.

Jamie Terravozza.

See, there were certain things I knew for sure. I knew that the dinosaurs lived from 65 million to 230 million years ago. I knew that Compsognathus was the smallest dinosaur ever discovered—about the size of a chicken. I knew that the theropods were the only dinosaurs to survive the entire Age of Dinosaurs—first on the scene, last to die off. I knew that predators evolved early stereoscopic vision to aid in the hunt and that Troodon had the highest brain-to-body-mass ratio of any dinosaur.

I knew that they shook the earth when they walked.

I also knew that I was in love with Jamie Terravozza.

He was a junior and on the baseball team, while I was a mere freshman, and a geek. But it didn’t matter.

He sat across the aisle from me in biology. I felt out of place—it was all seniors and juniors in there because it’s an advanced class and there I was, this freshman girl. A Compsognathus among Carcharodontosaurs.

I remember the moment when it happened, when I fell in love. One day Mrs. Knight asked us why animals never evolve with three limbs instead of four or two or six or eight. I raised my hand. I was the only one. I said, “Bilateral symmetry” as soon as she pointed at me. Zik Lorenz—another baseball player—chuckled and said, “What’s this about bisexual?” My cheeks burned and everyone laughed but me. And then I noticed Jamie. He wasn’t laughing either. He just rolled his eyes.

I couldn’t believe it.

He flashed me a grin, then scribbled something on his notebook and slid it to the edge of his desk so that I could see it:

IGNORE HIM. HE’S AN IDIOT.

I loved him for that.

There were no other notes after that. Every time I went to answer a question, though—the too-smart freshman in a room of upperclassmen—he would nod his head a little bit, like it was okay.

God. Love.

The problem, of course, was that he had a girlfriend already: Andi Donnelly. A junior. Captain of the girls’ soccer team. Drop-dead gorgeous in all the ways boys like.

Sooz sighed and threw down her pencil. “Coprolite!” she said. “This is just one big piece of coprolite.”

(In second grade, I made the mistake of telling Sooz the scientific term for petrified dung.)

“Coprolite, coprolite, coprolite!” She crumpled up her paper. “I suck. I have coprolite for brains. You do it.” She threw the paper at me.

“No way. Uh-uh.” I was a decent artist—you have to be, if you want to be a paleontologist, all of those bones and fossils to sketch while on a dig—but I was mechanical. I could draw something right in front of me, but I couldn’t invent. I couldn’t draw the pictures in my brain, the way Sooz could.

I looked at the piece she’d thrown at me. It was gorgeous. Just not up to Sooz’s impossible standards.

She sighed again. “Who knew high school would be this hard?”

“What? It’s not hard. We’re both doing…”

“I mean guys,” she said. “Jamie.” She looked at me. “You know—dinosaurs.”

The next day, sitting at lunch, Sooz read A Song Flung Up to Heaven. I read Scientific American. That was how we rolled.

“Apatosaur in the house,” Sooz murmured.

I followed her gaze. Andi had sashayed into the lunchroom. Jamie followed, carrying two lunch trays. He always did that for her. I loved the way he balanced both trays so carefully, but casually, like it was nothing. His arms went all taut and on days when he wore short sleeves (like that day), I could see the tension in his biceps and their hardness.

He had a tattoo of a flaming baseball on his left arm, just below the cuff of his T-shirt. I saw it all the time in biology because he sat to my right and I looked at it all the time and it was like it was tattooed on my brain.

My bio notebook was filled with pages of me drawing that tattoo over and over again, applying my meager art skills to it as if it were a thigh bone from a brachiosaur found on a dig, and I was trying to capture it, pristine and perfect, before plastering it and shipping it off to a museum.

In the meantime, my sketches would be all the world would see.

Drawing that baseball, over and over…

“Apatosaur,” Sooz murmured. “Apatosaur.”

Her nickname for Andi. Apatosaurs had a terrible brain-to-body-mass ratio.

Jamie put Andi’s tray down in front of her. Nothing on it moved at all. He sat down across from her after accepting a quick kiss on the lips that was gone before a teacher could say anything.

“Ugh,” Sooz said. “Don’t you just hate her?”

“No. I just want to be her.”

And it was true. If I could be Andi, I would be the world’s greatest Andi. I adored Andi—her hair, her body, her walk. Her clothes. She wore clothes effortlessly, like she just woke up every morning and her clothes flowed onto her body. The right colors, the right fit, the right style. I loved everything about her. She was perfect.

And, of course, she had Jamie.

Sometimes I imagined that she and Jamie weren’t going out anymore. And Jamie and I started dating, and Andi was cool with it and we were all three great friends. Sometimes I imagined that she had never dated Jamie, that she was just this perfect girl without a boyfriend, and even though I had Jamie as my boyfriend, I was still friends with her, still nice to her, and I was never jealous if Jamie wanted to hang out with her alone because I trusted both of them.

