“Ah.” I can’t help it—my face breaks into a wide smile.

Henry rolls his eyes again, and heads to his seat. He unpacks his bag slowly, methodically: a shiny MacBook Air, a clear Muji pencil case, and a thick binder with colorful annotated tabs running down the sides. He arranges them all in straight lines and ninety-degree angles, like he’s about to take one of those esthetic Studygram photos. Then, without lifting his head, he says, “Let me guess, you got ninety-nine percent, then?”

I say nothing, just smile some more.

Henry glances up at me. “You realize it’s rather sad that your sole source of joy comes from beating me by one percent in an English unit test?”

The smile slides off my face. I scowl at him. “Don’t flatter yourself. It’s not my sole source of joy.”

“Right.” He sounds unconvinced.

“It’s not.”

“I wasn’t disagreeing with you.”

“I—ugh. Whatever.” Despite the fact that there are literally a million other things I’d rather do—including walking barefoot over Lego bricks—I take the seat beside him. “There’s something kind of important I need to discuss with you...”

Henry’s expression doesn’t change when I sit down, but I can still sense his surprise. It’s an unspoken yet universally acknowledged rule that the seat you take at the very start of the year is the seat you stick with.

Which is why, when my usual desk mate and Airington’s top art student, Vanessa Liu, comes through the door a few seconds later, she freezes in her tracks. This might sound like an exaggeration, but it isn’t; she goes completely still from head to toe, even as more students trickle in behind her. Then she marches over to me with the sort of betrayed, wounded look one would usually reserve for when they catch their boyfriend cheating on them with their best friend, or something worse.

“You’re sitting here?” she demands, her thin voice stretching into a whine. When I don’t respond, just give her a small, apologetic smile, she pouts and continues, “You’re leaving me at our table with Lucy Goh?”

“What’s wrong with Lucy?” I say, even though part of me suspects I already know the answer.

Lucy Goh is one of the rarities at our school; thoroughly lower middle-class, with white-collar parents working at small local companies. She’s kind to everyone around her—she once baked the whole class personalized cookies for our end-of-year party, and she’s always the first to run over when someone falls in PE class—but she’s not an art prodigy, like Vanessa, or a musician, like Rainie, or particularly good at any of her subjects. And that’s the problem. Here at Airington, there are many different tickets to respect—talent, beauty, wealth, charm, family connections...

But kindness is not one of them.

“Like, yeah, she’s nice and everything,” Vanessa is saying, fluffing her bangs with one charcoal-smeared hand, “but when it comes to group work...” She pauses, then leans forward like she’s about to share a juicy secret, though her voice is still loud enough for the whole class to hear her next words: “She’s kind of useless, you know what I mean?”