6

One fitful night of sleep and one tense car ride later, Ted found himself back at school the next morning—it was Thursday, he had checked—an hour earlier than usual for his first-ever in-school suspension.

Ted never thought he would be happy to be at school, or anywhere, early. Today, though, Ted was glad that the halls were empty. Everything was terrible, but at least nobody would know he was going to in-school suspension.

Then again, he realized, the whole girls’ soccer team would notice that Jenn wouldn’t be at practice that morning, and she was probably going to tell them why. From there, the information would spread through the rest of the school by noon. Nina would definitely hear about it.

Ted signed in at the front office, writing his name on a clipboard right under Jenn and Adam’s names. A school secretary led him down the hall and into a small classroom he had never been in before.

The first thing he noticed about the classroom was that there were no windows. The bumpy cinder-block walls, painted with thin white paint, pressed in around three lines of desks.

Adam sat cross-armed at one of the desks, below a poster with a floppy-eared dog on it and the words Are you in trouble? Don’t worry. Even an old dog can learn new tricks!

From the stony expression on his face, Adam was not interested in learning new tricks. Adam had texted them the bad news that morning: he was grounded too. He wouldn’t be going to the diner after his recital.

Jenn sat at the desk next to his, looking almost as grumpy as Adam. She hated when plans fell through. She gave Ted a quick nod hello and then continued staring at the ceiling.

Ted slid into the desk behind hers.

“Your in-school suspension will begin once I read you the following,” said the school secretary. She took out a folder and began to repeat the rules listed in the letter the school had sent home with them for their parents the day before.

“The students will stay in their seats at all times and work on their classwork. They are not allowed to sleep, to use their phones, to listen to music, to speak to each other, or to leave this room. A teacher or staff member will check in every so often to make sure the students are following the rules and to escort students to the bathroom for bathroom breaks as needed. You will be dismissed at three o’clock this afternoon.” She looked up from the folder. “Do you all have your packed lunches?”

Ted, Adam, and Jenn all nodded.

“Good,” said the school secretary. “Hand me your phones, please. I’ll return them at the end of the day.” When they’d turned over their phones, she turned and left the room, letting the door bang shut behind her.

Silence settled over the cramped room like a heavy fog.

Ted tried not to think about how loud his breath sounded. He opened his science homework and tried to use up all of his brain cells learning about cells.

The clock on the classroom wall was broken—bored to death, Ted guessed, just like everyone else who’d had to sit through in-school suspension there—and they weren’t allowed to use their phones, so there was no way to know how much time was passing.

Sometime in the mid-morning, there was a knock on the door. Ted looked up and saw Ms. Stevenson open it and step into the room.

Ted realized he had never seen her look anything but happy. She did not look happy today.

“Hi. I just came in to check on you three,” Ms. Stevenson said in a quiet voice. “Do you need anything?”

Adam, Jenn, and Ted all shook their heads no.

“Okay,” Ms. Stevenson said. She paused. “I have to say, I am really disappointed that you guys cheated. You are all such bright kids. Even if you didn’t get the grade you wanted, it would have been so much better if you had just tried your best.” She looked down at her feet. “I don’t know. I just wish you had talked to me if you were having trouble. I wish you would had believed in yourselves as much as I believe in you.”

She looked at them, and Ted felt himself getting misty all over again.

“I’m really sorry,” he whispered.

“Thank you, Ted.” Ms. Stevenson rubbed the side of her face and then sighed. “I teach history because it’s important to learn from our past mistakes. I really hope the three of you will learn from this one.”

She turned and left.

Ted let his forehead sink to the desk. His eyes stung.

Don’t cry, he thought. Do not even think about crying. You are the worst person ever and she is so nice and that was devastating, but don’t you dare even think about—

Jenn snorted.

Ted raised his head. “What?”

“Can you believe her?” Jenn said with a sneer. “‘I wish,’” she repeated in a high-pitched voice, “‘you would have believed in yourselves as much as I believe in you.’”

Adam chuckled. “That was straight out of some cheesy movie.”

“And she teaches history because it’s important to”—Jenn made air quotes with her hands—“‘learn from our past mistakes?’ It was her mistake to leave the answers out in the first place.”

Adam nodded. “They were just sitting there in full view, and now she’s all high and mighty? What a joke.”

“Guys,” Ted said, “come on, lay off.”

Jenn rolled her eyes. “Seriously, Ted. That was so weird.”

“No, but actually, though,” said Ted. “You shouldn’t be so hard on her.” He took a deep breath. “And, for the record, I think she’s right. What we did was a mistake. We’ve been real jerks.”

Jenn’s lip twitched.

“Whoa there,” Adam joked, putting his hands up in the air. “We’re sorry. We didn’t realize we were in the presence of Sir Teddy, knight in shining armor for high school history teachers.”

“Should Nina be worried about this new crush?” asked Jenn.