“You need to get him out of your system,” Sooz went on, snapping me out of my fantasy world. “It’s weird. As long as we’ve been friends, you’ve always been single-minded. Dinosaurs, dinosaurs, dinosaurs, from Day One. Now you have this new obsession and I don’t know how to deal with it. Get back to your lizards.”

“They’re not lizards. They’re both from subclass Diapsida, but dinosaurs are archosaurs, while lizards are lepidosaurs. Two different things.”

Sooz grinned. “I love when you do stuff like that. I have no idea if you’re making it up or not, but it sure sounds good.”

Of course, I wasn’t making it up. None of it.

In kindergarten, when they asked what we wanted to be when we grew up, I said paleontologist. (Actually, I said, “plentyologist” because I couldn’t quite wrap my mouth around it yet…but I could spell it.) By first grade, I had the pronunciation down pat. Enough so that a boy once accosted me on the playground while I was sitting off to one side, reading a dinosaur book. “You’re not really a girl,” he said. “Girls don’t like dinosaurs.”

I blinked. “What do you mean? Of course I’m a girl. I’m wearing pink.” I pointed to my headband, just in case he didn’t get it.

Third grade: A-plus for my paper on theropods. Eighth grade—just last year—won the science fair with my project showing the difference between ornithischian and saurischian hips. I built my models painstakingly over a month, using books and Web sites for reference. I made Mom drive me to the museum in Washington DC two weekends in a row so that I could talk to one of the paleontologists there. Dr. Marbury liked me and let me e-mail him pictures of the project in progress. I wouldn’t let him help me, though. I had to do it on my own.

Dr. Marbury was so impressed with me that he said that—if my parents approved—he would take me on a dig with him. He had one scheduled for the summer of my junior year. I thought my eyes would pop right out of my skull. (Fortunately, that’s biologically unlikely. It does happen, though.)

That was a year ago and I still stayed in touch with him and he still wanted to take me and, honestly, nothing else mattered. I didn’t care that the other girls were getting into makeup and boys. I didn’t care that I only had one friend. I didn’t care that I wasn’t glamorous or that I was what Mom called a “late bloomer.” I didn’t care that boys didn’t think I was a girl. I didn’t care about any of it. I saved my money and I didn’t waste it on clothes or makeup or music from bands with hot guys in them or anything like that. Digs are expensive. I would need equipment. I would need stuff.

I didn’t care what it cost or what I had to sacrifice to get there. I just wanted to go on a dig. I wanted to be there, to find the remains, to brush away the dirt and the sand, to gently pry from the earth the bones of its past.

To sketch them and make them immortal.

The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago has one of the most complete T. rexes in existence, nicknamed Sue after the woman who found it. I just wanted a dinosaur nicknamed Katie—or even Katya.

That was all I wanted.

Until high school started.

Until Jamie.

Suddenly, I wanted something else. And I had no idea how to get it.

At her table, Andi got bored with food, apparently. She stood up and bounced a hacky sack from knee to knee, occasionally flipping up a foot to kick it up even higher. Everyone at her table watched and applauded. Even Jamie.

I am uncoordinated. If there is a piece of furniture in the room, trust me to stub my toe on it. I’m sort of like an allosaur or a T. rex—they could move somewhat quickly, but only straight ahead. The saurischian hip structure isn’t designed to swerve from side to side, so they blundered in a straight line, sometimes changing direction by shifting their weight with their tails. But dodging? Sidestepping something? No way. Can’t happen. It’s just a fact of anatomy.

“Close your mouth,” Sooz whispered to me. “You’re chewing like a theropod.” She picked up some of the lingo just from hanging out with me. Theropods were meat-eaters.

The lingo, but not the facts.

“Theropods didn’t chew their food,” I told her. “They didn’t have crushing teeth like we do. Their teeth were for tearing. Like this.” I demonstrated with my hamburger, attacking it with my front teeth, tearing off wads of meat and bread and growling.

Sooz looked at me in horror.

“See?” I told her, after I’d gotten it down. Grease and ketchup dripped down my chin. I wiped at it with a napkin. “They would just tear off chunks and then swallow them whole.”

“Um, Katya, you’re really loud….”

“They had these awesome teeth with serrated edges, called denticles?—”

“Katya…”

“Testicles?” someone said much too loudly.

I looked over my shoulder. At the table behind us, everyone was laughing, mimicking the way I’d chomped my burger.

“She said they have testicles for teeth!” one of them howled.

“No, not testicles. Denticles. They were for?—”

“Katya.”

“What?” I turned back to her.

