When she turned her attention back to Vi, Vi had that grin again, but it was a bit smugger. Like she’d won.

“Extension round!” Vi declared, lifting her finger up in the air again like she did every time she was taking charge, really acting like a teacher now.

“Which scientist laid the groundwork for the big bang theory by demonstrating that the universe is constantly expanding?” she asked.

“Stephen Hawking!” Dan answered immediately with a smack of the desk.

“Dan, I’m teaching Marianne,” Teacher Vi chastised him. “And no.”

“Fine, fine,” he grumbled good-naturedly.

Marianne shook her head to show she didn’t know.

“Edwin Hubble,” Vi told her, leaving the dry-erase marker and returning to the desk that held her backpack and flash cards.

“Oh, the telescope guy?” Marianne asked. Her sister had a telescope in the attic that no one ever used.

“Yes, exactly!” Vi said. She picked up her backpack and threw a strap over her shoulder. “And now you know two things.”

Big pause.

“So, Marianne. Once again…” And as she asked the question, Mr. Garcia came into the room and stood against the inside of the door, observing. “What theory states that the universe is constantly expanding?”

“The big bang theory,” Marianne said.

“Great,” Vi answered. “You got it.”

All four of them sat in silence.

“Did we make any progress today?” Mr. Garcia asked, looking from one student to another.

“We have a long way to go,” Vi told him. “But I think we all learned something. Right, Marianne?”

“Yeah,” Marianne admitted. “It’s a start.”

6

DID YOU KNOW THAT the big bang is still kind of going on, and that we don’t know what happens when it ends? Marianne texted Skyla.

Over dinner, she’d asked her parents, too. Her mom, who must have known all about it already, said, “Tell me more.” And she had.

yeah so cool, Skyla wrote back hours after Marianne’s text.

Imagine being the telescope guy and also figuring out something like that. his mom must have been so proud lol, Marianne wrote back immediately.

No response from Skyla. Were they officially in a fight?

Skyla didn’t know that Marianne—by staying—had agreed to do it. To try to win. Try to learn.

As Marianne took out the rag rug she’d begun crafting, knotting strips of marmalade orange fabric in circles over and over, Marianne recognized an old feeling—nerves. The kind of nerves where you didn’t know what would come next. Not like dread, where you knew something would be horrible, but more like the feeling before the first day of a new class or a summer camp.

No one had been more nervous than Skyla before their first middle-school-era summer camp as rising sixth graders, Marianne remembered, as she weaved the orange in and out of yellow and magenta. She wanted her rug to look like a sunset melting onto her floor.

“You’re going to be my only friend, I know it,” Skyla had kept saying. “What if they make us swim? I hate swimming in front of other people. My nose runs whenever I lift my head out of the water. Everyone’s going to want to hang out with you and you’re going to be stuck with me and then you’re going to be annoyed you’re stuck with me.”