Getting one hundred and twenty seventh graders on three yellow school buses is more chaos than even the kitchen at the Jasper house. Teachers call out, kids shove and push, buses belch black smoke. Mrs. Leeds emerges from her office to try to maintain order. “Make sure you have your lunches!” she calls out. “But no cell phones! Leave the cell phones in your lockers!”

“You heard Mrs. Leeds,” Ms. Garcia repeats, her voice stern. She’s wearing black boots, a yellow sweater, and a green jacket. Long yellow-and-green earrings dangle from her ears. “If you brought a phone, march back to your locker right now. Detention for anyone caught with a phone on the field trip.”

Most of us stumble back to the seventh-grade wing. The clank of lockers opening and closing adds to the confusion. I don’t see Mercedes anywhere. I set my phone on top of my language arts book. I hope we don’t need our phones for our secret mission today. I slam my locker door. It’ll be fine, I tell myself.

When the seventh grade is finally on the buses, I sit with Sunny. November and Ted are in the seat ahead of us.

“Are you afraid of the dark?” November pops up to ask me.

“No,” I say. I’m afraid of a lot of things, but not the dark. “Why?”

“Well, it’s dark in a planetarium. Have you been to one before? In fourth grade, we went to one in San Francisco.”

“Of course,” I tell November. “We do have things like planetariums in Minnesota.”

Now Ted’s head pops up. “Minnesota. Capital is Saint Paul.”

“That’s where I used to live,” I remind him.

Ted and November talk about capital cities and then argue about which one they’d like to live in. The only city I want to live in is the one I came from. I miss the stately two-story houses and the leafy green ash trees in Saint Paul. Outside the bus’s windows, I watch pink flowering bushes and the occasional palm tree whip past small stucco houses and advertisements for wetsuits. Soon the bus rumbles onto the highway. Bringing us closer to Northern Madrone College. And Francisco Gómez.

“Have you been to Northern Madrone before?” I ask Sunny. Even though she’s so quiet, I’m grateful to have someone to sit with.

“I think so?” She’s so shy, it makes me nervous.

I lean over the seat. “Hey, guys, have you ever been to this college?”

November and Ted pop up again. “We saw a concert there last year, didn’t we?” November says to Sunny. “It was dope, wasn’t it?” A look of recognition flashes across her face and she nods. “Violins and cellos,” November says.

The corners of Sunny’s serious mouth turn up just a bit. “Screech, screech, screech,” she imitates in her squeaky voice.

We all laugh. I guess she’s kind of funny.