“Let it go.”

I checked over my shoulder again. “I’m eating with my testicles!” one guy said in a mockingly nerdy voice, holding a French fry near his crotch.

“What am I going to do with you, Katya?” Sooz asked, and shook her head.

Only Sooz ever called me Katya. My real name is Katherine and everyone called me Katie, but Sooz said Katya was more exotic and claimed she would call me Katya for the rest of my life, even during the maid of honor’s toast at my wedding.

“I’ll never get married,” I told her. “Guys don’t like geeks.”

“You know,” Sooz said as we left the cafeteria, “it’s okay to do the dinosaur stuff with me. I like it, even when I don’t get it. But not everyone’s like that.”

“But dinosaurs are important! They ruled the earth for millions of years. When we study them, we can understand not just them, but also the way the world was, the way the world changed, maybe even what the world is changing into.”

She gave me the special Sooz look, the one that meant I was talking too loud again. Sure enough, people around us were snickering, shaking their heads, rolling their eyes. A few junior boys tucked their arms up like velociraptors and staggered around like drunk birds.

“Any day,” I said, more quietly, “we could wake up and there could be a discovery that could change everything. Right now, while we’re standing here, there are bones, Sooz. Bones and other fossils, filed away in museums all over the world. They’ve been in the ground for millions of years and they’ve been sitting in the basement of some museum for ten years or more, but every single day, someone looks at one of them for the first time. And that could be the one that changes everything. We could hear about it on the news any moment. Isn’t that amazing?”

“It is,” she said, and she was sincere because she was Sooz and she got it. “It really is.”

I didn’t tell her the rest. The best part.

The news could come at any moment. Or years from now.

I could be the one to make it.

And then everyone would notice.

Everyone would love me and respect me.

“I don’t get how you can like Andi,” Sooz said later that day, at her house. “She’s so mean. She once made so much fun of another girl that she went into the bathroom and cried for, like, an hour.”

I filed that one away, another “mean Andi moment” brought to you courtesy of Sooz, who has an endless supply.

“Jamie likes her,” I explained. “So there must be something to her, right? It’s just biology. Attractive specimens are good by definition—they reproduce and they pass down their genes.”

“This isn’t science,” Sooz said. “You’re in love with the guy. She’s your arch nemesis, not a science experiment.”

But I just couldn’t find it in me to hate Andi. I figured it had to be difficult to be her. There were all kinds of stresses that came with being Andi, things I couldn’t understand because I was not her. She was beautiful and funny and athletic and popular and I was…

When I was a kid, I had a picture book about T. rex. It talked about how juvenile T. rexes probably hunted in packs, and there was an illustration of a bunch of them ganging up on a lizard, probably an ancestor of the crocodile, judging by the spine and the tail.

But it was weird. They weren’t biting it or slashing at it or even touching it. They just surrounded the poor thing, which was slithering along the ground because it didn’t have the proper hip and tail alignment to stand on two feet like the T. rexes did. And the lizard had…It had this look on its face. This long-suffering look of Here we go again. And the T. rexes were leaning in, almost like they were taunting the poor lizard, making fun of it.

I knew how that lizard felt. And I hated that. I hated that I felt that way because that made me think that maybe…Maybe I was a lizard. I didn’t want to be a lizard. I wanted to be a dinosaur.

Andi was definitely a dinosaur. Sooz called her the apatosaur, but at least that’s a dinosaur.

“She has a biological advantage,” I told Sooz. “I need to figure out how I can get a biological advantage, make myself evolutionarily attractive.”

She waggled her eyebrows. “Oh? Really?” Sooz was marginally more girly than me—she actually wore makeup.

“Maybe. I’m thinking about it.”

That night, I went to my dad, simply because he’s a male and, therefore, would probably have an opinion.

“Dad, am I pretty?”

He grinned. “Honey, you’re the prettiest girl in the whole world.”

Well, that wasn’t helpful. He didn’t even stop to think about it. When someone answers a question that fast, they’re never telling the truth. I couldn’t possibly be the prettiest girl in the world. That’s just scientifically impossible. And what did I expect my dad to say? He’s not going to look at me and say, “Well, sweetie, your mom and I have been talking about this since you were born and we’re just sorry that we have such an ugly daughter, but we love you anyway and it’s what’s inside that counts.”

Right.

In my room, I looked in the mirror. I took off my glasses. My reflection became a big blur. How could I know what I looked like without my glasses if I couldn’t see without my glasses?

I squinted, scrunching up my face until I could make something out, but all I saw was my own scrunched-up face, which looked disgusting.

I checked my bank book. I’d been saving money forever—for the dig, for college. They’re both way expensive. I could buy contact lenses, maybe some makeup…some new clothes….

