And someone had drawn a horse—tiny, with big cartoon eyes and a swirly tail—in the bottom corner.

“Now that we’ve finished our discussion of X and Y intercepts, let’s turn to the other component of the equation of a straight line: slope.”

There wasn’t a point to this anymore. Bad grades on quizzes. How could extra credit save her, even if they could win the championship? Which they couldn’t, not with her on the team?

She could never get a B plus, let alone an A on the final.

She turned off her ears and drifted …

She tried to imagine traveling inside a black hole, where Vi told her the body would stretch every which way, getting longer and longer like your arms and limbs and neck became spaghetti. Dan said it would be worth it to go through spaghettification in order to see what was inside one. Marianne wasn’t so sure.

Mr. Garcia disrupted her space journey.

“Ms. Blume?” She could tell he’d been trying to get her attention for a while.

Hadn’t he seen her test score? Didn’t he know she simply wasn’t getting it? She couldn’t do this with him. Not that day.

“Hmm?” she asked. She tried to smile, but it was hard.

“So again, given this graph, which point shall we make point one?”

“Sorry, I kind of zoned out for a sec,” she said as cheerfully and dismissively as she could. Bubbly Marianne, not a care or a thought in the world.

Her act had always worked before, in months past, so it probably would again. He’d go elsewhere for learning.

The Lorelai Wheeler imitation came back to her as if it had never left.

Mr. Garcia took a beat, then continued. “I’m happy to go back a bit. Let’s review. Review is good for everyone. So. The actual equation is as follows: m equals Y2 minus Y1 divided by X2 minus X1. Now, Ms. Blume, this may be confusing, but it actually doesn’t matter which point you designate as point two. So, again, taking this graph into consideration, what will be point one?”

She didn’t know.

“You got this, Horse!” someone said in the room, a room that had begun to feel like a bunch of echoes and far-off voices unattached to any particular people.

Horse. Stupid as a horse.

She hadn’t chosen to become Lorelai Wheeler out of nowhere.

After the horse divorce day, after Marianne’s mom had seen her crying, when Skyla arrived at their house with sugar cookies, her mom had asked Skyla what was wrong with her.

Skyla admitted she’d told Marianne’s mom all about “the horse divorce thing,” which Skyla had heard from someone else, who said it was hilarious and that “even Marianne thought so.”

Marianne had left Skyla to play some games on her laptop. She went downstairs to talk to her mom, to tell her it was no big deal and everyone thought it was funny. Obviously, Marianne was going to tell her mom, she wouldn’t be following in her mom’s footsteps with the whole French thing. She was planning on saying to her mom, “You did two years abroad in France. Me? I’m going with the UK. Because English. Cheerio!”