“Umm . . . yeah, you’re right.” I wished I could stop stammering.

“But, if you’re going in the same direction, come along,” she invited.

She seemed welcoming.

Mel picked up the box and we began walking back to her place. It was still really warm out. I was beginning to worry whether my sweat was causing me to smell bad, so I kept trying to sniff myself without her seeing me. I was an anxious ball of awkwardness and kept overthinking the possibilities of making myself look weird.

“It’s really not too far from here,” Mel said.

“Good to know. How much further?”

“Two blocks. Queens Avenue is pretty easy to miss if you drive by.”

“Never been there before. Do you go to school around here?”

“Um . . . yeah. I know you from school, dude.”

“Wait, what?” I said, confused. “You go to the same school as me?”

“Yeah. I see you sitting in the cafeteria alone a lot of the time.”

She wasn’t wrong. I mean, I usually hung out with Donny, but sometimes he got busy with his music club during the lunch hour so he left me alone. I was bad at making new friends, so being alone felt okay, even if it wasn’t ideal.

“Yeah . . .” I said, worried. I was scared that she thought I was a loser.

“I saw what happened yesterday, too. That’s the reason you have the shiner, I assume.” She pointed at my eye.

“Yeah. That’s the reason.” I shrugged.

“Lewis is a douche.”

“I would have never guessed.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” I mumbled.

Wow. She had seen everything. That’s the most embarrassing part of being bullied publicly. Everyone sees it. Everyone knew what had happened and there was nothing I could do about it. I looked weak in front of everyone and Mel had seen it all. The only thing I could do to chase off the embarrassment was to change topics, so I asked, “How come I’ve never seen you at school before?”

“That’s a good one.” She sighed. “A lot of kids don’t see me. Some of it is because I try to disappear, most of it is because I’m in the elite class. That means I’m stuck in front of a textbook or in a classroom most of the day.”

Oh gosh. I had finally met someone who was in the elite class. It was kind of hard not to change my perspective of Mel after she told me that. For the most part, the elite class was full of pretentious jocks, classist students who thought they were better than everyone.

“Then there’s me,” Mel said, “Right in there with the pretentious jocks, the classist a-holes. There I am. The token brown girl who has to work twice as hard as everyone else just so people think I’m more than just a sprinkle of diversity.”

Being the token sucks, and I could relate to that a lot of the time, especially in history class when teachers would ask me about the black perspective of Canadian history in front of an all-white class. It made me stick out more than I liked to.