“Um, yeah. That’s really great!” Annabelle managed. “Good job!”

She walked over to Mia’s towel and sat next to it without bothering to spread out her own. Jeremy plopped down on her other side, and then Mia lowered herself back down, too. A little ways away, a lifeguard blew his whistle and motioned for two kids who’d gone out too far to come back in.

“How’d you guys do?” Mia asked. “You met Mr. Derrickson like a zillion times for history help, right, Annabelle? Did you do well?”

Annabelle focused on the seals that bobbed up and down in the water, out past where the lifeguards let swimmers go, waiting for their turn to sunbathe on the rocks.

“Um, yeah,” she said. “I studied a lot. My grade was . . . eh.”

She shrugged to show it didn’t really matter and buried her toes in the sand.

“Aww, Annabelle.” Mia put her arm around Annabelle’s shoulders, and Annabelle squirmed away to pick up a rock. Pink quartz, it looked like.

“Mr. Derrickson’s the worst,” Mia said. “He seriously wants people to fail. He’s, like, a Satanist who takes pleasure in making people suffer.”

“You mean a sadist?” Jeremy asked.

Mia reached over Annabelle to flick him in the ear. She never really minded when Jeremy corrected her, though. She was confident enough in her own intelligence that it didn’t shake her when she got a word wrong.

“The point is, he’s a miserable person. And not a fair teacher. That short-answer section was ridiculous—we barely ever talked about any of that.”

Mia talked faster and lower than she used to. In the spring, she’d joined the lacrosse team and become friends with all the prettiest, loudest eighth graders. She sounded just like them now, and she said everything like it was a fact, even when it wasn’t.

“It was a really hard final,” Jeremy agreed.

But it hadn’t been too hard for Jeremy or Mia. Only for Annabelle.

Annabelle wiped the sand off the pink quartz rock and ran her fingers over its rounded end. Pink quartz, white quartz, and salt-and-pepper granite—those were the most common kinds of rocks on the island, because they could handle getting pounded by the waves. She’d learned that her first year at the Academy, in sixth-grade science.

When they did their unit on the island habitat, she’d had questions about everything: why there were so many of those three kinds of rocks, why the ocean looked blue in the morning and greenish by afternoon, why all of the beaches were bordered with dunes.

And her teacher, Mrs. Mattson, would tell her, “What a terrific question!” And Jeremy would say, “I’ve never stopped to think about that!” And for as long as she was in science class, she almost felt smart.

Mia took the rock to examine it, and then dropped it back in Annabelle’s palm. “Hey, what are you guys doing tomorrow? Wanna play mini golf?”

“Okay, yeah,” Annabelle said, willing her voice to sound happy.