That wouldn’t totally drain my bank account. I would have money left over, but I would also have a new Katya to show off, a new, evolved Katya to attract Jamie, maybe.

Back to the mirror. I wished my boobs were bigger. Then it would be easy to get Jamie to notice me. I knew how that worked. I would just wear a button-down shirt with a couple of buttons undone and my boobs would work their magic boy-power. Maybe I needed a new bra. I could get one with padding in it, make everything stand up and stand out.

(Dinosaurs didn’t have boobs. Dinosaurs didn’t need boobs. Lucky dinosaurs.)

I thought about Andi, effortlessly juggling with her knees and feet. I thought of her lithe form in gym. Everything physical came so easily to her. She could head-butt a soccer ball in less time than it took me to realize there even was a soccer ball.

And Jamie loved her.

I had two things I thought of: dinosaurs and Jamie. Sometimes—like that night—the two merged in my dreams, and I was a T. rex hunting him down. Or he was hunting me (don’t I wish!).

Predator and prey. Prey and predator.

The next morning, at breakfast, I guess I still looked depressed. Dad asked me what was wrong.

“I wish I was good at something, Dad.”

He jerked his head like someone grabbed his hair from behind and pulled. “Honey! Why would you say that?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. Like baseball. Or soccer. Or something.”

He said what he always says when I shake him up: “Maybe we should have held you back after all.”

I have the dubious distinction of being the youngest freshman in school. Back when I went into kindergarten, I missed the cut-off by two days. My parents could have held me back and then I would have been the oldest freshman…next year. I would have never met Sooz, though, and that’s a world I’d rather not contemplate. My parents—Dad in particular—think all of my ills stem from that decision they made a bunch of years ago.

“This isn’t about that, Dad.”

Dad said, “Everyone is good at something. Some people play baseball or football. Some people are musicians. You’re good at dinosaurs.”

Yeah, but dinosaurs wouldn’t make Jamie fall in love with me. I already knew that.

You’re not a girl, that boy said on the playground.

Dinosaurs are neutered. Dinosaurs are sexless.

(Well, not really. Dinosaurs were amniotes—they fertilized eggs internally, just like human beings. I wanted to be amniotic with Jamie, and I couldn’t believe I just thought that with my dad right across the table!)

“Honey?” he said, because I’d drifted off.

“Nothing.” God, what am I, a total slut or something?

But when I got on the bus, I still thought about it. Thinking about Jamie not just liking me or talking to me, but actually kissing me. And maybe more.

Did being a dinosaur geek have to mean being sexless? Did T. rex discoverer Sue have a boyfriend? Did anyone ever kiss Sue, out on a dig or down in some dark, musty museum basement? Passion among the catalogued artifacts of a dead world.

Sigh.

On the way to homeroom, I kept my eyes down, watching my own feet. No footprints on school linoleum. A million years from now, if some future paleontologist tries to retrace the steps of the geekus girlus, she’ll have no luck because there aren’t any pathways to follow. Not like the dinosaurs. We take the fossilized imprints of their feet and string them together into “pathways,” which we use to reconstruct the way they moved. Along with the skeletons, this allows us to figure out how they walked and how fast they could run. Like, T. rex had a sort of lumbering run/walk, with its feet staggered.

I watched my own feet and started to mimic the T. rex. They had to start slow because they were so big—it took them some time to build up to velocity, but then they could move at twenty-five, maybe even up to forty miles an hour.

This is how we learn. Indirectly. We can’t observe them, so we observe what they left behind, and even though they left behind a lot, it’s never enough. Never. So we keep looking. We never stop. Because it matters. It’s important. They’re extinct, yes, but they still have so much to teach us, if only we’d listen and learn.

I looked around me at the swarm of kids in the hallway. I felt so small in that moment. I knew I was the only one thinking anything even remotely related to dinosaurs or history or science. I was alone.

And I felt like that lizard, the one being hounded by the young T. rexes. Just little lizard me, slithering along on my belly and along comes a bunch of big, bad dinosaurs and they’re going to take their time to eat me. They’re in no hurry. You know why? Because I’m just a little lizard. I’m nothing. Less than nothing.

And I don’t want that.

I had gym with Andi three days a week. I tried to be nice to her. I wanted her to like me. Maybe then I could learn how to be like her.

I thought about it this way: I knew the names of more than a hundred species of dinosaurs. I knew the order of the periods and epochs. I spent hours reading Gould and Barsbold and Bakker. I tried to understand both sides of the debate: warm-blooded or cold? Feathers or not? I taught myself how to draw, for God’s sake, endlessly tracing bone patterns out of books, sitting in the museum for hours on end, sketching the fossils on display there. I sat in the backyard for entire weekends, chipping away at different kinds of rocks with three different hammers, testing them for the proper weight and hardness of steel. (A paleontologist’s hammer is her most important tool—too heavy and you get tired using it too soon. Too light and it won’t do you any good. Too soft and it’ll fragment and poke your eye out. These things matter.)

