But her father had lobbied for Latin. Shy muddled through the first year, feeling a little insane for trying to learn a language no one spoke. She’d thought about switching to Mandarin. Now she was so glad she hadn’t. Second-year Latin at Phinney Collegiate was taught by Mr. Streko. And okay, yes, he had a mustache, which sometimes had bits of dried cappuccino foam in it, and he wore the same light gray V-neck sweater, which also sometimes had bits of food and cat hair on it, almost every day. He had tattoos on his forearms that she couldn’t quite make out because his hair was so thick and dark. But he was passionate about Latin—the other students rolled their eyes at him—so passionate, Shy had begun to feel passionate about it too.

She’d hated her new school from the moment she started there last year. The kids rolled their eyes at her, too. They rolled their eyes at her Gucci sneakers, a spare pair her mother had brought home for her from the fashion closet at work. They rolled their eyes when she didn’t understand the people who worked at Just Salad when she attempted to eat out for lunch—what in bloody hell was Buffalo chicken? They rolled their eyes when she didn’t know how to play basketball or volleyball. They rolled their eyes when she asked where she could get a cup of tea. Now, a year later, Mr. Streko had changed all that. She felt like a rare butterfly, shedding her cocoon in his classroom.

Today, Latin was just before lunch. They were attempting to translate Ovid’s Amores—poems about love.

“Sin, sin, sin—who has it?” Mr. Streko demanded, his brown eyes flecked with bright orange light, his fuzzy black mustache doing that sad and sexy thing where it went down over the corners of his mouth. Shy wondered if he maintained his mustache on his own or if he had weekly appointments at the barber. “This is a good one,” he prompted. “Remember this one on Valentine’s Day.”

“ ‘I can’t live either without you or with you,’ ” Shy translated, her long, frail body trembling with the effort it took to keep her voice normal and her eyes disinterested.

“Yes!” Mr. Streko beamed at her with his straight, pearlescent teeth and perfectly curled black eyelashes, shooting out arrows of love that bullseyed her heart, almost knocking her out of her chair.

“For tomorrow, translate the next four lines. Try to use your hearts and minds rather than your dictionaries. Remember, it’s poetry, so it has an emotional logic rather than a literal logic.”