Normally I’d walk or ride my bike, because Sorrento is so small it only takes about ten minutes to get most places. I’d tag along with Jed and his older sister, Lily. But she started high school this year and needed to take the bus to Rosebud, so it would be just Jed and me. And Sam, too, I guessed. Especially since he’d started talking to me again.

But that day Anika wanted to drive Sam and me to wish us luck. Then she was heading to her job cleaning the big holiday houses around Sorrento.

Anika kept a whole lot of supplies in the trunk of her car, and every day she went off to clean fancy houses that had views of the beach. They belonged to people who only lived in them for three months every year but wanted them to be clean year-round. I thought it was silly.

“Are you excited for your last first day, Fred?” Anika asked while we were stopped at the only traffic light in town.

She meant because it would be my last first day of elementary school, as I went into sixth grade. For Sam it was just another first day, starting fifth.

“I guess?” I said, but I could feel Anika looking over at me and smiling the way she does, a little smile trying to be gentle and get more words out of you. “Lots of kids have swapped out to do sixth grade at the same place they’ll go to seventh grade,” I said, and then I gave a big huffy sigh to blow my bangs out of my eyes. “A bunch of them who started out in kindergarten with me at PNP have gone, and that sucks.”

Point Nepean Primary—PNP—is named for the Point Nepean National Park, which is just down the road from us. There are only three elementary schools in Sorrento, and PNP is the oldest and smallest, facing the water at the bottom of Ocean Beach Road.

“Mr. Khouri is your favorite teacher, though, right, Freddo? So that’s something, at least.” The light went green, and Anika turned onto Ocean Beach Road. “Maybe he’ll be your favorite teacher too, Sam!”

Pop had this saying that you take the good with the bad. I never really understood it, but I came closer to getting it when we found out that some of Sam’s fifth-grade classmates and my sixth-grade classmates would be smooshed together in a composite classroom that year. They combined our sixth- and fifth-grade classes because there’s not enough of us students in either, so they needed us in a multi-age classroom to make a whole.

The good was that Mr. Khouri would be my teacher again. The bad was that not only was I stuck with Sam at home, but now I’d be lumped in a classroom with him too.