Do you ever notice something, something that nobody else notices, you don’t know why, something just makes you notice it, it catches your attention, it gets on your radar screen, and you pick out this little detail from far away? It doesn’t even register as significant; you don’t even know why you notice it. But you do. This gold Corvette struck me that way, like, why am I noticing that gold Corvette going so slowly down that street? It’s too far away to see who’s driving it, but it catches the afternoon sun and glints before it disappears, so I notice it and watch it move by.

“You coming on?” the bus driver calls down to me, and then I follow Grimshaw on to the bus.

“Hello, Prof,” Grimshaw says cheerily, mounting the steps of the bus.

“Afternoon, darlin’,” says the bus driver. “Miss Serena, how was history?”

“It’s over,” I tell him. “We passed.”

“Remember what they say,” he cautions with his finger in the air.

“What’s that?”

“If you don’t remember your history, you gotta repeat it.” He laughs heartily at his own joke.

With the completion of our Western Civ exam, we are now seniors in high school, and strictly speaking, mature young ladies such as Grimshaw and I shouldn’t be riding the school bus, which is really a rolling day care center. If I were more like my older sister, Allegra, I would be driving home with friends. But I’m not Allegra, and I don’t have friends with cars. With all Grimshaw’s brothers, we could have our choice of a whole rusty fleet of Blazers and pickup trucks, but she never took Driver’s Ed, so she doesn’t have her license, and I’m not old enough.