She looked at me as if I were stupid. “Never.”

“What?”

“I can’t go back. If I go back, my parents will find me.”

“But you can’t just skip school.”

“Why not?”

I had never questioned this before. “Kids go to school. It’s what they do.”

“Why?”

“To learn things.”

“Why? So we can learn how to make atom bombs and kill ourselves faster?”

“No. So we can improve our lives.”

“Right,” Grace said sardonically. “My mom graduated from college, and it didn’t do her any good. In fact, I think school makes you dumber.”

As a three-year recipient of the perfect attendance award, I took offense to this. “How could learning things make you dumber?” I said. “That’s just stupid.”

“I didn’t say ‘learning,’ I said ‘school.’”

“It’s the same thing.”

“No it’s not. School makes people lazy. They stop thinking things out for themselves and just plug in the facts other people want them to think.”

“Like what?”

“How about what really happened to the Indians?”

I didn’t know how to respond, since, frankly, I wasn’t sure what had happened to them.

“We need school to learn socializing skills.”

“What socializing skills has school taught you?”

She had a point. The only social lesson I had learned at Granite was that big dogs eat small dogs; a particularly disturbing lesson when you’re a small dog.

“You’re just parroting the Establishment,” Grace said.

I was starting to get mad. “I’m not parroting.”

“Yes, you are. They can tell you anything and you’ll just believe it.”

“Give me one example,” I said.

“Okay. In Christopher Columbus’s time, why were people afraid to sail?”

“Everyone knows that,” I said. “It’s because they thought the world was flat.”

“You’re sure of that?”

Her saying that made me not so sure. “Yeah…”

“Guess what year the first globe was invented?”

“I have no idea.”

“Fourteen ninety-two. You know the poem, In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue. It was the same year Columbus sailed. If they thought the world was flat, why were they making globes?”

“You just made that up.”

She shook her head. “No, I didn’t.”

I couldn’t tell if she were making this up or if she really was a lot smarter than me. The latter seemed likely. Either way I was losing the argument. “What does Christopher Columbus have to do with you living in my clubhouse the rest of your life?”

She looked at me, stunned. “Fine,” she said between clenched teeth, then began grabbing her things and shoving them in her bag.

“What are you doing?”

“You want me to go? I’ll go.”

“I didn’t mean that.”

“Yes you did.”

Even though she was turned from me, I saw her furtively wipe a tear from her cheek. I touched her shoulder. “Grace…”

She pulled away from me. “Don’t touch me.”

“Please, stop.”

“No.”