It turns out Well’s in both math and geography with me, and I am better than him at both. Mom is terrible with money. She handed our tiny budget over to me a long time ago. And as the designated “navigator,” I’ve spent a lot of time with a map on my lap. The best part is that I don’t have to do the standard “stand in front of the class and tell us about yourself” routine that every other school has made me do. These teachers are all business. Roll call and get to work. Maybe that’s what middle school is like, or maybe they just know that every twelve-year-old’s worst nightmare is to stand alone in front of everybody else. With the exception of Well. I bet Well would introduce himself every day if he got the chance.

Even though it isn’t as terrible as I thought it would be, and Well stays next to me through second and third period, and the bells between classes sound like wind chimes and so don’t startle me at all… even then, by lunch, I am shaky and tired. I forgot what it was like to be around so many people my age. As promised, Dan is waiting for me in front of the cafeteria when I come down the stairs with Well. It’s on the bottom floor and opens onto a grassy area with picnic tables.

“Maxwell, thank you for showing Lou around.”

“Oh, it’s a pleasure, Coach. Lou is the first new kid in our grade in about three years. Tour guide is a new gig for me.” He puts on a game-show voice and turns to me. “And to your right, you’ll see our lovely dining hall. You better not call it the lunchroom, because lunchrooms don’t have homemade chai granola and a smoothie bar!”

“Seriously?” I ask, because surely not.

“Seriously,” he says, and Dan nods. My last school had pizza and Fritos and ice cream cups that had melted and refrozen so often by the time you opened one, there was just nothing there.

“We had fish sticks back in my day,” Dan says. “You’d think San Diego could do better than that with seafood.” That Dan is from California is news to me. I try to picture him surfing on a Saturday morning or hitting up the skate park in the afternoon. Or bumming a ride out to Tahoe on the weekend to snowboard. I just can’t see it. He seems so much more at home in his ties with the crossword puzzle tucked under his arm.

While I’m squinting at him, trying to picture him with sunglasses and a tan, he hands me a small plastic card that looks like a credit card. It has my name printed on it and the same gold crest as the school.