We were halfway through scraping the desks when the school secretary came for Mrs. Stricker. Her husband was on the phone. Surprisingly, Mrs. Stricker dropped everything to go talk to him. Even more surprisingly, someone had married Mrs. Stricker in the first place.
“You two just keep scraping,” Mrs. Stricker said. “I’ll be back to check on you.” She looked right at me when she said that. Then she slithered out the door.
“What did you do to make Stricker love you so much?” Sam whispered once she was gone.
“It’s a case of mistaken identity,” I told him.
“Right.” Sam grinned, like he thought I was joking.
“No, seriously. My brother, Rafe, got detention a lot. So Stricker thinks I must be the same way.”
Sam rolled his eyes. “That’s pathetic.” He chiseled at a chunk of fossilized gum. “But that’s how this place works. They treat everyone the same way—like you’re a juvenile delinquent waiting to happen.”
“Everyone except the Princess Patrol,” I corrected.
“Who?”
“Oh—that’s what I call Missy Trillin and her friends.”
Sam laughed. “I call them the Cheeses.”
“Why?”
“Well, because they’re cheesy. And because they think they’re, like, the Big Cheese. And also because they’re so… fake. Like that bright orange spray cheese.”
“And yet they rule the school.”
“Yeah, Stricker probably wishes we were all like them.”
“She’d turn us into them if she could,” I agreed. I scraped at yet another chunk of gum, but it wouldn’t budge. “Life would be so much easier if I could just fit in,” I admitted.
Sam shrugged. “Easier in some ways,” he agreed. “Harder in others.”
“Harder how?” I asked.
“Fitting in takes a lot of time. Effort. You have to keep trying and trying, and even then it probably isn’t going to stick.” He shrugged. “Why bother?”
I looked at him with a kind of amazement. How did he understand so much? Sam wore jeans and a rugby shirt. His hair was longish and tousled, and he had two deep dimples that showed when he smiled. He looked like the kind of guy who could fit in anywhere.
He smiled at me, and I smiled back.
And that was when it hit me: Detention with Sam Marks was the best thing that had happened to me since I started middle school.