Grimshaw is bored—by Junior, by the final exam, by history, by life. She wants to go somewhere, but she doesn’t know where, and if she did know, she wouldn’t be able to figure out how to get there. She wants to be a dancer, that’s all she’s ever wanted to be, but she doesn’t know what that means she should do. There are no professional dancers in Colchis, not like the kind she wants to be, anyway, so she can’t ask them what they did to get there. It’s a dream for her, like a god she prays to. Nothing else matters to her. My family used to get her ballet lessons for her birthday down at Monique’s Dance Academy, a Christian dance studio owned by one of my mother’s church friends, on the condition that her family take her to them, but you can’t really count on Grimshaws for anything. Her brothers are numerous, but when you need them they are always ending up in the emergency room, or jail, or needing her to babysit, or their cars have issues. Now my mom buys her subscriptions to dance magazines, which get delivered to our house, so it keeps the dream alive that way.

She doesn’t have anything written on her paper. Mr. C. catches me looking.

“Miss Velasco,” he enunciates.

“I’m not cheating.” I sit back down. “But other people might be.”

He stands up and scans the room, which interrupts these two vicious cheerleaders who are sitting in front of me and passing misinformation back and forth.

The cheerleaders give me dirty looks, and I smile at them. The football player who is playing with Grimshaw’s hair belongs to one of them.

Mr. C.’s gaze comes back to rest on me. His eyes narrow. “Miss Velasco,” he says again, with his usual complement of sarcasm. “I assume you’ve done the math.”

“Yes.”

“You need to hand in a perfect exam today if you expect to achieve one of your D’s and come back in the fall as a senior.”

“I know.”

Mr. C. stares out the same window as Grimshaw. “We know you know everything already,” he says, “but what we don’t know is if that’s an asset or a liability.”

I accomplish the short answer questions in less than ten minutes. Mr. C. is right: since my grade in Western Civ is currently a deep F, I do have to ace this test. Around me, my classmates are sighing while the grinding of the motor in the clock on the wall gets louder and louder. Grimshaw has picked up her exam and is staring at it with profound disinterest. Junior is still keeping busy with tying her hair into little bows. Junior’s cheerleader girlfriend looks pretty upset about all the attention he’s putting into Grimshaw’s hair, but he ignores her.