Then the bell rings and classes start. Still no sign of Grimshaw, and I start to wonder if she did quit school. My first period of the day is free, and I spend it on our bench in the park, alone. It feels like it’s going to be a long, quiet year. Sitting there, looking up at the school, I make the first decision of the rest of my life: I’m going to follow the principal’s advice. I’ll have myself my own future, a real one, complete with all the middle-class accoutrements. I go to the guidance counselor’s office. I switch my classes around so that now I’m in physics, calculus, and French IV, as well as AP English.

The people in Guidance don’t really want to let me change my schedule so drastically, since I have no prerequisites in place, and of course there is the small matter of my GPA. Guidance shows it to me, and we look at it together. There it is, the GPA of doom, the smallest number anyone has ever seen. But I bring up the fact of my near-perfect SAT scores and drop my - mother - the - new - principal’s name casually into the conversation enough times, and how inspired I was by her speech, that obstacles to my ambition start to melt away like ice cream. Except for Western Civ, which I still have to repeat, they don’t care who my mother is.

My French teacher, Mlle. O’Shea, is so happy to see me that she cries when I walk into her classroom. My other classes are full of middle-class strivers who look pretty sour to be sharing their station in life with the girl in the Red Army hat. They don’t think I’m real competition. That’s okay. Chiang Kai-shek thought the same thing about Mao. I eat lunch with a pile of textbooks for company. It’s not so bad to be alone.

After lunch comes Western Civ, with Mr. C. as sarcastic as ever. Then who breezes in but Melody Grimshaw, chatting and laughing with Claudette Mizerak and Angel Ciaramitaro like they’ve always been best friends. When she sees me, she comes over and stands in front of my desk. She’s wearing high heels and a skirt that’s so tight it looks like it was duct-taped on.

“I thought you were going to be in Consumer Concepts with us,” she says. “We signed up for it, remember?”

I shrug. “I switched all that up for physics and calculus.”

“No way!” Grimshaw looks genuinely excited. “You know I always thought you should be taking that stuff.”

I shrug again. “I’ll probably fail them, anyway.”

“No,” she says. “You’ll work hard. I’ll make you do your homework. Then you can go to a good college, and I’ll come visit and scope out the cute college boys for you.”