Olivia had never been the kind of person who liked attention. In fact, she stood in the back for family pictures, dressed in the most discreet colors, and used a book as a shield. People didn’t talk to kids who had their noses deep in books. That everyone was staring and some weird guy was filming her made panic rise inside her. Her cheeks burned, and tears flirted at the periphery of her vision.

The door shut behind her.

“Conrad, please stop circling our new victim, um, I meant student.” Mr. Littman gave a goofy laugh, and the guy buzzing around her pressed a button and pulled the camera away. The student’s face was lean, and he looked so intense that Olivia stepped back.

“The best capture is a natural one,” the kid said, not looking at the teacher but keeping his brown eyes trained on Olivia. She shifted her gaze back from the goofy teacher to the creature watching her like a police detective interrogating a suspect.

“Con,” Mr. Littman cajoled.

The boy shrugged one shoulder. “‘If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.’ Or at least that’s what Bobby Kennedy said. And if you want to ignore him . . . well . . .” Then the guy with the camera plopped into an open desk and crossed his long legs.

Good Lord. What kind of class was this?

“Sorry about that, Miss . . . I’m assuming Hancock? I read about your father in the last district newsletter. Sorry about Conrad. He’s our resident director and has the camera attached at his hip. Or his hand, if we’re being anatomically accurate.”

Olivia didn’t move. She didn’t know what to say and wished she’d just stayed in the class where the teacher was crying in the corner while the students sat on the desks, listened to music with a lot of bad words in it, and screamed with laughter at the jokes one dude was telling. At least no one really paid attention to her in that class.

This class filmed her.

“Okay,” she managed to say, bending and sliding into one of the nearby empty desks. She hoped she fit in it. The thing looked tiny. Like a leftover from an elementary school. “And it was John Kennedy who said that. Not Robert.”

Why she’d added that she wasn’t sure, but the weird boy who’d filmed her laughed and said, “That was a test to see who knew I was wrong. The new girl wins.”

The rest of the class groaned as if this boy constantly tested them with just this sort of thing. There were only seven others in the class, a motley crew consisting of two other girls and five boys. All looked about as different from one another as possible—like the cast of a TV show. Olivia’s mother didn’t let them watch much cable, but Olivia had seen a few sitcoms at a friend’s house. This class looked like one of those, replete with a few nerdy-looking kids, one tough guy who slumped and looked bored, a girl who was plucking her eyebrow in a compact mirror, and that intense know-it-all, Conrad.