“Good luck,” she says, smooths down my hair (which is apparently sticking up funny, or at least Mom thinks so), and leaves.
The secretary gives me a printout of my schedule. “Would you like a student to show you around?” she asks.
“Your rooms have numbers on them, right?” I say. “I’m sure I’ll figure it out.”
The secretary gives me a wide smile. She’s wearing a very red shade of lipstick. “The kids here are very nice,” she says.
Almost every school I’ve gone to, someone’s told me that the kids there are very nice. Admittedly, the one time they didn’t, the kids were really awful. It doesn’t mean much when the office secretary says people are nice, though.
Anyway, it doesn’t matter. No one ever writes to me after I move away, and there’s no reason to assume that Mom won’t move me to Michigan the week after next. The only friends I ever get to keep are the people on CatNet.
The first class I get to is a tele-learning math class, in which we watch a teacher on a screen explain calculus to us. The teacher can see all our classes and call on us, but they’re based somewhere else and apparently teaching four remote classrooms. This is how they taught Spanish in one of my previous school districts. Because of some law about supervision, there’s also a classroom monitor sitting in the classroom with us who has nothing better to do than yell at anyone who takes out their phone. She’s ignoring other goofing-off sorts of behavior, though, including the girl next to me who’s drawing instead of taking notes.
The girl starts out graphing the function the teacher is talking about, but then she extends the lines and starts turning the functions into a castle. It’s a pretty elaborate castle, but as I watch her draw, I realize that she’s actually still taking notes. All the notes are incorporated into the castle somehow.
She looks up and notices that I’m staring at her drawing. I immediately feel self-conscious and worried she’ll be mad, but she looks thoroughly pleased with herself and adds a princess standing at the top of the wall with a bird on her shoulder.
The artist girl has long brown hair that spills down against her desk, half hiding her face as she works, and some elaborate nail art, black varnish with pictures of the planets on them. I wonder if she does her own nail art or if she has a friend who does it for her. I have trouble even just painting the nails on my right hand, my left hand is so clumsy.
Art Girl is in my English class, as well, where we all get paperback copies of The Scarlet Letter. The good thing about reading The Scarlet Letter is that I saved all the essays I wrote for my other two English classes and probably I can just recycle them and no one will notice. The bad thing: I didn’t like The Scarlet Letter the first time, I really loathed it the second time, and I’m not expecting the third time to be the charm.
The teacher, Ms. Campbell, is grouchy and boring. As she starts lecturing about Puritanism, the girl draws an enormous cursive-style capital L and starts decorating it. I wonder if this stands for her name, but as we are gathering up our books for the next class, I hear someone call her “Rachel,” so no, that’s not it.
At lunchtime, the school secretary turns up at the door of my classroom to summon me back to the office; my mother failed to fill out some stack of forms, which she insists on explaining to me so that I can have her sign them tonight. By the time she’s done explaining, I don’t have time to get anything to eat.
Next is health class. I had a health class back when I was in ninth grade, but for some reason, that state lists health classes as gym classes, and that’s how it’s on my transcript, so they’re making me take health class again, which is at least as bad as a third go with The Scarlet Letter. I’m surprised to find Rachel in that class, too. It doesn’t look like it’s a ninth-grade class here, though. They’re most of the way through a unit on the importance of exercise. The sex ed unit is next, and I hear a bunch of jokes about it being taught by the robo teacher, which I realize toward the end of class is not actually a joke. They have a robot that does the sex ed unit.
My final class of the day is Global Arts and Crafts. By now, I’m not surprised to find Rachel.
The teacher hands out paper and charcoal sticks and tells us to draw whatever we want. I want to draw a picture of a fruit bat hanging from a tree, its wings folded around it, and its pointy little puppy face. I don’t have a photo to work from, and my picture looks approximately like a banana with a cat head on the end. I grimace and look to see what Rachel is drawing now.
She’s drawing me. Her picture has me scowling at my paper.
“Hey,” I say.
She looks up. The smile is gone, and her eyes are open a little extra wide. “What?”
I don’t know what to say. I feel weirdly self-conscious about this picture. One of my mother’s really strict rules is no photography of me, ever. I have a digital camera because I fought and begged and promised to never, ever, ever take a selfie. I’m supposed to leave or cover my face or turn away if a camera comes out, because an online picture of me could lead my scary-ass father straight to us.
This is a drawing, but it really does look an awful lot like me.
“That’s a really good picture,” I say finally.
Her smile returns slowly, blossoming into
