Mom and Dad wanted to start homeschooling me to prevent anyone from discovering my secret, but I refused. I want to do normal things. I want to eat stale chicken nuggets in the cafeteria. I want to hang out with my friends. I want to sketch guitars on my math worksheets instead of doing actual math.

I won the fight, so I get to go to regular school, but if I have a shifting episode they’ll pull me right out.

“Any cramps?” Dad asks.

“No.”

“Burning sensations?”

“No.”

“Excessive itching? Strange wriggling?”

“No, Dad. No.”

Dad’s a proctologist. That means he’s a medical doctor who specializes in butts. Asking about symptoms is how he shows he cares.

As soon as the car stops I leap out. I’m ten steps away before they stop me.

“Jake!”

With a groan, I turn around.

Dad’s holding out my lunch card.

I tromp back and pluck it from his outstretched hand.

“I love you, kid,” he says.

Mom smiles. “Have a wonderful first day, Jake-o-lantern.”

I wave but don’t smile back because I don’t want to risk my mouth doing something weird.

A few minutes of shuffling and dodging through the clogged halls gets me to my first class, Advisory. “Sit anywhere,” the teacher says, not looking up from the stack of papers on his desk. Class doesn’t even start for another five minutes, and he already seems stressed. I get it.

I gaze out into a sea of faces and instantly regret it, because now a sea of faces is looking back at me. What’s my mouth doing? Is it normal-sized? Do I have extra rows of teeth? Do I have tusks? Nobody’s screaming, so it’s probably good.

Cedar Creek View Middle School takes students from all seven elementary schools in our district, so instead of a few hundred kids, now I’m going to school with almost a thousand. Only a few of the faces are familiar.

I catch sight of Eirykk near the window and give him a nod. Our eyes lock for a second before he looks away, pretending he didn’t see me.

Eirykk and I are best friends. Or we used to be. Things changed over the summer. He just wanted to hang out the way we normally did, jumping our bikes off a plywood ramp in front of his house, shooting hoops, playing putt-putt golf. But I couldn’t risk shifting into jelly at the water park, so I kept putting him off, making excuses. One day it’d be a dentist appointment. Then, I’d tell him I had a stomachache. Then, chicken pox. After a month of that, he gave up on me. And I can’t blame him.

I duck my head and aim for a seat in the back row.