A couple of kids snickered.

Mr. Garcia glared in the direction of the misbehavior.

She was wasting his time again. Teachers hated wasting time. She hated wasting his time, but he was giving her no choice! She couldn’t learn this stuff. She really couldn’t.

Eventually he’d have to call on someone else. No one ever paid her too much mind for too long.

“Actually, Ms. Blume, that’s an interesting point. X is conventionally used to signify the unknown, but we could use any letter, really. Let’s change it to M. So. What’s the next step to get us to the value of M?”

“Cool. ‘The unknown,’” she said, stalling. Marianne pulled a hair tie off her wrist and twisted her long tresses into an elaborate messy bun.

She wished the class would misbehave or have conversations around her, but it was quiet. People would hear whatever she said. Her insides felt like clothes tumbling in a dryer. It was like her body remembered those years before she’d figured out how to slide by. Her cheeks remembered the heat that rose in them when she answered with the opposite of the correct answer because the question itself still perplexed her. Her shoulders remembered how high they’d risen as the other fourth and fifth graders watched her flail.

But nowadays she was a pro, bubbly and unbothered. She could get out of this.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and in so many ways she was, “but I didn’t hear that last part. Can you repeat it from back when you started writing?”

Mr. Garcia said nothing, but a couple of kids groaned.

“Sorry!” she said again, as sincerely as she could, though she knew that her singsongy voice probably sounded pretty fake. “I was putting on my lip gloss, and I remembered I’d left the other one at home and I started thinking of where I put it, and you know…”

“Yup,” a girl a few seats away said, and then conversations broke out.

Class was officially disrupted.

“Ha!” Lucas Hayes called out from the back of the classroom. “Yeah, you guys know how that is!” He put on an airy, girly voice and mimicked, “Lip gloss probs!”

Marianne swiveled back toward him with a thumbs-up and a grin.

To survive the day, that was what it took. A smile. A thumbs-up. Daydream. Stall. Shrug after shrug.

Lucas threw her an air high five.

“Enough!” Mr. Garcia snapped in their direction. “How about you pick it up for us from there, Mr. Hayes?” Mr. Garcia said, finally leaving her alone.

As his attention and the class’s focus left Marianne, she could feel her whole body melt back into the chair. Humiliation officially dodged.

As Mr. Garcia went on to describe the homework, Marianne picked up her favorite purple pen with a big plastic unicorn on the top of it and scribbled hearts in the corners of her papers.

After class Marianne stopped by her locker to grab her history and literature binder and spotted Skyla walking by. “Skyla!” she hollered.