I absorbed her words, acknowledging the threads of truth that maybe, possibly, were woven throughout. I gripped the back of my neck, sighed heavily, and confessed, “I feel like everything got shitty while I was away.”

Ayisha raised both hands and affected a lighter tone. “Think of it this way: two more weeks, and you’ll be back at Hogwarts and you don’t have to think about the shitty everything that’s here.” Something in my expression must have tipped her off because she looked closer at me. “What?”

If you had told me as early as this morning that Ayisha Lewis would be the first person I told about Barrington, I would have scoffed.

But that was before I’d gone through Arthur, the Reindeer Romp, my dad holding hands with someone other than my mom, and talking with my mom.

The next thing I knew the words were tumbling out: “I don’t know if I want to go back to Barrington next term, I think I want to stay in Christmas because I suck at school and have no friends and I don’t belong there. I don’t belong anywhere . . .”

She stared at me unmoving for ten seconds then shook her head dramatically, a single hand up in a “stop” gesture. “I’m sorry?” Then she pinned me down with her raw incredulity. “Back up. You want to leave Barrington? The super-prestigious boarding school you spent all of last year telling everyone that you were soooo excited to get into? It made me wanna punch you!”

She wasn’t wrong, I had been pretty locked on about going to Barrington, to the extent I even annoyed myself, so the turnaround from her perspective must seem abrupt.

And I didn’t quite know what to say next, it was all so pathetic. I was pathetic.

I rubbed my face with one hand and all I wanted to do was go back up to my temporary room, crawl under my temporary covers, and fall into a deep sleep that lasted for at least a week. Maybe longer. Maybe forever.

But on the flip side, I felt the powerful urge to unburden myself and tell someone what I was feeling, even if that person had called me snooty and confessed the desire to punch me all in the same conversation. But sometimes we don’t choose our confessors.

I drew a breath and—

“Ayisha.”

Ayisha and I both turned at the voice coming from the front door and here was Ms. Nicole Lewis, standing just inside the front doors of the lobby. She was not pleased.

“Mamma.”