A t my old school we had desks. They were ancient, but it didn’t matter ’cause yours was yours. The top lifted up, you could stash all sorts of stuff in it, and nobody bothered you about the mess lurkin’ inside. Unless a sandwich got rotten. Or a banana went past black and into gooey. Even then, it was no big deal. The teacher’d say, “Smells like it’s time for a little desk cleanin’,” and everyone would throw away their spoiled food and old papers and candy wrappers.

Lookin’ back on it, those desks might have been old and creaky, but they were way better’n the ones we have at my new school. What I liked most about the old desks was knowing where the borders were. Borders were simple. Nobody ever hogged up part of your desk with their stuff, or edged you out when they got carried away with a project. If they got carried away, their stuff went smack onto the floor.

At Thornhill School, the desks may be new, but they’re really just tables. Tables for two, with a wide-open shelf for each person that barely holds a thing. There’s no border on the desktop between you and your partner, not even a drawn line. So it’s hard to protect your territory ’cause stuff is always creeping across the table like it’s on a stealth mission.

And if that’s not bad enough, we have to sit with two tables shoved together, face to face, so there are four kids at one big, square table, with no borders.

A whole continent of desktops, with no borders.

When I asked Ms. Miller if it was going to be like this all year, she explained that sixth grade is “a time of community learning” and that “this is how things are done around here.”

Ms. Miller has put all sorts of reminders about being part of the community on our classroom walls and even on the ceiling. Every possible inch is covered in bright colors invitin’ us to get along. There’s the Global Community part, with flags and maps and art from around the world. There’s the United We Stand wall, with more maps and figures from U.S. history. And there’s the Our Community wall, where our projects get posted around the Golden Rule display.

Maybe I wouldn’t mind community learning if my everyday community wasn’t three girls with way too much stuff. I don’t understand why they have to have ten of everything and, if they do, why can’t they keep it in their own territory?

Rayne’s got hair accessories that stack up as the day goes by. She usually comes to school with her hair clipped down or braided with ribbons or decorated somehow, but by the end of the day it’s busted loose and in full mane mode, with her headbands and clips and ribbons or whatnot roamin’ wild across our continent.

Straight across from me, there’s Wynne, and she goes through Kleenex like air. She breathes in, she sniffles out. “Sorry! Allergies,” she whispered the first time I got fed up with her tissue avalanche and pushed it back on her side. “Sorry” hasn’t stopped avalanches from happening, but I feel mean just shoving them back because she looks truly miserable with her nose drippin’ and her eyes waterin’.

But the worst invader was Colby’s pencil feather. It’s pink and fluffy and has little fake jewels that kind of clink when she writes. Why does a pencil need a feather? And why does a feather need jewels?

That’s accessories on accessories!

I wouldn’t have cared, except Colby’s feather made her pencil about two feet long, and since she sat right next to me, that feather would wag around in my airspace with its little fake jewels all clinkin’ together.

Colby gets A’s on everything, which Ma told me was a good reason to put up with her feather. But during tests, that feather flaps around like a demon bird, and what that means is, Colby’s got answers.

Right off, my stomach would tie up in knots. How could she know the answers so fast? And how come all of a sudden I couldn’t think of any?

All through September and all through October I forced myself to put up with Colby’s demon feather. I would scoot to the side and try everything to ignore that feather flapping through the air.

Then November rolled around and Ms. Miller gave us a math test and none of my feather-fightin’ tricks worked. I just couldn’t concentrate. Flap, flap, flap, flap, flap, that demon feather went, whippin’ through the air while Colby showed all her steps. It would glide for just a second as she put a box around her answer, then take off again, flappin’ its way through the next problem.

I was so distracted that instead of working on the math test, my brain went off and made up a story. In it there was a big feather that released hypnotizing eraser dust that was used as a powerful weapon by an intergalactic queen named Colby. Queen Colby had hijacked the Inquiry, a spaceship that, until then, had been under the command of the famous Captain Jones. The feather had hypnotized the captain and he was now a desperate prisoner on his own ship.

There’s a great battle in the story, where the captain finally defeats Queen Colby by snatching the feather and tickling her nose with it, bringing her down in a fit of sneezing. It was a pretty funny scene, and I was having a great time making it better and better in my head when Ms. Miller told us that test-taking time was up.

I saw her frown when she collected my paper, but I tried to duck out to recess anyway.

“Lincoln!” she called as I was bolting for the door.

“Yes, ma’am?”

“Stay in, please.”

When the room was cleared of everyone but her and me, she held out my test and said, “Can you explain this?”

So I told her about Colby’s demon feather.

“Why didn’t you just ask her to use a different pencil?”

“I’ve asked her lots of times! She says it’s her lucky feather.”

“Couldn’t you have turned away?” She shook her head. “What did you do the whole time?”

I didn’t want to say “Nothing,” so it slipped out about the story. And since I was nervous, more slipped out than I wanted.

“Lincoln,” she said with a sigh. “Don’t these sound like excuses to you?” The corners of her mouth twitched like they wanted to get up but were just too tired. “Do we need to talk to your parents about getting you a tutor?”

“No, ma’am! I know how to do this stuff.”

Her mouth rolled over into a frown. “Lincoln.”

“I swear, ma’am! It was the feather!”

“Fine,” she said after studying me for a bit. “It was the feather.” Then she sat me down at the table nearest her, put my test and a pencil in front of me, and said, “You’ve got until recess is over.”

I never worked a math test so fast in my life. And when recess was done, so was I.

Ms. Miller took the test from me with an eyebrow stretched high, then checked it over quick with a red pen in her hand.

A red pen that only touched paper once.

She looked up at me, then wrote 96% and circled a big red A at the top. And when everyone was in from recess, she told Colby she couldn’t use her demon feather pencil anymore.

“That’s unconstitutional!” Colby cried, and she somehow twisted freedom of speech into freedom of feathers and got all uppity about her rights.

“Why don’t I just switch seats with her?” Rayne asked, and once everyone was done being stunned by how nice it was for her to offer and what an easy fix it was, Rayne switched with Colby, putting that demon feather as far away from me as it could get on our borderless continent.

“Thanks,” I told Rayne when she was all settled in.

“Sure,” Rayne said, and gave me a smile that was one part twinkle and nine parts shy.

A smile that made my cheeks burn hot.