“Hey, Champ,” she said.

“Hey, Champ,” he repeated.

Marianne felt a smack on her back. Lucas Hayes strolled up to her side and said, “Making the papers, Blume! Nice!”

He seemed like he didn’t know what to say. Like she’d ruined his good time.

“Good job,” Niko grunted as he followed Lucas off and away to their next class.

Marianne could see why Vi had wanted to win so badly. Winning did earn you some respect, no matter what else anyone thought about you. Was this how Lillian felt after she won at a swim meet or got all As? Maybe all that respect was addictive.

At the moment of their win, Marianne had almost forgotten that it was just the first step toward more attempts to win. As they celebrated afterward, she’d said to her teammates, “Phew! Extra credit, here I come!”

Vi had responded, “What are you talking about? Now things get real. We go to the finals. The state capital. The only win that matters.”

“So,” Marianne said to Dan, who was still standing by her side watching Lucas and Niko walk away with his usual amused, quizzical expression, “Do we get a break in practices or is it, like, straight back in? Any celebrating?”

Dan nodded to the office, where the Brookdale article was already up. “That was the celebrating. Now we keep grinding away.”

Marianne felt her phone buzz in her pocket and instinctively picked it up. Lillian had responded:

ummm i dont care if my little sister is a winner or a loser but itd be nice if she didnt have little pity parties and take them out on me, followed by a smiley face emoji.

sorry, Marianne wrote back.

Dan stood there, waiting for her to look back up.

“Sorry,” she said to him. She was full of sorries. “Sister probs.”

“You know I get it.” He walked alongside her toward their classrooms.

A group scurried by them, oblivious, knocking both Dan’s and Marianne’s shoulders as they went by.

“Jerks,” they both said.

“So why do you really hate Andy so much?” Marianne asked him, turning off her phone. She didn’t want to see any more Lillian texts.

“He’s stuck-up! And he doesn’t even know he’s stuck-up,” Dan said. “But you know what really gets me?”

“What?”

“So, like, he stole my air, right?”

“No, sorry, ya lost me,” Marianne said.

“Back when I was forced to be around him—when my mom was pregnant with us—he basically hogged all the good stuff from the umbilical cord. So that’s part of why I have these bad boys…” He lifted a crutch off the ground, and as he did so, he tilted further onto his toes for a moment. “But what’s so maddening is he thinks that’s why I don’t like him,” Dan seethed in disbelief, “when I actually don’t like him because he’s a conformist and a social climber who only cares about school because he probably wants to be, like, an oil tycoon one day.”