Ma Elena’s not done. “Note taken. We’ll be totally silent.” (Somehow, I doubt this is true.) “But for the rest of us, we don’t have to wait to get to work. Weese helped with I won’t say what this morning, but we still need to paint the I won’t say that either, and Mr. A said we can get in the shop building tonight to do it.” The smile she lobs at Chaz and me might as well have come from a matchmaking tía.

If she has at all noticed that neither of us smiles back, you’d never know.

Rec starts right after dinner at First Secondary. The boys play baseball on a real diamond next to a wan volleyball net just plugged into a flat-ish patch of grass for the girls. If this was not the dark ages, I’d start a campaign on Insta to shame the school. (Where’s Megan Rapinoe when you need her?) Rec would not be my first choice for an evening, but on Thursdays, it’s “sack supper,” which means sandwiches, chips, and cookies in paper bags, and they’re distributed here on the field. Even if it’s cold cuts with (oh my god) globs of mayo on white, a sis has to eat. If there is any slim reward, it’s that the ball field is the highest point on campus, the only place with a lake view.

Mrs. Buckman is here, pregnancy making her look fifty pounds heavier and yet not any less pickled than in my time, and she’s strolling among the students who are camped out on the lawn. Every now and then she points at someone and makes a scissors with her fingers, but instead of making a snipping motion, the blades go up and down in an alternating pattern. What the hell? Vin Weasel is going by and even though it’s him, I ask what that’s about. He grins. “So they don’t have the “One Up” rule in Connecticut, huh?” Apparently, Mrs. Buckman is the Social Monitor, whose sole job is to make sure there are no public displays of affection and that nobody cops a discreet feel. “One Up” really means “At Least One Up,” meaning that if a boy and girl are on the ground next to each other, they can’t both be lying down: at least one must sit up.

(Um, why? Because somehow they might have sex in front of everyone? Or does she think just being prone gets you pregnant?)

I start laughing and poke his arm. “Does the school not know how babies get made?”