wasnt right but ok.

Vi: (eye roll emoji)

Marianne: plus I knew I couldn’t have it in class!

Nina: my mom says “your friend Marianne is a rebel

without a clue” lol

Marianne: you told your mom???? the whole story???

(head slap emoji)

Dan: Rebel Without a Cause was a movie starring

James Dean—three Oscar noms, no wins (Wikipedia

link)

Nina: i know its a movie dan. thats the joke.

Marianne: i didnt know that. but james dean was real

cute.

Nina: true

Dan: true true

Vi: i have to go study. you guys should too.

Marianne: ms clarke says shell let me know by next

week. ill still study ok?

Vi: let us know the second you hear.

Nina: good luck!!!

For all of Marianne’s suspension and into the weekend, she and Skyla studied side by side.

On Sunday night, Skyla announced, “I don’t mean this to be mean, but I think the word for what’s going on with you is ‘innumerate.’ It’s like illiterate, but with numbers. Dad was telling me about it the other day.”

Marianne wondered why they’d been talking about it. The most obvious conclusion was that they’d been discussing her. Maybe Skyla’s parents were trying to comfort her about Marianne not going into freshman year with her.

“You just left the math party at some point and didn’t come back, right?” Skyla went on, her kind eyes earnest. “So it’s like you know your ABCs and some words, but you can’t read a paragraph.”

“So how do I ace a test?” Marianne asked her.

Skyla sighed and fought her endless battle of putting her hair behind her ears as the strands fell out again and again. “We’ll give it our best,” she said.

Her mom and dad both separately checked in on them multiple times to see if they were actually studying.

And after Skyla listened in on her “learn one thing a night” sessions with Vi, Dan, and Nina, they practiced flash cards, focusing on math.

Skyla already knew many of the answers, like the degrees of the inner angles of a triangle and the myth behind the Orion constellation. And after a couple of rounds on each stack, Skyla remembered even more, like “antipodal points” and “orthodromes” and “Bernard Montgomery” and “the House of Tudor.”

“Which element has a name meaning ‘light-bearing’?” Skyla asked, trying to go as fast as they could.

Marianne’s mind blanked. Elements swirled in her mind—iron and copper and helium.

“I don’t know,” Marianne sighed.

“Phosphorus,” Skyla said.

“You didn’t look down. You just knew it?” Marianne asked her.

“Well, we just did it a couple times. So now I know it.” Skyla shrugged, and Marianne could tell she was trying to be casual about it.

“You’re really good at this stuff,” Marianne told her.

“Think of the word ‘phosphorescent,’” Skyla said, ignoring her. “Like a phosphorescent ocean. Bioluminescence. Have you ever seen those pictures? Where the ocean glows blue or green because of the algae?”

Marianne shook her head, and Skyla pulled up a bunch of photos on her phone.