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For Jonathan, who sees me.

Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don’t.

—BILL NYE

This is how it works

You peer inside yourself

You take the things you like

And try to love the things you took.

—REGINA SPEKTOR

1

MARIANNE BLUME DIDN’T KNOW a lot, but she knew she was stupid.

And so did Mr. Garcia.

“Alright, Ms. Blume,” he said, serious as ever, giving her a look like this was her one last chance.

When the class heard him call on her, most of them tuned out, scribbling on worksheets until they could actually learn something again.

“Let’s give this one a try,” he went on.

Oh no. He wasn’t really going to make her do this, was he?

That afternoon she’d tried a couple of her usual strategies to get him to leave her be: sighing here and there like she was having outside-the-classroom troubles, and scribbling in her notebook so it looked like she was taking notes.

“Who, me?” She raised her eyebrows in the doe-eyed way she’d learned meant “I know nothing.”

Kylie Chen, seated in the chair next to her, snorted.

The class giggled at her snort.

Thanks, Kylie. Maybe Mr. Garcia would move on. Too much distraction.

Marianne heard Vi Cross mutter something to herself two desks over. She glanced back just in time to see Vi roll her eyes.

Marianne could see that Vi was annoyed, and she understood she’d already frustrated Mr. Garcia, but what she couldn’t wrap her head around was how in any world, in any version of any universe, she was supposed to figure out the value of X.

“Hmm. Sorry. I don’t know this one.” She threw Mr. Garcia a big smile. The more you smiled, the more people liked you. And man, did she want Mr. Garcia to like her.

“Let’s walk through it together,” Mr. Garcia went on, offering no sunshine in return.

Why was he doing this? He knew she didn’t—and wouldn’t—know the answer.

Ms. James, Marianne’s English and history teacher, would’ve let her off the hook. So would her math teacher from last year, Ms. Corwin, who made Marianne and a few other kids spend a couple of lunches a week in her classroom completing extra worksheets. Ms. Corwin loved to chat, so they spent most of the lunch hour gabbing with her about stuff like the best mystery shows on Netflix and what they’d do if they had a million dollars. Those teachers understood Marianne. They wouldn’t put her on the spot. Even Mr. Hedley from sixth grade, a famously grumpy science teacher, would’ve joked around with Marianne instead of embarrassing her. Marianne figured out early on that Mr. Hedley was like most cranky old grandpas—a softie. After a few post-class questions about his grandkids, they became the best of friends. She still stopped by Mr. Hedley’s room to see if his ski champion grandson was getting closer to the Olympics.

“Okay, let’s work through this together…” Mr. Garcia turned to the Smart Board, which was Marianne’s cue to shut off her brain. Like she always said, mostly just to herself: If you don’t listen, you can’t not know.

Her thoughts drifted to her best friend, Skyla, and what she might be doing in her science class across the hall right then.

Mr. Garcia kept talking.

Marianne put a finger to her temple and tried to send Skyla telepathic messages: Skylaaa, my mom will only buy me all-natural deodorant and it doesn’t work. Help meee.

He went on and on.

Marianne forced herself to think about the pair of red shoes she really wanted from the thrift store downtown. She thought of how she couldn’t wait for lilac season, when the whole town smelled like a perfume shop. She thought about how weird it was that killer whales were dolphins, not whales, and how she wished she could be a killer whale right then, splashing freely in the sea instead of stuck in an uncomfortable metal chair, bent over a desk, a bright overhead light making it impossible to hide the big pimple on the side of her nose and Mr. Garcia making it impossible to hide that she hadn’t taken in a single thing from his class all year.

Mr. Garcia inched closer to the end of his lecture, and she knew he’d ask her to say something soon.

She wouldn’t let him pull her in, wouldn’t let the class see her try to translate the numbers on the board when to her it was like trying to read a foreign language that she didn’t speak.

Please move on to someone else, please move on to someone else, she prayed. Please, Almighty Whoever in the Sky, send a tornado at this very moment.

“And so that tells us what?” he asked.

Marianne stared at the numbers and letters before her, scrawled in Mr. Garcia’s chicken-scratch handwriting.

Everyone around her knew the answer. Everyone.

She peered at Kylie’s notebook. They were two fellow C-or-lower kids placed together in the front, where they “had” to pay attention. Marianne saw that even Kylie had been following along for the most part, rows of numbers dutifully copied down.

Marianne’s paper contained a shimmering masterpiece of doodled pink stars.

“Well? What’s your first thought, Ms. Blume?”

Marianne stared blankly. Her first thought? That in order to figure out the answer she’d have to go back in time and hear what he’d said, but first she’d have to go back in time to five math books ago, and five years before that, and further and further back, to a time she hadn’t felt totally, entirely lost, and start there. And if she did have a time machine, she wouldn’t waste it on learning math. She’d ride a woolly mammoth.

“Um. My first thought? It’s … Why the letter X, anyway, huh?” She whipped her lip gloss out of her pocket and spread it onto her pouted lips. “It makes me think of poison labels or whatever. When they were making up algebra, why did they pick X and not L? Like love? Or—better yet—M?”

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.

Skyla motioned “one sec” and continued her chatter with a few kids from her classes that year. Back in sixth grade, Skyla had only made friends with whoever Marianne had introduced her to.

Marianne barely knew these girls. And they mostly talked about boys. Boring.

She tugged on Skyla’s shirt to get her attention. “I can’t go home with you today,” she told her in a low voice.

