Between the Lines by Jodi Picoult, Samantha van Leer

I become an even bigger pariah than I already am.
    My mother glances at me. “Well, whatever it was, it’s nothing a double chocolate milk shake from Ridgeley’s Diner can’t fix. Let’s stop there for dinner.”
    I know, for my mom, this is a big deal. We aren’t the kind of people who eat out a lot. We can’t afford to. “Thanks,” I mutter. “But I really just want to go home.”
    “Delilah,” my mother says, frowning at me. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
    “I’m fine, Mom. I just have… a lot of homework.”
    I successfully manage to avoid conversation for the rest of the ride home. When we pull into the driveway, I rush into the house and upstairs to my room. The book is lying on my bed, just where I left it.
    I open to page 43 without even trying—the spine is developing a natural split there, I think—and find Oliver at the bottom of the rock cliff. He offers me a brilliant smile. “Did you enjoy swim practice?”
    I’ve managed to hold it together through the end of practice; through the locker room, where everyone was whispering and giving me dirty glares; through the ten-minute car ride home. But now, in front of Oliver, I let go and burst into tears. As I do, droplets splash on the page. One lands on Oliver and bursts over his head like a water balloon, leaving him soaking wet.

     
    “Sorry,” I say, and sniffle. “I had a pretty lousy afternoon.”
    “Maybe I can cheer you up, then,” he says.
    Just being here cheers me up, I think, and I realizethat at swim practice, when my whole life was falling apart, the one person I really wanted to see was Oliver.
    Who, technically, isn’t really a person.
    I wipe my eyes. “I just practically drowned the most popular girl in my school—the same one I crippled last year. Monday morning when I go to school every single student in the building is going to hate me.”
    “ I won’t hate you,” Oliver says loyally.
    I smile a little. “Thanks. But unfortunately, you don’t go to my school.”
    “Ah, but maybe I could—sooner than you think….”
    My eyes widen as I realize what he’s talking about. “You found another way out?” I would much rather talk about Oliver’s problems than my own.
    “Well, I found some kind of portal, at the very least! I met with Rapscullio, and he’s a brilliant painter!”
    “ Painter? I thought he was a villain!”
    “No,” Oliver says. “Remember, I told you, that’s just his role in the story. Anyway, he’s figured out how to paint an object onto a special canvas that’s an identical portrait of his lair… and have that object magically appear.”
    “That’s how he creates Pyro, the dragon—”
    “Exactly. But apparently the mechanism works even when the story isn’t in play.”
    I shake my head. “How will that help? It’s not likeRapscullio lives here. He can’t just paint you into this world.”
    “Yes, but I think I might be able to paint myself out of my own.”
    I ponder this for a moment. “That won’t work. You’d just wind up repainted somewhere else in your story. Like a clone.”
    “A scone?”
    “No, a cl—Never mind.” I get up from the bed and start pacing in front of it. “If there was a way, though, to get a painting of my world into Rapscullio’s lair, then maybe—”
    “I thought you might need some comfort food….” At the sound of a voice, I whirl around to find my mother standing in the doorway with a dinner tray. There’s a grilled cheese sandwich and a glass of milk. She peers around the room. “Who on earth are you talking to, Delilah?”
    “My… a friend.”
    My mother glances around again. “But there’s no one here….”
    “Oliver’s on the phone,” I say quickly. “Speaker phone. Isn’t that right, Oliver?” He doesn’t answer, of course, and I feel myself blushing furiously. “It’s a pretty bad connection.”
    My mother’s eyebrows raise. It’s a boy? she mouths silently.
    I nod.
    She gives me a thumbs-up and—leaving the