I’m making more challah on Sunday afternoon after church and a lunch of salmon patties and green beans. The kitchen is covered in flour and so am I, but it’s warm in here and the windows are all fogged up and it’s nice, like I’m snuggled in a sleeping bag. I need something to take my mind off school, and punching dough and braiding it like hair is exactly the thing to do it.

I wish I could make bread instead of pie for the contest in May. Bread is trickier—like the final exam of baking. It would kick a lot of people out of the running.

Wheeling myself all over school, plus doing the laps in gym, has made my arms feel like jelly, but I’m not telling Mom because, miracle of miracles, she actually gave in and is letting me go without an aide. Rachel still waves from the office and tries to come over, but I shoot off before her perfume gets me.

At lunch on Friday, Coralee tried to explain the sixth-grade groups to me, but she called them “tribes,” and at first I thought she meant Native American tribes. We are in Oklahoma, after all. But when I said, totally innocent, “Like Cherokee and Sioux?” she spit her Coke out onto the table and laughed until Bert told her that you could rupture your spleen that way.

“No, Ellie darlin’.” She gets more Southern when she thinks she understands something you don’t. “I mean gangs. The kids who run together.”

She pointed at the end of our own row of tables, where a group of six boys sat with their heads together over a piece of paper. “Those are the basketball players. They’re probably talking ‘strategy’ for the game tonight,” she said, using our favorite air quotes. I could see their long legs sticking out at all angles from under the table. Yep. Definitely basketball players.

“Who are they?” I asked, and nodded toward the three girls in the row next to us. It was the blond one and her friends from my homeroom who had laughed on that first day. They always wear shirts with words on them like “luv” and “l8r” and short, short skirts with UGG boots. It makes me cold just to look at them.

“Ick. Yes. Those are student government girls.”

“Wait, seriously?” I said, because they did not look like the type to care about hall passes and the price of Cheetos in the vending machine.