Marianne had yet another meeting with the principal and her parents. Twice a year she could count on a warning about her grades. At home, her dad would yell and take something away, like her time on the iPad or nightly mint-chip ice cream. He’d say, “I just don’t understand why you don’t want to do well!” Her parents would try to help her with homework more often until they both gave up and spent that time working instead. They’d attempt hired tutoring again. It would fail and they’d decide it was too expensive, anyway.

Skyla turned away from her other friends, though it seemed to Marianne that she was still listening to their conversation out of one ear.

“Meeting with Ms. Clarke,” Marianne reported. “If you wait around my parents can drive us back together?”

“No, Papa and Dad are home early today and I bet they’ll make nachos and I don’t want to miss it. See you tomorrow. Good luck!”

“’Kay. Bye.” Marianne blew her a kiss.

Skyla blew one back and returned to her other friends—her non-best friends, who really hardly knew her, anyway.

Marianne hated having no classes with Skyla that year.

But before too long it would be high school, and she and Skyla could sign up for electives together. They could be each other’s dates for Homecoming, like Marianne’s big sister, Lillian, did with her best friend that year.

As she headed toward the end of the hallway to lit class, she heard Lucas Hayes cackling before she saw him.

He lingered in a crowd with his twin, Ava, and a couple of other kids, smirking at something. At someone.

Marianne inched closer.

Vi Cross stood before them handing out fliers and yammering on and on. Why did she keep talking? Couldn’t she see that they were laughing at whatever she was saying, and not in the good way?

Marianne remembered earlier in the year when Vi had run for class president but lost to Sam Musaka after giving a truly embarrassing speech about the “carbon footprint” of the school. At one point Vi had told the kids they were a “part of the problem” and scolded “For shame!” at the whole auditorium, which caused an explosion of laughter. She would probably be president of the United States one day, but the skills necessary to become president of the eighth grade were beyond her.

Marianne made her way to the outside of the crowd and held out a hand to one of the kids to snatch a flier. They passed one over. It read:

ETHERIDGE QUIZ QUEST TEAM IN NEED OF NEW MEMBERS

JOIN QUIZ QUEST AS IT PROCEEDS TO REGIONAL CHAMPIONSHIPS FOR THE FIRST TIME IN ETHERIDGE HISTORY

EXCELLENT GRADES NOT REQUIRED BUT HIGHLY PREFERRED

MUST HAVE KNOWLEDGE OF OR INTEREST IN GEOGRAPHY, SOCIAL STUDIES, LITERATURE, HISTORY, CIVICS, MATHEMATICS, SCIENCE, GRAMMAR, & MORE

*SEE MR. GARCIA FOR MORE DETAILS*

“Wait, so how many of us can join?” Lucas asked, obviously messing with her. “Could we all do it?”

“I’m so glad you asked!” Vi chirped. “We’re short one person since Addison Schuler moved, and only four of us can compete at once, so technically we only need one more teammate, but we can always use extra players. We’d simply have to determine who’s best suited to perform at Regionals. But others could provide assistance as swing teammates in case of illness and whatnot, and if there are enough who join, we could even add B and C teams! Honestly, whoever joins has big shoes to fill. Addison was … incomparable.”

Marianne saw something flit across Vi’s face, maybe worry or sadness, but she couldn’t tell what exactly.

“The point is, it’s really worth the time commitment,” Vi went on. “You’ll see your grades improve.”

“It just sounds soooo fun!” Ava squealed.

“It really is!” Vi beamed.

Marianne didn’t think she’d ever seen Vi Cross smile before. She had two dimples in each cheek.

“I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Ann Arbor, but it’s a pretty neat place. And, of course, if we win Regionals and make it to the Championship in Lansing … Well, that’ll be really exciting,” Vi went on, still oblivious to the fact that she was an object of mockery. “Have you visited the state capital before?”

“What?” Lucas fake-gasped. “The state capital? Is the governor there?”

Ava and her friends snickered. Lucas and Ava were both super good-looking. Other kids flocked to them. They laughed with wide-open mouths and their pretty eyes twinkled at any opportunity to tease.

“But!” Vi held up a finger to make another point, which caused a few other kids in the crowd to stifle even more giggles. “I know some of you here don’t quite have the grades to cut it. I’m sorry, but it’s just the truth. So I don’t want you to get the wrong idea and think you can easily make it to Ann Arbor. Or Lansing.”

The kids couldn’t hold it in any longer. They let out whoops of laughter.

Vi grew quiet. She appeared to finally understand what was happening but didn’t know how to stop it.

Marianne did.

She jumped in. “Wait, no, for real, guys, this sounds like fun.”

Lucas and Ava howled. “Ohmygod. Please, please join Quiz Quest, Blume,” Lucas said. “Do it.”

“Seriously, I would buy a ticket to see that. I’d bring my whole family,” Ava deadpanned.

“Yeah, they’ll ask for the value of X and you’ll say ‘It’s M!’” Lucas’s friend Niko joked. Niko had shaggy hair that nearly covered his eyes and a broad grin that took up the rest of his face.

Jalilah Jacobs—always glamorous, always unbothered—jumped in, too. “Yeees! Horse in Nerdland! Love it!”

Horse. Marianne could never quite shake the nickname that had started early on in sixth grade. Sometimes, when people called her that, she performed a little “Neigh!”

“Hardy har har. I’m serious, guys! I could be awesome at it! Vi, test me!” Marianne turned to Vi and hoped Vi would see that if she would just jump in and participate in this little performance, then she wouldn’t be the target anymore.