“Nope. Still stuck with the all-natural?” Skyla asked with an “Oh, Marianne” laugh.

“Yup.”

And then Marianne told Skyla every last detail of the meeting. “It was awful. And I couldn’t stop thinking about how we wouldn’t be in the same year together. And how we’d never make it to Hawaii.” And—Marianne wanted to add but didn’t—how Skyla would leave for high school without her and make more new friends and pretend she didn’t know the loser next door who couldn’t even go to Homecoming.

Skyla lifted three fingers to make the Girl Scouts honor sign. They’d been Daisies and Brownies together back in the day. “Nothing—and I mean nothing—will stop us from opening up the Skylanne Surfing Gear/Friendship Bracelet/Organic Sugar Scrub Stand of Maui.”

“Better not.”

“And they said you can’t just do summer school?” Skyla asked.

“I think Ms. Clarke’s words were ‘You could take a class or two this summer, but unfortunately you can’t redo all of eighth grade over a summer.’” Marianne pictured Ms. Clarke and the dozens of worry lines in the light brown skin on her forehead, the streaks of white in her hair, and her tired smile. Marianne liked her, even though most of the times they saw each other involved some kind of punishment or warning.

After a few moments in which the only sounds around them were the chirps of the early-evening birds, Skyla asked, “Have you really been doing no homework at all?”

Marianne shrugged. “I hate it.”

“No one likes homework.” Skyla fingered the turquoise beads on her necklace, looking out at two squirrels scrambling their way up a tree.

“Well, I hate it,” Marianne repeated.

“Squirrel fight,” Skyla said as the squirrels tumbled out of the branches and onto the grass. “I just do mine during class or while I wait to get picked up,” she added.

“Okay, but first I’d have to know how to do it.” Marianne heard herself snap at Skyla a little. “And I don’t.” Why would Skyla talk to her like this? Like her parents? Especially right then?

“You could,” Skyla responded, echoing her mom and dad and Lillian and Ms. James and all the other people who lived on a planet far, far away from Marianne. “You’re just a little … behind. That’s all.”

“Ha. Yeah, ‘a little.’” Marianne took her arm out of the branches so they blocked her view of her friend.

Did it count as “behind” when you got so confused by long division in third grade that you never caught back up? She’d never forget the month Ms. Klein introduced it. Suddenly the numbers Marianne had once known split into halves and thirds and .078s and became unrecognizable. “How could twenty-eight even go into two?” she’d asked. “It’s so much bigger!”

“If you work on it, you’ll catch up!” Skyla’s voice called through the bush.

“Can we stop talking about this?” Marianne pleaded to Skyla.

Instead of answering her, Skyla skipped down her porch steps and walked up Marianne’s. They sat together on the rickety swing that had been there before Marianne’s parents even moved in. Marianne liked to imagine that it was a hundred years old and that families had been chatting on it forever. One summer, she and her parents had painted it light blue while Lillian was away at camp.