June 18, 4 pm, Prucher Hall Auditorium

I am sitting cross-legged on an uncomfortable seat, waiting for a speech to start. It has been approximately forty-five minutes since Mom and Dad left me here. I am going to be here for the whole summer, and I do not know a single person. I open the big new journal Mom gave me last week. So far all it has is a title page which says "Field Notes" in block letters. I turn to the first blank page and write:

hypothesis: taking an actual class in archaeology will serve to confirm nicola lancaster in her lifelong dream of becoming an archaeologist.

I scratch out "lifelong dream," because it doesn't sound scientific enough, and write "proposed vocation," but that sounds pompous, so I write "lifelong dream" again, and then above it, in larger letters, "ignore: this is dumb." Then I write: "speech notes" just in case I actually take any.

A large pink bald man in a navy blue suit that's slightly too small for him walks up to the podium in the middle of the stage. He taps the microphone until he gets the proper loud staticky clicking sound.

"Greetings, everyone. I'm so pleased to welcome you all to the Siegel Institute Summer Program for Gifted Youth. You are exceptionally talented, and we at the Institute are privileged to serve as guides for this stage of your educational explorations."

if you bottled his voice, you would never have to buy cooking oil again.

scary-looking kids in th e front. guys with bad hair, button-down shirts and ties. girls in perfect pastel floral-print dresses. one redheaded guy wearing a three-piece suit. mostly white, some asians, a few black kids. as usual, each ethnic group member is only sitting with other people from the same ethnic group. four disgusted-looking girls sitting together, dressed in all black with dyed black hair: the goth ethnic group?

Two seats over on the right is a tall, solid girl with gray-blue eyes and a lot of curly red hair. She is wearing a green velvet dress and black sandals, and is carefully painting her toenails the same shade of green as the dress. Her fingernails are purple. I start to sketch her. I want to see if I can get her hair and her look of total concentration. I get her expression but screw up her hair, then ruin her expression in the process of trying to fix her hair.

On my left are a boy and another girl. The boy has wavy, longish, dark brown hair, caterpillaresque eyebrows, and I don't know what his eyes look like; they're closed. He won't notice me drawing because he's asleep. Deeply asleep -- I see drool glistening at one corner of his mouth. I draw his closed eyes and his open mouth. I have a hard time with the drool. It ends up look ing more prominent than it actually is.

I look away from Drooling Boy back up on stage. "It is necessary to understand that giftedness qua giftedness, that is to say giftedness as giftedness, is not sufficient armor with which to attack the modern world."

you don't attack with armor. armor is a defense.

I sketch Large Pink Bald Man: an egg with arms and legs, and a smaller egg on top for the head. The resemblance to Humpty Dumpty is uncanny, so I draw a wall, then a second sketch, of his great fall.

splat.

The girl on my left has the most beautiful hair I have ever seen. It's very long, blonde, thick, simple and heavy. All the blonde girls I know do so much crap to their hair. They curl, spray, and gel it into submission. Actually that's not true; there are the hippie girls who part it in the middle and braid it, but they're the exception. This girl's hair doesn't look like any of theirs. It's blonde all right, but not platinum blonde, and not that really yellowy blonde, either. Honey is the closest color, but it would have to be different kinds of honey that are different shades, like alfalfa and clover, and maybe some spices too, like ginger and cumin. Of course this doesn't really matter because all I have is a pencil and I doubt I could get her hair right if I had the world's biggest box of crayons. I couldn't get her eyes right either. They're so green. They look like they would glow in the dark.

I realize I haven't drawn anything yet. I quickly sketch the shape of her head and start doing her hair. The nose will be hard, I always mess up noses. Maybe I should do the mouth first. She has narrow lips.

For a while I forget where I am. I'm trying to be like Dad. I'm trying to look at her the way he looks at things when he draws them. He says he breaks objects up into forms: like he doesn't see a head, he sees an oval.

But I just keep seeing this girl.

She has her index finger in her mouth. I can't quite tell, but it looks like she's peeling off the skin around her cuticle with her teeth.

I didn't think anyone else did that.

I know I'm drawing too quickly and sloppily now, but I want to have evidence that someone else damages herself in the same small subtle way. She takes her finger out of her mouth too fast for me to capture it on paper, but when she does, I see a spot of blood.

Beautiful Hair Girl has messed-up fingers like mine.

Just as I'm thinking this, she looks over at me with those glow-in-the-dark green eyes. I feel myself start to blush. Then she smiles. After a moment, I smile back.

Excerpted from EMPRESS OF THE WORLD © Copyright 2003 by Sara Ryan. Reprinted with permission by Viking. All rights reserved.