I lived in eternal frustration. I didn’t get it. I knew all of these things! I figured them out, sometimes on my own.

So why couldn’t I figure out the qualities in Andi that attracted Jamie? Why couldn’t I mimic them, improve on them? I was smart. This was one more science problem, a biology test set in real life.

Maybe that’s crazy. But I couldn’t help myself. I was desperate. I clung to the fantasy that—somehow—I could break up Jamie and Andi and yet be friends with Andi and make everyone happy all at once. There was no direct evidence that such a thing would work, but you know what? There’s no conclusive evidence as to exactly what made the dinosaurs extinct, either. Maybe it was a comet hitting the earth. Maybe it was disease. There’s a recent theory that bugs killed the dinosaurs. Tiny, insignificant insects. They weakened the dinosaurs enough that environmental factors were able to wipe them out.

Was that it? Maybe. We don’t know. But we know it was something because they’re definitely dead.

So maybe there was some way to live out my fantasy. Maybe I just hadn’t figured it out yet.

But I had to. It was killing me.

I never knew that being in love was a physical thing. I never knew your body reacted. Like when I saw Jamie and my stomach felt like someone had tied lines to it and pulled it in ten directions at once. Or the way I became suddenly aware of myself, of my body, when I sat across the aisle from him in bio—the way I felt my hair and my eyelashes and my lips and my nose and every motion of my body as I breathed, hyper-conscious in every way.

But it didn’t matter. Because one day it all became impossible.

That day was the worst day of my life. My own personal extinction-level event, right in the halls of high school.

I was leaving gym, following close to Andi. I did that whenever I could. Watching her. Listening. Trying to learn. Doing my research, like a good scientist.

But then, suddenly, Andi turned around, as if she’d forgotten something. Maybe she had. I don’t know. All I know is this: The worst thing that could possibly happen, happened.

She bumped into me. Hard.

I dropped everything I was holding. Including my bio notebook.

Which fell, fluttering like a wounded bird, to the floor.

And landed spread open.

The reproductions of Jamie’s tattoo.

That tattoo. Over and over and over again. Meticulous. Precise. Because that’s the only way I knew how to draw.

I prayed that Andi wouldn’t notice it. But her eyes dipped down.

I prayed that she wouldn’t realize what it was.

Fat chance. Like I said—precise. It couldn’t be anything but Jamie’s tattoo.

Before she could say anything, I started babbling. I just couldn’t stop myself. I was terrified and embarrassed and strangely giddy all at once.

“Please don’t say anything. Andi. Please. Please. It’s nothing. It’s really nothing. It doesn’t mean…I would never try to take him away from you, really. Never.”

Her eyes got wide and then she laughed. She laughed.

“Are you serious? Do you think I’m afraid of that? He doesn’t give a shit about you. He needs you following him around like he needs a hole in his head.”

“Actually, um, that can be useful.” Oh my God! What on earth? Where was that coming from? “The theropods had holes in their skulls to make their heads more lightweight.” Shut up, Katie! I begged myself. Shut up!

But I couldn’t stop myself. I was on autopilot. It was like my brain and my mouth became disconnected and my mouth just kept on going.

“It’s something of an evolutionary advantage for a large predator to have at least one hole in its head, as a way of reducing drag when?—”

“Hey!” she snapped. Her eyes scrunched and her brows came together and her mouth twisted into a scowl. Andi was suddenly the one thing I never thought she could be—ugly. It shocked me into silence. “Shut your little prissy, geeky mouth and listen to me, okay?

“Look, Dino Girl. There’s, like, a natural order to things, okay? It’s the way the world works. And girls like you do not get to go with guys like Jamie, okay? Especially when the guy is already with a girl like me. Do you get it? Did that get through your little lizard head?”

Dinosaurs aren’t lizards! I wanted to shout. Just like spiders aren’t insects or rabbits aren’t rodents, you stupid piece of coprolite!

But I said—I shouted—nothing. I just stood there, pinned, frozen by her anger.

“Do you get me, Dino Girl?”

I thought about that lizard in the picture book. And wouldn’t it just shock the living hell out of those T. rexes if it suddenly stood on up on its hind legs and roared and bit one of their heads off?

Impossible, of course. A physiological impossibility.

But I wasn’t a lizard. I was a human being.

And yet…

And yet I stood there. And I said and I did nothing.

“I asked you a question, lizard brain!”

