OMG LOLOLOL NO WAY

its jeopardy for morons

lol this is so embarrassing i cant even handle it

Baaahahaha

is @itsmariannebb like the water boy or something is she the mascot i dont get it

Watch party?

omg omg she is so stuuupiiiiid this is amazing

lets do it

the horse strikes again folks

As if it had burned her, Marianne threw her phone on the carpet.

She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to send Skyla a telepathic message: stop being mad at me and help meeee.

She wanted her mom. She wanted to jump into her arms like she did when she was little and skinned her knees.

Instead, she couldn’t help but pick up the phone once again.

But the page had disappeared. She reloaded it and reloaded it again. It wasn’t there.

Navigating back to Dan’s page, she saw he’d deleted the post.

But Ava Hayes had posted a screenshot. And so did others.

It would circulate in eternity now.

But where was Skyla commenting “don’t say that, she’s our friend” or “stop that, she’s nice”? Marianne reloaded the pages again and again, over and over, to check and see if anyone came to her defense.

Nope.

She’d always known she was a joke, but she thought it was a joke she was in on.

She’d thought she was laughing along with them, but she’d been wrong.

How could she try to win with all of them watching?!

As if she were in a trance, Marianne picked up her phone again.

Underneath all the comments, Marianne wrote: haha yup haha that’s me.

She didn’t know how to be anyone else.

7

ALL DAY, MARIANNE HEARD about nothing but the Quiz Quest livestream.

“You really did it, Blume,” Lucas said to her several times in delight. “Thank you for doing this for us.”

“We love you, Horse,” Niko told her.

“You’re so brave,” Kylie cooed. “That would be like me joining the varsity football team or something. And I’m barely five feet. But it’s for a joke, right?”

Marianne nodded.

She tried to play along. How was she supposed to turn back now?

During math, Mr. Garcia called on her.

She felt the familiar rush of nerves. She put on a confident, upbeat grin. She didn’t know what else to do.

All the homework with her mom? It hadn’t done much. She could do one piece of a math problem, but never the whole thing.

On the screen he wrote, -24 = -x + y.

“Alright, so that’s our equation,” he announced.

Negatives?! Oh no. The second she saw them it was game over.

“Now, as we’ve discussed, we just need two points. And those two points will be what?”

She knew he was doing the easy bits with her. Everyone else knew, too.

But she remembered this one because he’d said it over and over again the week before.

She had to get Mr. Garcia to see her differently, even if the rest of them laughed. She had to.