“Don’t hate eleventh grade without giving it a chance!” Hermione says. “You wouldn’t like it if eleventh grade hated you without giving YOU a chance.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Hermy. Eleventh grade definitely hates me. Anyway, LBB, I took you a picture, and you should check it out.”
I look at Firestar’s new pictures. There’s a picture of a bat! An actual fruit bat. Firestar is nowhere near Australia, but there are fruit bats at the zoo in Boston.
“Awesome, Firestar, thank you.” I’ll have to check the porch for orb-weaving spiders in the morning and see if I can return the gift.
“What are you worried about in eleventh grade, Firestar?” That’s not Hermione, but CheshireCat. “Tell us and maybe we can help.”
“There isn’t anything you people can help with except math, like last year.”
“Math is overrated,” Boom Storm says. “Possibly mythological.”
“How about you, LBB?” CheshireCat asks. “Are you worried about starting at a new school?”
“I’m used to it,” I lie. “It’s no big deal anymore.”
In the morning, Mom yells at me to get up, that I’m going to be late for school, even though I don’t see how I can be late for something I’m not actually enrolled in yet. I get dressed, then dig out my file folder of transcripts. I have four. I have been enrolled at six—no, seven—different high schools, but I wasn’t at three of them for long enough to get a transcript.
New Coburg High School is in a low building surrounded by parking lots and cornfields. Mom parks our van in the far end of the parking lot rather than hunting for visitor parking. It’s a hot, sunny day, and the breeze throws dust and the smell of asphalt in our faces.
Mom doesn’t like talking to people, but there was this one time she tried just dropping me off by myself at the high school and it didn’t go very well, so now she always comes in with me. We open the front doors of the school and are met with a rush of air-conditioning and the faint smell of the wax they probably used to shine up the floors over the summer. There’s a trophy case in the front hallway that’s half-covered by a big banner saying WELCOME BACK WRANGLERS. It takes me a minute to find the sign saying OFFICE, with an arrow, but I spot it before my mother does.
“This will be fine,” Mom says, and I’m not sure if she’s talking to me or herself.
The time she dropped me off without her was my second high school in ninth grade, the one in Kansas. There were basically two problems that intersected. The first was that Mom wasn’t with me, which got their attention in a way that was not helpful because it was weird. The second: we’d rented a house next to a vacant lot. What the landlady didn’t tell us was that the vacant lot had had a house that was used as a meth lab. Everyone in the town knew about the meth house, and the fact that I was right next door to it—and didn’t have a parent with me—made the school secretary so concerned she literally called the police.
That was one of the high schools I don’t have a transcript from. After showing up to try to reassure everyone she wasn’t up to anything dodgy, Mom loaded the van back up, and I finished ninth grade in Missouri.
Anyway, looking around the office in New Coburg, no one here looks like they’d care enough to call the cops on us, so that’s good. There’s a secretary and a touch screen for signing people in and out and a robot with a tray of sharpened pencils. Thief River Falls got that same “Utility Robots for Rural Schools” grant, but the robot broke and there wasn’t money to fix it, so all it ever did was sharpen pencils; it didn’t cart them around to classrooms.
The guidance counselor is a woman whose hair is dyed blond but growing out gray at the roots. When the secretary tells her there’s a new student here to enroll, she lets out a heavy sigh and says, “You’d better come into my office.”
In her office, I find out that she doesn’t want to let me take calculus because I wasn’t here for the placement exam and how does she know whether the precalculus class in Thief River Falls was any good, and also I’m only in eleventh grade and calculus is for twelfth graders. There’s also no Spanish class here—the high school only has German—and they do American literature in eleventh grade, which means I’ll be reading almost the same books I read last year at my last two high schools, both of which had American lit in tenth grade. I read The Scarlet Letter twice last year.
She flips through my stack of transcripts with obvious irritation. “Why is your name misspelled in half of these?” she asks. I shrug. So does my mother.
By the start of third hour, I’m registered for calculus despite the guidance counselor’s reluctance, the usual stuff like English and history, an animal science class, and something called Global Arts and Crafts, which sounds like the sort of class where most of my classmates will be showing up high. I was hoping that maybe they’d have a photography class, but no.
Animal science is mostly a class about dairy farming, but it’s only one semester, so I’ll have half of a credit of a science under my belt when my mother moves me again, assuming we stay here through the semester, which may be a big assumption.
The office secretary makes me a student ID card and sets me up with a lunch account, which my
