“You’re good at everything,” Marianne said, impressed.

“Not everything,” Vi sighed.

And Marianne thought she knew what Vi meant. Vi wasn’t great at making friends.

“Hey, why did you pretend you didn’t know the answer in scrimmage?” Vi spoke loudly all of a sudden, as if she’d been holding this in and finally had to say something. “Why’d you say ‘a cuddle’?”

“Ha. Because I forgot the word and I thought ‘cuddle’ was kind of funny, so I—”

“No you didn’t forget it,” Vi said, dead serious. “You knew it.”

Marianne watched two kids on the swings, each yelling that they were higher in the air than the other one. Both at exactly the same height.

“You’re not as spacey as you act in class,” Vi accused her. “Why?”

Vi saw it. Vi saw through her.

“Lorelai Wheeler,” Marianne reported. She’d never told this to a soul before. But she’d also never confessed to anyone that she couldn’t learn.

Marianne picked off the last bit of polish on her left thumb and added, “I never really thought about it before. But that’s what it was.”

“Who?” Vi leaned in an inch closer.

“In sixth grade there was this girl named Lorelai Wheeler. She was a little like me, ya know? Bad at school. But, like … prettier. And she had great clothes and nothing seemed to bug her. And she was not smart. I mean, no way was she getting good grades. Like, she didn’t know a thing. If she did one sheet of homework in her life, I’d honestly be shocked.”

“I cannot imagine,” Vi said almost inaudibly.

Marianne kept going. She watched the breeze twist the ends of the tree branches this way and that. “I used to, like, stress out when I got stuff wrong. Which was always. Like … I would feel kind of sick. I knew what people thought of me. I guess I hoped sixth grade would be different? Middle school? But, like, Lorelai blanked out on her entire times tables—even the twos, the threes—and the whole class raised their eyebrows like ‘Wow,’ but Lorelai? She just giggled and shrugged. Or, like, blew a bubble of the gum she was always chewing.”

Marianne could feel Vi giving her a look, but she kept her sights set on the leaves swaying on the trees.

“Sometimes she’d answer so wrong, and she’d just pop up and curtsy real quick or scrunch up her face like ‘Whoops!’” Marianne laughed at the thought. “It was funny. And everybody laughed. People just loved her.”

“So you did it, too,” Vi stated.

“Yeah,” Marianne said, her voice airy, like she couldn’t quite admit it even though she already had. “Yeah, after a couple really bad days, I started to do it, too.”

Marianne didn’t know how to explain it.

Lorelai had moved by the end of the year. Her mom was in the army, and Lorelai told them she was always moving. Texas that time. She hoped Lorelai was okay.