Math was out to kill me. I’d always known it. Overall I was an average student, but multiplication and division signs were like bayonets against my brain. That Friday it didn’t help that Ms. Pinkton was in a foul mood. The morning announcements were read by our student council president, who could not conceal her excitement about the Festival of the Fallen Leaves, Shakespeare on the Fifty-Yard Line, the game versus the Connersville Colts, and the big unveiling of the long-awaited jumbotron. All of it put Pinkton on edge.

“A scoreboard,” she muttered. “What about Bunsen burners to replace those fire hazards in the lab? New calculators for calculus? A Wi-Fi signal that actually works? Have any of you seen the fetal pigs they’re dissecting in anatomy? Half are deformed and the other half are freezer burned.”

She was right, of course. The school’s priorities could be summed up in that noise two classrooms down: SMACK, SMACK. Pinkton’s opinions ought to have endeared her to a loser like me, except that she took out her frustrations on her students. My only hope for the semester was to slow the bleeding so I could squeak through the class with a D. Pinkton had been reminding me all week that I needed an 88 percent on next Friday’s test if I had any chance of that.

Public humiliation was an important part of Pinkton’s psychosis. She wasted no time calling a series of victims to the chalkboard to be struck down by a kamikaze battalion of quadratic equations. I hid behind my book, pretending that my naked fear was total absorption in a spellbinding text. It worked for thirty-five minutes but I couldn’t help but peek over the top. Claire Fontaine was at the board, after all, and I couldn’t miss that.

Everything Claire did was worthy of slow-motion replay, and math was no exception. The chalk swooped upward and fluttered downward. Her pilled sweater stretched this way and that. She tucked her long dark hair behind her ear and left it with an adorable smudge of white dust. I thought she was beautiful, though she wasn’t in the classic sense. The popular girls would say she wasn’t skinny enough. They would also point to the fact that she didn’t wear makeup or do anything to tame that hair. And her clothes—well, what could be said about her clothes? Her boots were not sexy and knee-high; in fact, they were ankle-high and rubber-soled and looked suited for hiking. Her clothes were beyond vintage; they looked picked from military surplus racks, an array of pea-green coats and sand-colored skirts and multi-pocketed slacks, all of which looked as if they’d been through actual World War II combat. And that beret she wore before and after school wasn’t of the look-at-me-I’m-French variety; it was more in the style of I’m-going-to-invade-your-country-and-be-your-new-dictator.

Only one thing didn’t make sense: that bright pink, exceedingly girlish backpack that inexplicably hadn’t one anti-establishment patch sewn onto it, nor a single permanent-marker defacement. Most thought the spotless backpack made her even weirder. To me, it meant that she just didn’t care. A good backpack was a good backpack.