Free Period: Chapters 19–21

“Feel free to run as many laps as you want around the perimeter. I’ll figure out how to write you an emotions pass.”

“Tell us everything the school board members said after your disastrous romp through the culinary arts yesterday. Because you screwed things up beyond what I could have ever even imagined, I want to proactively address it in a social post from the Community Action Club account.”

“Ha. Yeah,” he said and sauntered away.

When we were done, Madison typed it at one of the library terminals, even though I told her it would be way more powerful as a series of threaded gifs or a reel of us acting it out: Come in close.

“I like how we’re not asking for people to do anything but think and feel. I still want to add the fundraising point. What if I go completely rogue and secretly ask my dad to buy the pads without telling the PTA?”

“Fine. After yesterday’s debacle, I want to show this to Ms. Varone before I post.”

She was so still and serene.

“You know the first time I got a call to pick you up was in preschool? At four years old you’d tackled someone because he knocked over your friend’s castle. And while I’m in there apologizing like you’d tried to burn the place down, they also tell me you’re reading and doing math years ahead of what was expected. And they’re showing me your papers, these complex sentences and ideas in your baby handwriting. I asked them what do I do, how do you reconcile these things?”

“An entire armada,” I said.

Each hour that I slid through a different door and into a different chair was a new opportunity to remind myself that nothing would be my salvation.

Right about now, Gracie should have been inhaling her dessert and telling me about whatever madness had befallen her in health.

“Everything copacetic over here?”

“Bespoke and bejeweled Cuterus Uterus shirts,” Mary broke in.

In the hallway, Larisa’s voice echoed and enveloped me until I felt like it was lifting my feet right off the linoleum.

“This infraction will merit disciplinary action. If you were thinking of doing anything similar, I suggest you think again,” she said.

“Larisa is special, and so are you,” Isabella said and gave me and Gracie a simultaneous side squeeze.

Putting conformity and accomplishments over relationships.

I didn’t know if it would have turned out this way if the system had been built to include girls from the beginning rather than throwing us in as an afterthought.

The jocks mocked us during lunch.

“How has the fallout been?”

The baton fell like a javelin and landed right in my sweaty paw.

“What do you think?” Carmella asked, stabbing her trowel into the dirt.

That the same kind of prank I would have reveled in a month ago broke my heart when it hurt our project.

Madison knew that was Helen’s realm.

But a complete dissection and analysis of every word they shared would have to wait.