“You moved here from California; some people say LA.” Berry raised an eyebrow as if to check on this one.

I shook my head.

Berry looked disappointed for a flash, but then she looked at her watch. “Okay, and also we have to start walking to get to homeroom.”

“It was Petaluma,” I said, walking next to Berry, “which is not LA. Petaluma is actually kind of small, but apparently not Greenville small because no one there knew my bio from the moment I arrived.”

“Well.” Berry sped up a little. “People are going to say you’re from LA. Because that’s what they’ve decided is true, and basically California around here is just west.”

“Riiiiiight.” I silently prayed Berry was taking me somewhere I needed to go. “What else?”

Berry rounded a corner. “Your other not-porn-making mom is a left-wing socialist militant who will be our first female vice principal in fifty years.”

“Yikes again,” I said. “Militant? Is that all-encompassing like west or what?”

The eyes on me suddenly seemed all that much more potent. Wasp stingers. If wasps were insects that categorized people without actually knowing the person they were talking about.

“Don’t worry,” Berry said, gesturing for me to catch up. “I’m in your homeroom. And I’m, like, maybe the only person in this town who was excited you were from LA. And that your moms are cool and gay and artists.”

“Well, good.” I mean, heck yeah, my parents are awesome.

“Whatever you need to know about Greenville, I’ll, you know, try to tell you all the stuff,” Berry assured me in a tone that was actually assuring.

“Thank God.”

Berry grinned, gap showing. “Don’t you mean ‘thank goddess’?”

“Is that a feminist militant reference, because we do worship Gaia,” I joked. “I mean not ALL the time but on the harvest moon, you know, we strip, dance in circles around a fire, that whole thing.”

“I mean that’s what people are saying.”

“I’m kidding.”

“Yeah, okay,” Berry said. Which made me think that that was what people were saying.

As if my moms didn’t actually spend their weekends bingeing TV and cleaning the kitchen like everyone else. My moms went to sleep at like nine. Not exactly a full-moon house. Although Millie did walk around naked sometimes when she felt like it.

Curtains, I reminded myself. Must get curtains.

We rounded another corner (I was NOT keeping track of where we were going) and ended up in a small classroom where Berry navigated us through a sea of seats to the far side. In each seat sat a kid in muted earth tones who looked at me like I was an alien. Either because two of the fabrics I was wearing were sparkly or because they thought I came from a cult of angry lesbians.

Which, think about it, most cults are heterosexual. Just saying.