Room 217. Peering through the window of the closed door, I pray I don’t pass out with fear. I turn the doorknob with great plans to slink in quietly, pass my new-student slip to the teacher, and find myself an empty desk at the back. But the squeaky hinges give me away. About thirty kids spin around to stare.
My cheeks burn so hot it’s like I’ve been slapped.
“Welcome to Honors Math,” the teacher says to me, pushing up the sleeves of his jacket and loosening his tie. “I’m Mark Curtis. I was just explaining that I’m here to make your lives miserable for the next few months. By the time you encounter me again as a senior, you’ll be thankful you’ve been broken in. Grab a seat, we’ve got a lot to cover today.”
The ripple of groans that follows is a nice distraction from the strange kid at the door. Unfortunately it’s short lived. All eyes return to me as I walk across the room to hand him my office slip. “I’m new.”
He glances at the paper. “Welcome to the class, Sara. Ever heard of Saint Sarah?” he asks, rubbing his chin and looking up. “More than one author has suggested Saint Sarah was the daughter of Mary Magdalene and Jesus. History’s most perfect union.”
A few kids smirk from the front row.
I start to hunt for a seat, when he continues. “This theory was used in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. The daughter of Jesus. Fairly illustrious parentage, don’t you think?”
I offer him a watery smile.
He grins, his grayish hair swooping down over one eyebrow. “Now that I’ve destroyed any shot you might have had at a social life, you can go ahead and find yourself a seat.”
There’s an empty desk next to a girl with layered hair dyed so black it’s nearly blue. As I pull my binder from my book bag, I realize Bentley Girl is right in front of me. Thankfully, her underwear is covered.
I notice her bare knees right away and scan the other girls. Sure enough, every female in the class is wearing kneesocks. No one is in tights but me, and I feel like a kindergartner. I’m tugging my skirt down over my knees when Mr. Curtis asks Bentley Girl about her summer vacation.
She flips her hair and turns sideways in her seat, crushing her mouth into an irritated smile. “I spent six weeks sunning myself in the courtyard behind the Queen Elizabeth Theater, where I was meant to be sorting sweat-soaked costumes for the cast of my dad’s new musical while he howled at the orchestra for butchering the music he spent two years writing. But this old fungus-face of a lead actor kept hitting on me, so I bailed.” She snaps her gum and looks around at the class before her bluegreen eyes rest on me. As hard as I try, I can’t stop staring. Before she turns away, she adds, “Don’t ever let anyone tell you showbiz isn’t freaking glam.”
The redheaded boy next to her scoots his chair closer. He’s so small his overstuffed pencil case could practically crush him, and with his plump cheeks and soccer-themed backpack, he looks to be about nine or ten. He reaches for her hand and starts to scrawl something on her palm. “Take my number,” he says through a nose stopped up with rhinovirus. “I’m younger and way more flexible.”
Bentley smacks the pen to the floor. “We need to get Little Man Griff a blow-up doll before he hits puberty and implodes. He clearly can’t handle the estrogen around here.”
“That’ll be enough from the two of you.” Mr. Curtis crosses his arms. His head tilts to one side as he stares at the girl next to Bentley. “How about you, Sloane? Do anything interesting?”
Sloane slumps lower in her seat, causing her too-tight vest and shirt to ride up and expose her slender waist. She nudges Bentley Girl. “I spent the summer texting my poor friend from my dad’s office.” She pushes a tangle of chestnut hair from her face to reveal eyes the color of smoke and a pouty lower lip that gives her a drowsy sulk. She looks as if she’d like to go back to bed. Not necessarily alone. “It was boring. All I really learned was that you can’t get a good cell signal in the basement of Mallory, Mallory, and Montauk unless you sneak out into the rat-infested back alley and risk the plague.”
“Don’t think I didn’t appreciate it, Sloaney,” says Bentley Girl.
“Rats didn’t cause the plague,” says another girl, haughty and offended. Unlike Bentley’s, this girl’s voice is shrieky and metallic, like a spoon scraping against the bottom of a mixing bowl. Her yellow bob is tamed by a velvet headband. Everything about this girl looks fragile; from her thin legs to her papery fingernails to her dangling butterfly earrings. “It was fleas that carried Yersinia pestis and they transmitted it to the rats. In fact, rats carry very few zoonotic conditions. Leptospirosis, maybe, but you’d basically have to lick rat urine while it’s still wet to catch that, and it isn’t even in season during the summer.” She settles herself back in her seat and folds her arms across her chest, satisfied. “Not outside of the tropics, anyway.”
Sloane blinks at her as if too tired to push her features into any sort of expression. “Is that information meant to kill me, Isabella? Because it might.”
Isabella doesn’t answer. Just adjusts her headband and turns to Bentley Girl. “Anyway, what about me, Carling? I braved old fungus-face every Tuesday to meet you for lunch. Don’t I get any credit?”
Carling. Wait a minute … I suck in my stomach and fumble around inside my too-tight waistband to pull out the dangling tag on my left. It says Carling Burnack. My stomach flips over as I realize I’m sitting in Bentley Girl’s cast-off skirt. After class, I should go back to Mrs. Pelletier. Tell her this skirt isn’t lost. It escaped. From the girl with the composer father and randy old actor and the chauffeur with the dreads.
Carling reaches over to slap the blonde girl’s forearm. “Isabella gets a love smack.”
This pleases Isabella so much I have to look away. Though, on some level, I understand her fascination.
