Other people are noticing her, too. I’ve never been friends with someone like this: someone so unafraid, someone people see. Just when I think she’s embarrassing, she passes that point and moves into the bizarre, and I watch, in wonder, as people are surprised and then become caught up in her momentum. She speaks out when she’s not supposed to, moves when she should be still, says nothing when she’s meant to speak. When people make fun of her, she joins right in the laughter or sends a zinger back, and then it seems like other people defend her also, call out the assholes who try to take her down. Sometimes before class starts, she stands on a chair and does a little dance, and when anyone tries to talk to her, she calls out in a really loud voice that she can’t hear them over the music. She does the boogaloo, whatever that is. She parades around the cafeteria like she doesn’t know the rules: she walks past tables of popular kids, like Breanne and Paige, Aidan, and sometimes Lottie, tapping them on the head, saying, “Duck, duck, duck,” but never “goose,” which secretly drives everyone a bit crazy. People are talking about her, laughing when she sings loudly in the halls. She tells rude jokes about nuns having sex, pinches her own butt and howls in outrage, shakes and shimmies while she’s opening her locker. People are being pulled into her orbit.

For me, she takes the edge off my worries. She’s changed the conversation. When the trolls come for me—on the way to school, after, in class under the radar of teachers—Dee sticks up for me. She shuts them down, tells them to fuck right off, laughs at them, and more. The other day, Luke tried to pin me in front of the water fountain and turn it on. Dee managed to get between us and kick him in the nuts. On the way home from school, some kids I didn’t recognize got really close, heckling me. Dee was right there, rooting around in her bag and then suddenly pulling out pepper spray and threatening them. They scoffed but left us alone.

“Where’d you get that?” I asked her as she threw it back in her bag.

“I’ve had reason to be prepared,” she answered, cryptically.

They still find me online, and there isn’t much Dee can do about that, but I feel her, like a kind of shield.

Other, different people are noticing me too, and it’s not entirely bad. I get the occasional smile of recognition, a wink of association, like they’re in on Dee’s jokes. It feels good.

Today, for now, it is lunchtime.