“Look,” said Ms. Lopez. “It’s been taken care of. I’m going to send you girls down the hall to help clean up, and then home for the day, okay? And when you come back I expect a letter of apology from each of you. Tomorrow you’ll be back and ready to learn, yes? Without the sand?”

Talia and I nodded.

“And if anything like this happens again, please, please, come talk to me first. I am here to help you with exactly this kind of thing.”

Mom promised that I would talk to her next time. Ms. Lopez stood and said goodbye, and we left her office.

We walked slowly down the hall, Talia and I keeping our eyes to the ground. Mom’s hand stayed on my back, and it did make me feel a bit better. It helped me breathe easier. This wasn’t a good thing, but it could have been worse. I could have been expelled. Or sent to prison.

“What does BB stand for anyway?” asked Mrs. Latu, as we neared the dreaded locker.

Talia glanced at me and we caught each other’s eye. To my surprise, she was grinning.

“Beach bum,” she said.

Some Dead White Dude

The next day, I was eating lunch in the library again, but this time it was different.

This time Talia was eating lunch with me.

We were lounging in the beanbag chairs by the magazine section. Talia’s mom had sent her with a big Tupperware of rice with chicken and pineapple and a sweet sauce that smelled so good it made me shiver.

“Your mom seems like a really good cook,” I said as I ate my peanut butter banana sandwich.

“Yeah,” Talia said.

“My mom owns a bakery. We should do a combo dinner sometime.”

I was scared that somehow that would be the wrong thing to say, but Talia said, “My mom could do pork. Does your mom make coconut cream pie?”

“The best.”

We both turned back to the open notebooks on our lap. I’d gotten better at remembering about Silent Questions, and earlier that day I’d figured out something new about Talia. We were both writers. At least kind of.

“How’s it going?” I asked her.

She groaned. “I hate sonnets,” she said.

Talia had signed up for the Creative Writing elective. She told me she was really excited about it at first, but that they were just doing boring stuff like essays and descriptive paragraphs. And sonnets.

“I keep trying to tell Mr. Gradey that rap counts. That Logic is poetry. But he won’t listen.”

I looked down at my notebook. I had a good chunk of my letter written, about how Cecilia had influenced the world, but I couldn’t figure out how the letter should start. I wanted the first paragraph, even the first sentence, to be so wham-bam amazing that they would have to give it the grand prize.

“How’s yours coming?” she asked.

“I thought I knew what to say, but it’s harder than I thought,” I said.