As for me, Serena Velasco, aside from being taller than average and hated for my brilliance by students and teachers alike, there’s nothing all that special about me. I’m your basic middle-class American teenager, bored and disgusted by my surroundings. I’m a classic, left-brained, linear learner, which means I can memorize long lists of unrelated and irrelevant facts and regurgitate them with ease but am challenged by tying my shoes, dancing, reading maps, telling time, and being nice to people. Since high school started, I have kept my hair dyed some patchy, hybrid-industrial color. I wear combat boots, and have a bad attitude but very good posture. Although some people say I would be pretty if I ever smiled, Grimshaw is my idea of beauty, and I don’t look one little thing like Grimshaw. I never wear makeup. Most adults think I do drugs. If they’d rather think that than consider that my critique of the moronic society they’ve created might be based on hard evidence, that’s fine with me.

I find that adults are very jaded these days. No combination of hair color, clothes, body piercing, or tattoos can shock them. About the only thing that can still guarantee a reaction in this factory town is communism. So I wear a Red Army cap every day, with the red star. I think it belonged to my father, who has been dead now a long time, at least I found it at his house in Maine, where I have to go every summer for an obligatory visit with my grandmother. I probably overdo it with the communist thing, but otherwise I’m not sure anyone would know I exist.

The bus ride home has taken longer than usual today. The development where my house is is at the very end of the line. As we turn onto our road, the bus shudders and clanks climbing the last hill. We’re way up in the country now, and the air has cooled down and feels fresh, coming in through the open windows of the bus. As we approach the gates of the development where I live, what should be coming down the road but the same gold Corvette. The bus flashes its lights, and the Corvette slows down and stops, and waits.

“Look, there it is again.”