“It’s cold,” Skyla said.

Marianne snuggled up next to her. “It’ll be warmer in a couple weeks.”

Skyla pulled some lip gloss out of her pocket and handed it to Marianne, who spread some on her lips, too.

“The thing is,” Marianne said, reopening the conversation door she’d just shut, “Mr. Garcia is impossible! Even if I could do okay, I wouldn’t get enough points to catch up, and he doesn’t allow extra credit. I mean, have you ever heard of anything so ridiculous? What if something awful had happened to me, like my house burned down or I got some rare illness and I couldn’t get the work done? I wouldn’t get the chance to do anything extra to get points? It’s un-American.”

“Yeah, but…” Skyla said, “None of that happened.”

“True,” Marianne admitted.

“Besides, he is offering extra credit this year,” she added casually.

“What?!”

“Yeah, nobody has taken Addison’s spot yet on the trivia team. They’re desperate. It’s been weeks since she left, and no one has joined.”

“No surprise there,” Marianne grunted. “Have you seen their publicity? It’s just Vi Cross shaming everyone about their grades in the hallways.”

“Totally,” Skyla concurred. “I mean, Nina Anderson asked me to join, but Vi is just too … intense.”

Nina who? How did Skyla suddenly know so many people Marianne didn’t?

Some girl had asked Skyla to join Quiz Quest? Weird. It wasn’t like Skyla was some superstar student.

They must have just asked everybody.

“And it’s not really an option for you, anyways,” Skyla went on, picking up her phone to check it, giggling at something, and putting it back down. “I wish you were in Ms. Fitzgerald’s math class with me instead. She’s nice.”

It surprised Marianne how good it felt to hear Skyla say that she wanted her around. That fact used to be a given. But these days, with all of Skyla’s new friends … Marianne wasn’t always sure.

Marianne’s parents pulled up in their car. Lillian jumped out of the back seat, bounded up the steps, and scrunched herself in between them, her thick dark hair still damp.

“You swam good?” Marianne asked as Lillian rubbed the top of her head like she was two years old.

“Fastest yet!” their dad answered for her, lighting up.

Marianne ignored him. She knew a talk was coming about a homework plan, and she wanted to avoid meeting her mom’s and dad’s eyes for as long as possible to prevent it.

Marianne gave Lillian a thumbs-up, and Skyla clapped.

“They told me about the meeting,” Lillian whispered into her ear. “You got this.”

Her dad ambled his way up onto the porch, but her mom went right inside. Marianne noted the light turning on in the kitchen.

“Can we have a chat?” her dad said.

He’d caught her.

Marianne groaned and heaved her body up from the swing, moving toward the kitchen as slowly as possible.

“Byyye!” Skyla sang.

At the kitchen table sat three cups of hot cider, one for each of them, and some molasses cookies Lillian had made for her book club, Literary Lionesses. Her parents were trying to be nice, which made everything so much worse.