“I understand.” My voice didn’t sound like my own. It sounded like a very small girl who has just learned how to speak and is being punished by her parents.

Andi turned away, stepping on my notebook. She left an imprint of her shoe there, destroying two of my sketches. A pathway for the modern dominant girlosaur. What would a future paleontologist make of it?

I was proud of myself: I managed to scoop up my stuff and make it to the girls’ bathroom before I burst into tears. I thought about the girl Sooz had told me about, the one Andi made cry in the bathroom for an hour. All she had done was make fun of her. Me? She had destroyed my soul. How long would I be in there?

Why did she have to be so mean? Why? All I wanted was a kiss. All I wanted was for a boy to like me. A special boy.

I locked the door to a stall in the corner and sat down, bringing my knees up to my chest. No one else was there, so I cried and cried and cried, but I don’t think it would have mattered. I don’t think I could have held it in even if the entire school had been sitting out there.

She was mean. Yes. But the worst part was that she was honest.

Like she said, he wouldn’t like me. He would never love me. I was just a geeky girl who knew too much about dinosaurs.

No threat to her. Just a little lizard. The most pathetic example of prey—not even worth the time for a predator to hunt, much less eat.

I spent the rest of the afternoon in the bathroom. I just couldn’t make myself leave. And when I left at the end of the day, I felt like everyone knew. Like Andi had texted everyone in school and sent instant messages and e-mails and then put up a Web page, just to make sure: “DINO GIRL LOVES MY BOYFRIEND! ISN’T THAT CUTE PATHETIC?”

Mom and Dad could tell something was wrong when I got home. I told them I had really bad cramps. They didn’t believe me. I’ve always been a lousy liar.

But I stuck to my story anyway and went to bed early and lay there, replaying those horrible moments in my mind over and over.

I fell asleep praying for a sudden Ice Age that would just make all of us extinct.

The next day, I went to school prepared for the worst. I somehow anticipated posters of my face throughout the school, with the word “LOSER!” plastered over them in big fonts.

But no one said anything. No one did anything. No one even looked at me funny.

Andi hadn’t told anyone. Maybe it wouldn’t be as bad as I thought. Sure, I’d blown any chance of being friends with Andi, but at least no one would be making fun…. And maybe I could get past it. Maybe someday it would be the kind of thing Andi and I would laugh about. Remember the time you tried to steal my boyfriend and I was mean to you?

But then came biology. I panicked. Jamie. What if she told Jamie?

Somehow, that had been the furthest thing from my mind. I had been so concerned with Andi that I couldn’t even make the leap to her telling Jamie about my crush on him.

Jamie sauntered into bio just before the bell.

My breath went out of me, entirely gone. I couldn’t find any more. I was in a vacuum.

He sat down.

He was wearing a long-sleeve shirt, but he had the sleeves rolled up so that I could see the bottom of his tattoo.

The tattoo burned my eyes. I thought of those pages from my notebook, now carefully torn out and left at home, where they could no longer incriminate me—too late.

And then…

And then he rolled his sleeve down. Slowly. Like an afterthought. Like he was trying to be casual about it. He stared straight ahead while he did it, not looking at me.

She told.

She told him.

I wanted to die. I wanted to combust, to burn up and die right there, leaving nothing but the smell of fried hair and a black scorch mark on the chair and the desk and the floor.

I heard nothing throughout bio. It was my favorite class, my best class, but I heard nothing and when I looked at my notebook later that day, there was nothing on the page. Just the date, printed neatly like on the rest of the pages, and then nothing.

Same thing with my memory. Just a white space—a blank like my notebook—in my brain where the carbon cycle should have been.

I stumbled out of class. Jamie knew. He knew I was in love with him. She’d told him. I had lost everything.

She could have just walked away from me. She didn’t have to be mean. If I wasn’t a threat, she could have been kind and just walked away and never mentioned it to anyone, ever.

And that’s the thing: She could have been kind. Why wasn’t she? Why was she so mean? If you’re not going to eat the prey, why smack it around? It just doesn’t make sense.

I spent the day in my own little hell, trying to figure it out. Trying to figure out what she had to gain by it. If she was right, if Jamie would never be interested in me (and she was right—I knew it, and I knew it all along), then why hurt me like that? Why?

Just because she could? Just because she was a dinosaur? Just because she was a dinosaur and I was a lizard, predator and prey, and she could?

She could. That’s what it came down to: She could do whatever she wanted just because she was Andi Donnelly, and there was nothing I could do about it.

And then…

And then, on the bus on the way home…

It hit me.

Like a comet.

It hit me:

The dinosaurs were more powerful, but the lizards survived.

Look around. They still exist. In forms almost identical to their dinosaur-age forebears. I could show you a salamander from the late Triassic and you would think, “Hmm, that looks like a salamander.” You would recognize it right away. Because it survived and the dinosaur didn’t.

