Revealed by Amanda Valentino Page A

stuck in the theater and working on costumes for a certain play because a certain other somebody who shall remain nameless had signed them up for a certain job that never seemed to end, whereas that certain somebody’s job did not require a Saturday shift.
    â€œWow, that guy sounds like a real jerk,” I agreed, then hopped on my bike and hightailed it out of the parking lot.
    I told myself I wasn’t telling them about my trip because Frieda had been explicit in her instructions: TELL NO ONE .
    So it wasn’t like she’d told me to tell them and I hadn’t.
    I even tried to convince myself it was safer for me to go alone than to drag the girls into it (oh, yeah, because I’d so totally rescued Callie and Nia from creepy doctor guy— not! ). I told myself all kinds of stuff, but by the time I got on the train Saturday afternoon, I was pretty sure the truth was a whole lot less altruistic.
    I wanted to go to Baltimore alone.
    I wanted to be the one who discovered the missing link to Amanda, the one who found her when no one else could. And I didn’t want to share all of my memories of that day in the city, how it felt when Frieda took me seriously as an artist, how grown-up it seemed to be ordering lunch at a Baltimore diner right as the rest of my class was sitting in fourth period. That day was one of the happiest of my life, and it was also private. It was mine. Mine and Amanda’s.
    Wondering if that made me a total jerk, I opened the folder Cornelia had slipped into my hand as I was walking out the door earlier. I’d told her I was on my way to an afternoon rehearsal (note to self: add “lies to awesome little sister” to list of things to admire about Hal Bennett), and she gave me a sort of funny look before saying she’d printed out everything that had come into the website in the past couple of days. “I figured you and Callie and Nia might want hard copies.”
    At the mention of Callie and Nia, I couldn’t meet Cornelia’s eyes, so I just mumbled something vague, then took the pages from her and pushed the button to open the garage door and grab my bike. My mom was at a conference, learning about pursuing “nontraditional” college applicants. I couldn’t help thinking she wouldn’t exactly appreciate my “nontraditional” plans for the afternoon.
    As the train pulled out of Orion and I flipped open Cornelia’s folder, the henna tattoo of the cougar on the inside of my forearm caught my eye. I touched it lightly, thinking of all the things that had happened in the brief time since Amanda had convinced me to get it. Somehow I felt like the person who’d taught me that cougars are strong and solitary, that they stake out their territory and patrol it, would understand my needing to go to Baltimore alone.
    The thought of Amanda understanding me, wherever she was, made me feel comforted somehow, and as I started flipping through the pages Cornelia had printed out, I didn’t feel quite so much like the world’s most selfish immature loser.
    The top page was a posting from someone who thought Amanda was part of a crazy science experiment that turned her invisible, and she got stuck that way.
    I chuckled and turned to the next printout—a testimonial written by a girl from a town called Saint Albans in Wyoming. She wrote that when her dad had a heart attack and it looked like he wasn’t going to pull through, Amanda had spent a day and a night sitting with her outside ICU, waiting for news (he’d survived, she told us, and was helping her mother prepare dinner as she was posting).
    The page after that was a post written by a girl named Poppy. She wrote that until Amanda came to her school, she was always made fun of for her patched clothing and shy personality, but when Amanda found her crying in the bathroom, she promised to make the bullying stop, which she did.
    Next came something from a girl who was