“Knock it off, guys.”

“If you wanted to get Ms. Stevenson’s attention, you didn’t have to go to all of this trouble,” said Adam.

Jenn laughed. “Ted and Ms. Stevenson, sitting in a tree—”

“Ew, stop. Are you in second grade?” snapped Ted. “This is serious.”

“No, you stop,” said Jenn. “We didn’t force you to cheat with us. You asked for the answers, remember?”

Ted exhaled and looked up at the gray-speckled ceiling. “Well, I shouldn’t have.”

“Yeah, but you did!” said Adam, raising his voice.

“Yeah, and now I realize it was a bad call!” Ted retorted. “All it did was hurt people and get us in trouble. None of us should have done it.”

“Enough!” Jenn shouted. “You can mope about it and blame us if you want, but that’s your problem. Seriously, all you do is whine about things that are your own fault. Oh, I’m not ready for the test, even though I don’t have any extracurricular activities getting in the way of studying, wah wah. Oh, I can’t get Nina Alvarez’s number, even though I’ve never bothered to say a single word to her so that I could actually get to know her. Oh, I got caught cheating, even though I chose to do it—”

The classroom door burst open. The school secretary’s eyes were wide behind her wire-rimmed glasses. “The students are not allowed to speak to each other,” she hissed. “This is your first warning. The next time that we have to tell you to keep quiet in here, we will add another half hour of in-school suspension.”

“Thanks a lot, Sir Teddy,” Adam said under his breath.

The school secretary put a finger to her lips. “Shush! That is enough from the three of you.” She glared at each of them and then left the room again.

No one spoke.

Ted stared up at the dog poster above Jenn’s head. Sitting in that classroom, he felt like he was locked in a kennel—with two bigger, meaner dogs. He hadn’t thought about Adam and Jenn as mean before, just as two smart and sarcastic people with whom he was lucky to be friends. Now . . . the way they acted just felt different. Ugly.

Maybe not being on their level isn’t such a bad thing, thought Ted.

It wasn’t that he didn’t want to be friends with them. He still did. They were his best friends, after all. He couldn’t picture going through the school day without joking around with them in class or at lunch . . . but maybe it was time to think about making other friends too.

It just felt like he had seen another side of them—and Ted didn’t like what he saw. He didn’t want to be like that. The way the school secretary had just looked at them, though—it was as if they were all the same.

He had to do something. He had to make things right somehow. Adam and Jenn clearly weren’t interested—whatever Ted did, he knew he would have to do by himself. He could think about his social life later. Right now, he just needed to fix this mess.

Ted tapped a pen against his temple.

Think, Ted. Think. What are you good at? Besides messing things up and sleeping . . .

Then he looked at the pen.

Bingo.

* * *

When he got out of in-school suspension that afternoon, Ted biked home faster than he had moved all year. He thundered upstairs to his bedroom and took out his gold rush history notes, his textbook, an old box of art supplies, and a stack of blank paper from the printer in his mom’s home office.

He spread it all out across his desk and peered down at it with the intensity and importance of a general with a table full of maps. After a minute or so, he picked up a pen and began to trace a thin black line down one of the pieces of paper.

Ted’s phone buzzed twice in his pocket. He pulled it out and tossed it over onto his bed, barely registering the texts on the screen from the group chat.

He knew the texts were probably from Adam and Jenn, hopefully apologizing for their fight. But right now, Ted didn’t really want to hear what they had to say.

He was so focused on what was unfolding in front of him on the paper that the knock on his bedroom door almost startled him out of his chair.

His mom pushed the door halfway open.

“May I come in?” she asked.

He nodded.

Ted’s mom stepped into the room, taking in the pile of dirty clothes by his hamper, a forgotten glass of water on his nightstand, and the stack of items in front of him on the desk. She moved his phone aside and sat down on the unmade bed.

“More penguins?”

“Huh?” asked Ted.

She lifted her chin in the direction of the paper on the desk. “Are you drawing more penguins, like you did the other day?”

Right, thought Ted. That penguin I drew on the napkin.

He felt like that had happened years ago, not days.

He spun in his desk chair, hiding the paper from view behind his back. “It’s, um, something I’m working on for school.”

His mom looked like she wanted to ask another question, but she just pressed her lips together and looked down.

“For my history class,” Ted added.

When his mom looked back up at him, Ted thought he saw a muscle in her face soften.

“That’s great, Teddy.”

“I should probably get back to work on it,” said Ted. “Do you need anything?”

His mom paused, and then shook her head. “No. I was just came in to see how you were doing. It’s . . . it’s nice to see you so hard at work on a school project.”

“Thanks, Mom. I’m fine.”

She stood up. “I’ll leave you to it. Come downstairs when you feel hungry. I’m about to order a pizza.”

“Sounds good,” Ted replied, already swiveling back around in his chair. “Thanks.”

He picked up the green marker and kept drawing.