They used to be prey, but they lived. They thrived, these lizards. Some of them are even predators now.

It’s scientifically, biologically impossible for a lizard to evolve into a dinosaur.

But prey can become a predator. It happens all the time.

All the time.

“Well, what are you going to do about her?” Sooz asked when I finally told her everything.

I couldn’t believe it when I heard the words come out of my mouth:

“I’m going to destroy her.”

Sooz stared at me as I told her my plan. I waited. I was nervous. Had I gone too far?

Finally, she said, “It’s about damn time.”

And then she said, “That bitch. I swear to God…Finally. Finally, Katya.”

I waited for her to get it all out.

“I hate her. Do you understand me? I hate her. And I’ve been sitting here while you talk about how great she is and how wonderful she is and it’s been killing me. Because she’s not great and she’s not wonderful.”

She took a deep breath.

“Do you remember that one story I told you about her?”

“Which one?” There were millions. Sooz was the editor of The Compleat Crimes of Andi Donnelly.

“About the girl. In the bathroom.”

“Yeah. What about…oh.” It hit me. “Oh, God. Sooz. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because you were so in love with her, that’s why! Because all you could talk about was how great she was and I didn’t want to…I don’t know. I don’t know.”

I hugged her. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry, Sooz.”

“Never mind. It’s all over.” She shuddered. “Let’s kick her perfectly rounded ass.”

So, Sooz was on board. Good. I needed her Photoshop expertise.

I would have to spend a little bit of the money I was saving. But if I was willing to do that before, for makeup, shouldn’t I be willing to do it now, for revenge?

Maybe it was insane to take on Andi. She was bigger than me. She was more popular, more important.

But here’s something every good paleontologist knows: Even the biggest die. Even the meanest get killed off by something that they can’t see coming. Like a meteor. Or an insect.

What it comes down to is this: In this world, you’re either predator or you’re prey.

There are many ways that dinosaurs caught and killed their prey. Everyone thinks that T. rex or allosaur or whatever just ran out into the open air and chased the little guys and ate them up. But the truth is that most of the meat-eaters were ambushers. They lay in wait very carefully and then grappled their prey. Chasing after prey was useless—it consumed too much energy and left too great a chance that the predator would injure itself. Besides, a high-speed pursuit of a smaller, more agile creature isn’t to your advantage when you can only move in a straight line.

So the big boys learned how to be patient. And stealthy. And to attack when least expected.

Like me.

Like a paleontologist.

Because you have to be patient to study dinosaurs. There are massive advantages to patience. On a dig, you can’t just go ahead and rip up everything in your path in your quest for fossils. You’d just end up destroying what it is you’re looking for. Fossils are fragile. They’ve been around for hundreds of millions of years and they won’t react kindly to someone tearing them out of the ground.

So you take your time. You dig out the earth in teaspoons. You don’t gouge the ground—you brush it away gently. You don’t pound the rocks to release the knowledge within—you chip at them. Fragment by fragment. It’s the patient work of centimeters.

It takes forever.

And once you’ve got the ground chipped and swept and brushed away, you have yet another long wait ahead of you. Maybe you want nothing more than to pull it up and marvel at it, but you can’t. There are procedures.

Because once you isolate the fossil in the ground, you have to sketch it for the record and for cataloging. You sketch and take notes and then finally pull it up, but you can’t enjoy it. No. Because you have to wrap it in plaster of paris, for protection. And pack it in a special crate. And send it off to a museum, where it will sit in a basement vault somewhere. It’ll sit there for years until someone has the time (and the grant money) to pull it out and break open the plaster of Paris (again, carefully—patiently) and sit down to clean it and examine it and draw more sketches and officially decide what it is and where it belongs and everything else.

Years.

That’s what I had waiting for me in my future. So I was ready. I was ready to be as patient as I had to be.

Someday, I’ll be the world’s greatest paleontologist. Because I am patient like nobody’s business.

After three months, I began to lose faith in the “ambush theory” of predation. There’s no way a meat-eater could or would wait so long for its prey.

I didn’t have a choice, though. I had to wait for soccer season.

I had to wait for Andi to be in practice pretty much every day of the week.

So I waited. And waited.

On one of my gym days, I “accidentally” left my math book in the locker room after changing. I begged Mom to take me back to school for it.

We got there just as practice was ending. A stream of girls headed into the locker room.

Coach Kimball gave me an annoyed look, but Mom said, “She really needs this book. It’ll just take a second.”

Coach made me give her my cell phone first—cell phones aren’t allowed in the locker room because of the cameras.

