“I think it’s all in the interpretation, don’t you?” my mother asks. She plays it straight. “Kids really need second chances, don’t you think?”

Outside the office, I hold my hand up for a high five.

“Not yet,” Grimshaw says. “We still have to get the signature. Just remember. He’s your dad.”

So at the end of the day, I prepare to broach the subject with Mr. C. Once again, he makes me stand there while he concentrates on his grade book. “Serena,” he says finally.

“I’ve been thinking about that independent study you wanted me to do—”

“So I heard,” he says. “Your mother told me.” He sighs and shakes his head. “All right. The independent study is no longer optional, not if you want me to sign off on the cheerleading for you and Melody Grimshaw. May I remind you, I expect attendance, every day. Class discussion and participation, every day. And for the study, I’m thinking I want you to take some of your ideas in that essay on last year’s final and use it on Colchis. An independent study on democracy’s effect on upward mobility in your own town. Go ahead,” he says, nodding to one of the desks. “Make me something I can sign for the principal.”

He walks over to the window and looks out through the branches of the white pine. He has all the windows open, and a breeze blows papers off his desk, but he doesn’t move. I sit down and start, and as I write the proposal, it occurs to me that I don’t even like cheerleading—the clapping, the yelling, the tedium, my utter indifference to whatever is happening on the football field. Then I sign the paper on the bottom. When I hold it out to him, he draws a big slash across the bottom of it without even looking at what I have written and continues to look out over the yellowing leaves of the town of Colchis. I guess it’s his signature.

“Thank you.”