“To Buckhead,” I said.

Anita had been accepted to a posh private school in Buckhead, one of the neighborhoods inside the perimeter. The perimeter, referring to Interstate 285, which neatly locked the suburbs away from Atlanta proper, was one of those things to which my mother sometimes mystically referred while in that open house headspace—a state of mind that I swear caused her very large ears to droop and soften, implying that she was listening to something otherworldly, something more splendid than terrestrial gossip. Someday, we might live inside the perimeter, she suggested. My father scoffed; in Hammond Creek we were close to my parents’ jobs, good public schools, and other immigrants. Inside the perimeter, he grumbled, were crumbling houses that white people would spend a million bucks on because they seemed Margaret Mitchellian.

Anita’s destination was a school I’d faced at debate tournaments a few times. They never failed to intimidate, showing up with four coaches from the best college teams huddled around them. They strutted about in blazers and ties and pearls and heels, while we mopped our sweat with our swamp-green Okefenokee High School T-shirts. Her school sat near the long low lawns of country clubs and the governor’s mansion. Its female students would be debutantes, and its alumni seemed—from my position outside its brick-winged gates, anyway—to waltz into Harvard and Princeton and Vanderbilt and Georgetown.

It made sense. Anita’s only plan in life, as long as I had known her, was to attend Harvard. What followed Harvard was a vaguely crimson-tinged blankness; Harvard was sufficient, would propel her into some life thereafter. The first step in achieving that life seemed to be leaving Hammond Creek, Okefenokee High School, and me.

Anita and I had been avoiding each other since Spring Fling. She now traipsed around the hallways ensconced in Melanie Cho’s pack, making it impossible for me to catch her eye. But I had not forgotten the dance. I wondered if by ditching me—or by stealing a queen bee’s coveted piece of jewelry?—she had completed some hazing ritual. I sought signs of change in her. Did her hair shine more than it used to? Had she grown lankier? I looked for her on AOL Instant Messenger, one of our regular sites of communication. She logged on only once. I began to type: wtf where u been? Then I deleted it, trying the softer, r u mad @ me? I cleared that out, too: sup, I wrote. Then came the heartrending sound of a door slamming. She’d signed off. Her avatar never reappeared. I guessed she’d blocked me.

So I did not learn the news about the school from her, but from Shruti Patel. Shruti was in all the gifted classes, and already taking Advanced Placement Physics as a freshman. She told me during Honors American History, the only class where she did not regard me as a flailing moron. (I liked English and history and scraped by in most other subjects.)