But no one noticed my new little credit card–size camera. That’s because I hid it in an empty blush compact, with a hole drilled through for the lens. So I could hold it up and look like I was just looking in the mirror, but I was actually snapping pictures.

When I’m stressed—like I was in the locker room that day, surrounded by Andi’s friends, all of whom just ignored me, thank God—I try to remind myself that over ninety-nine percent of all the species that have ever lived on earth are already extinct. So it’s not like I matter. Or any of us. But on that day, I didn’t care that my existence was just a blink of the universe’s eye. I wanted Jamie Terravozza. And if I couldn’t have him, well, at least I could make sure that she couldn’t, either.

Sooz giggled uncontrollably when she saw the pictures.

“This is serious,” I told her. “Stop it.”

“Sorry.” But she kept giggling. “I’m just thinking of how it’s gonna look when I’m done.”

I had taken as many as I could, as quickly as I could. They were mostly pretty bad—you try taking a bunch of pictures through a tiny hole in a compact case while surrounded by girls who could notice you at any minute.

But there were two or three that weren’t totally awful. Sooz took the best one and massaged it in Photoshop until it looked pretty good and then she did some more work. I watched her, impatient.

“That’s it,” I said. “It’s done.”

“Not yet,” she said, focused on the screen.

An hour went by. “Come on, Sooz. It’s perfect.” I was practically dancing from foot to foot.

“It’s nowhere near perfect. Shut up, Katya.”

I spun around her room. I paced. I practiced my brachiosaur walk.

“Come on, Sooz!”

She grumbled a little and clicked the mouse a few last times. “Fine. Fine. Here.”

I looked at the screen over her shoulder. “It’s perfect. It’s beyond perfect.”

Sooz grinned. “How many should we print out?”

We waited. To have it all come out the next day would be too suspicious. Someone would remember me in the locker room.

So I waited. Again. Still lying in ambush. I’ve already pegged the prey—it just doesn’t know it yet.

After two weeks, I pounced.

Brookdale awakened to a new poster on its telephone poles and newspaper boxes and bulletin boards. A new flier tossed in piles by the post office and the grocery stores and scattered all over the entrance to the high school.

It had taken us all night to walk around and do it. All night. Worth every last second of it.

I didn’t even get five minutes of sleep, but I couldn’t possibly miss school that day. Not and miss what everyone was talking about.

The image Sooz had mocked up.

Andi, half-naked from the shower in the locker room, drying her hip and leg, her torso completely revealed. Wet and gorgeous and totally unaware.

Sooz gave it atmosphere and mood. She Photoshopped out the locker room and Photoshopped in a sleazy hotel room we’d found online. And at the top:

DO YOU LIKE SEX? SHE DOES!!!!!

Under the picture: CALL ANDI! with her phone number and her address. And then:

TRUST ME—SHE LOVES IT!!! I KNOW FROM EXPERIENCE—COUNTLESS TIMES!!!!!

The first time I saw Andi that day, she was in tears. She was alone. She was rushing to the bathroom.

She probably tried to lie. She probably tried to say it wasn’t her. But she knew it was. You can’t hide that kind of knowledge from your expression, from your eyes. People can tell when you’re lying.

Everyone in Brookdale knows what Andi’s boobs look like now.

It was the talk of the school. I heard all sorts of rumors: She was a secret prostitute. (She and her best friend had had a threesome with a college guy from Pennsylvania.) She was an exhibitionist—she couldn’t help it. It was an ex trying to get back at her. She was a nympho and couldn’t help cheating on Jamie. It wasn’t really her. (Then why did it look like her? Why was her phone number on it?)

At lunch, I sat with my usual view of Andi’s table. By then, the real story had spread throughout school: They were over. Period. For good. Zik Lorenz and Michelle Jurgens had heard the whole fight near the stairwell between third and fourth period.

What the hell is going on? Jamie yelled. Everyone’s saying you’re a slut.

It’s not me! she protested.

It is you! It is! Jamie said.

Which clinched it. For everyone. After all, Jamie would definitely know what she looked like naked.

If it’s not real, Jamie demanded, how did they get a naked picture of you?

What could she say to that? With the locker room Photoshopped out, how could she know where that picture had come from?

According to the grapevine, Andi had just broken down into tears again at that. I wished, oh, I wished I had been there to see it!

I watched at lunch instead.

I watched as Andi sat down at her table.

Jamie didn’t sit with her.

In fact, no one sat with Andi.

Sooz flashed me the biggest smile I’ve ever seen. I resisted the urge to high-five her. Too incriminating.

But when I got up from the table, something amazing happened.

The earth shook with my footsteps.

It shook.

From now on, the earth would tremble in my wake.

And I knew. I knew what the dinosaurs sounded like.

They sounded like me….