“Seriously. They only do it so they can plan the dances.” Coralee leaned over and pointed a french fry in their direction, and it was so obvious that I grabbed her hand and pulled it down. “What? They’re too busy pretending not to watch the basketball guys to notice. That’s Sierra in the middle. She’s on the beauty pageant circuit. She’ll be at the one in Checotah I’m going to in March.”

“Wait. You’re doing a beauty pageant?” I couldn’t make my voice normal, and Coralee noticed, because then she was pointing at me.

“Yes, I am doing a beauty pageant, and don’t judge. How else am I going to get noticed? In case you didn’t know, I’m not lined up to be on The Voice anytime soon. Besides, my talent is singing and you know I will kick every girl’s tail.” She took a bite of her bologna sandwich and talked through it. “I am going to be the next Kacey Musgraves. So you better be nice to me.”

I snorted and stole one of her fries. I thought beauty pageants were for five-year-olds with crazy moms.

“Who are they?” Bert asked, and I was glad because it made Coralee stop giving me the stink eye. I turned to where he was pointing just as obviously as Coralee. These two clearly hadn’t spent a lifetime trying to blend in. I think that fact, more than the trailer thing, might have been the reason we were the only ones at that table.

The table Bert pointed at was the only one besides ours where guys and girls sat together.

“I’m surprised you don’t know,” Coralee says. “Those are your kind of people, Bertie. Those are the mathletes. They’re the smarties, and they travel together doing math competitions and probably play chess in each other’s townhomes on the weekends.”

“I don’t like math,” Bert said, doing his slow-blinking thing. “I just like facts.”

I’m coming to learn that Bert isn’t creepy weird like I thought. He’s just a mega geek. If he lived back in Nashville, he’d probably have his own tribe of geeks just like him to calculate statistics and memorize all the former presidents of Lithuania. But in Eufaula he’s just about the only one. We had all these cliques back at home too, but our middle school was four hundred people.

Now, in Mema’s kitchen, I think about how easy it was to get lost in the crowd back home as I pull the challah, warm and golden, out of the oven.

Grandpa wanders in first. He taps his knuckles on the countertop. “Mmm-hmm, something is calling my name.”