Mr. Curtis turns to a girl with smooth black hair pulled back into a high ponytail so glossy it could be made of strands of satin. Her eyes are enormous, her dark-skinned face heart-shaped. Her shirt is buttoned to the chin. She launches into an explanation about helping her right-brain father choose scuff-proof hotel wallpaper and helping her left-brain mother develop an industrial robot system to vacuum each floor, and I realize who she is. Willa Patel from Patel Hotels. I hear they’re so completely computerized, the front desk is notified electronically when a room’s toilet paper is low.
“What about you, Saint Sarah?” says Mr. Curtis when Willa is done. “Do anything special over the summer?”
Everyone turns around to look at me. They’re waiting for me to hold up my superior genes for all to see. My mother’s law firm, my father’s robot army. But all I have is a hole where my mom used to be and my jilted dad in his really bad janitor uniform.
“I just moved here from Lundon.”
“London,” says Carling, kicking one leg out in front of her in despair. “I’d kill to live in London. They’re about two years ahead of us in style. Whatever they’re wearing right now, you can be sure we’ll be wearing our freshman year in college.”
“No,” I say. “Not Lond—”
Mr. Curtis interrupts. “If that’s true, Carling, you should probably take your new classmate with you on your next shopping excursion. Sara, do you have advice about next year’s skirt lengths or must-have accessories?”
For a moment, I’m full of promise. Kids, mostly the girls, especially Carling and her friends, look at me as if I hold the key to their long-awaited transformation from wool-wrapped super geeks into world-weary It Girls poised on the knife-edge of global miniskirt fashion. Then I open my mouth. “I never, um, never really paid attention to that sort of thing.”
Carling, Sloane, and Isabella look disappointed. One by one, they spin around in their seats and face forward.
There’s nothing to see back here.
“Figures, the daughter of Jesus is an Ant,” mutters the dark-haired girl beside me. As Mr. Curtis scrawls a complicated formula on the blackboard, I look up to see she’s filming me with a large camera.
I hold a hand up to shield my face. “What?”
“Most insane school in the country. Figures you’d go here.” Pulling back from the camera, she squints at it, presses a few buttons, and resumes shooting me, this time leaning closer. The blue circles beneath her eyes, set against her ultra-white skin, combined with the wild black layered hair, make her look like she’s been exhumed from a grave.
I’m the daughter of somebody all right, but after spending ten minutes in this class, I’m not sure I should say whom. “What’s with the little boy?”
She whispers, “That’s Griff Hogan—an eleven-year-old perv-sicle genius who scored higher on the Ant admission test than anyone in history and will probably rule the world one day and force all women to walk around in rubber chaps and pasties. He’s in the news all the time and they make him out to be this model student. What never makes it into the papers is that he’s more interested in bra sizes than algorithms. Total deviant and not once in the two years has his sniffer been mucous-free.”
She’s funny, this girl. I wonder if she has any openings in the friend department. “But how does he not get trampled in the halls? He’s, like, three feet tall.”
She shrugs. “Brains are revered around here. And no one is brainier than Griff Hogan. His family lives in a shack in the South End that should be condemned, but his dad’s some famous researcher who won the Nobel Prize in physics about a million years ago. There’s some serious cerebral wattage in that family. Any one of us could be begging him for a job one day and we know it. Like I said, Hogan’s going to rule the world.”
The parents who voted for uniforms were wrong. White shirts and ties might be able to camouflage Griff Hogan’s crumbling house, but the real inequality between these students and me can’t be erased. The cerebral wattage of my genetic background is comparatively low in volts and all the entrance exams and wool skirts in the world won’t change that. Even the poor kids, the ones too gifted to need cram schools and tutors, come from brilliance. I don’t belong.
I nod toward Carling. “And her?”
“Carling Burnack is kind of like the school mascot, our crazy-faced lunatic. The daughter of this major award-winning Broadway composer whose career is now seriously wounded. The chicks making googly eyes at her are her minions. The blonde, Isabella, is a prickly little know-it-all, totally devoted to Carling. The brunette who can’t keep her eyes open is Sloane Montauk, about the laziest human you’ll ever meet. If the boys offered to carry her from class to class on their shoulders, she’d be up for it. These girls all hang out at the Petting Pool at lunch.”
“Petting Pool?”
She writes something on a scrap of paper, folds it a few times, and slaps it down on my desk. “Here’s my number. Stick with me and you’ll be okay. I’m Poppy, by the way. We should totally hang out.”
“That would be cool,” I say, trying not to sound too eager. When she moves in close with her camera, I laugh. “What’s with the short-lens-stalker thing?”
A boy with acne-scarred cheeks and greasy hair grunts from behind her. “Poppy’s mom is Kiki Chan.”
“The director? Seriously?”
“Don’t get all excited about the DNA,” the boy says, giving the back of her chair a few playful flicks. “There won’t be any Oscars for Poppy. She’ll be more into shooting cheating husbands through restaurant windows … maybe a few porn flicks to keep her creative edge.”
Poppy frowns, lowering her camera for a moment. “I can’t even believe you said that, Landau.”
Landau squints. “I was joking. Chill.”
“Yeah, right!”
“I actually think he was,” I say, baffled by her overreaction.
“Oh. So you’re taking his side?” Her voice rises into a pathetic squeak.
“No. I …”
“You know what, Sara? I’ve changed my mind. Don’t call me.”
Mr. Curtis’s voice booms from the front of the classroom. “Can we have a little less chatter back there?”
I flip open my binder, mortified. And once I’m certain Poppy isn’t looking, I slip her phone number into my pencil case. An overly sensitive friend is better than no friend at all.