History had already started by the time I arrived.
I crept into the classroom, trying not to interrupt. It was a small class; Eaganville School for the Arts promised a student-to-teacher ratio that would be the envy of any high school in Minnesota. I scanned the room, looking for a friendly face. The faces that stared back at me were unlike anything at my previous school. I was in a room of artists. As one, their artistic heads swiveled to look at me. I was keenly aware that my clothes were from Target, my hair was only two colors, and I hadn’t even pierced my septum. I felt like an untattooed, unpierced freak.
I mumbled a sorry and shuffled my boring sneakers to an open desk at the back of the room.
Eaganville was not a normal school in any sense of the word. First of all, it was housed in an old nunnery. Most of the classrooms were underground, and the corridors connecting them were a maze of twisting passages and narrow dead ends. Nothing made sense, nothing went in a straight line, and if you listened hard enough, you could hear the ghosts of dead nuns wandering the halls, searching in vain for a bathroom. Not only that, but the rooms didn’t have numbers. They were named after famous artists. History was in the Klimt room, which had taken me twenty minutes to find. It was basically Hogwarts for bullshit.
“Take a seat, please,” said the teacher, a sprightly sixty-year-old woman with short iron-gray hair. She wore a blazer and yoga pants and had about seven silvery bracelets on each wrist. She was probably big into astrology.
“My name is Ms. Banks,” she said. “Or Miss B. Or Teach. I do not answer to ‘Hey, Lady.’” The room buzzed with a little light laughter. Apparently, Miss B. was the shit. “You must be Sydney.”
“That’s what it says on my witness protection form,” I said. Nobody laughed. Some people eyed me quizzically. “That was a joke. I make, um… jokes sometimes, you know, when I’m late.”
“Ah,” said Ms. Banks.
“No filter,” I added.
“We get it.”
It’s astonishing how quickly you can become a social outcast in a new school. I seemed to have managed it in under thirty seconds. Cool, cool.
She put a foot on one of the empty desks at the front of the room and stretched like a lioness. “All right, let’s get back into it. And remember, folks,” she said, pointing to a large poster of Napoleon looking like a tiny badass in a very large hat, “history is written by the winners.”
Huh. I guess I wouldn’t be writing any history, then. I mentally crossed that off my career goals.
The closest I’d ever come to winning anything was the school geography bee in seventh grade. The final question had been “What controversial crop is a major export of Virginia?” and I’d strode confidently to the microphone, looked out at my parents, gave them a thumbs-up, and said, “Meth.”
Real answer: tobacco. Sorry, Virginia. I didn’t mean to do you like that.
Then there was the time in the championship soccer game in ninth grade when I managed to score two goals—against my own team. One goal, sure, that’s a mistake. Anyone can do that. But two goals was an incredible accomplishment. I really should’ve won the MVP of the other team. In my defense, I was extremely horrible at passing the ball to our goalie, and no one should have let me have the ball. It was probably their fault, really.
My family were losers, too. But that’s a whole different story.
“Why shouldn’t the winners write history?” said a tiny blond girl wearing a gray shirt that said PEACE AND LOVE in chalky lettering. “Who else is going to write it? The losers?” The rest of the class chuckled in assent.
Ms. Banks tried to quell the uprising. “Well, Taryn, I can see why you would say that, but—”
Taryn cut her off. “If it had been a good idea, it would’ve won, right? And then we’d be learning about that. So, obviously, the winning idea was the best idea. Why is this controversial?”
“Maybe the other idea just wasn’t sure of itself,” I said, running my mouth.
Taryn turned to look at me. She had a pixie cut with pink highlights and the icy-blue eyes of a wolf. A hush fell over the rest of the class like I had just poked the mother of all bears.
“And if people would’ve just given it a second chance, it could’ve proved itself, but as soon as it made one mistake over and over again it was trashed by a whole bunch of judgmental people. And then it had to leave its previous environment and go to a new school. Or something to that effect.”
Taryn blinked. “That’s literally the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Well, I’m just saying that there are multiple perspectives—”
“And some of those perspectives are stupid and wrong.”
I felt my face get hot. “Maybe that perspective is stupid and wrong.”
Ms. Banks took a step back. I could feel the eyes of the class zero in on me. Taryn took a deep breath and tucked the pink ends of her hair behind her ears. “So you’re super in favor of the gold standard, then?”
“I’m in favor of what now?”
“The gold standard. What we’re talking about.”
I noticed that everyone had a book open on their desk. “Ohhhh.”
Ms. Banks gingerly lifted a syllabus and handed it to me. “This is actually a discussion about nineteenth-century monetary policy.”
“Riiight,” I said. “I withdraw my opinion, then. Carry on. Also does anyone have a copy of this book we’re supposed to be reading?”
I kept my mouth shut for the rest of class, which was a personal record for me. I noticed pretty quickly that nobody disagreed with Taryn about ANYTHING—the gold standard, the moon landing, tectonic plates, anything. Not even the teacher. Taryn was out for blood. I decided not to make the class hate me any more and let her have at it.
“All right, hey, before we go,” said Ms. Banks, right before class was over. “Any announcements for the week?”
I kept quiet. I felt it was best for me not to have announcements. Ever.
“Um… hey, I’m Lakshmi, if you don’t remember,” said a tall, brown-skinned girl with a long black ponytail. “We’ve got a really important basketball game coming up on Thursday, so we would really appreciate y’all cheering us on.” She gave a slight thumbs-up as a current of amusement rippled through the class. “It would be really cool if we had like a big crowd showing a lot of school spirit just to like give us some moral support, ’cause we need it super bad.”
A guy in the back of the room interrupted. “I’m sorry, are you inviting us to a sportsball game?” I took a closer look at him—he was deeply tan, had fluffy good hair, and wore a goddamn blazer with elbow patches.
“Not sportsball—I don’t actually know what sportsball is—this is basketball.”
“So you throw a round object through a hoop?”
Lakshmi blinked. “Yeah. That is a description of basketball, Milo.”
Milo leaned back in his chair. “And you think this is a worthwhile use of your time? I mean, you’re inviting us to this—don’t you think this culture puts too much emphasis on sports and not enough emphasis on things that actually matter?”
Lakshmi stammered a bit. I looked at Ms. Banks, who was trying to ignore all of it.
Milo kept going. “Are you aware that studies have shown that there’s no link between athletic achievement and success in college?”
“I don’t think that’s true—”
“So you just don’t believe in peer-reviewed studies, then? Is that it? I’m sorry, do you have a background as a social scientist? I guess I missed that part of our education here.”
“I’m just inviting people to a basketball game—”
“Why are you changing the subject?”
“I’m not changing the subject.”
“The subject is do you believe in peer-reviewed studies? Are you a believer in science?” Milo chopped his hand in front of him like he was slicing her down with a mental katana. “Clearly there is research out there. That research shows no link between athletics and academic achievement, and yet you would bury your head in the sand and have us all celebrate you. For what? For your ability to throw a round object through a hoop? Can anyone think of a more useless waste of our time?”
Lakshmi twitched a bit, biting her lip.
God, what an asshole.
Sixteen heads swiveled toward me. Oh, had those words come out of my mouth?
Why yes. Yes they had. See, there was a way to make the class hate me more.