Turn 12 of 26

You and everyone grabs cake. Everyone shoves it down their throats like fat nerds do. Everyone giggles and snorts over it. Everyone soon walks out the dining back to the mathematics building for the best class. Everyone gets into the same seats as before in the other two classes. You know this class is the longest, but best one as the professors allows talking, giggling and snorting.

The cake disappears in a table-wide feeding frenzy — thirty girls shoving sheet cake into braces-locked mouths, frosting on chins, snorting giggles between bites.

"You've got thomething—" Ruth wheezes, pointing at your face, and you wipe and find a smear of chocolate across your cheek, and the table dissolves again. You have never laughed this much at lunch. You cannot remember lunch at all before this one.

Then the trays are bussed and thirty girls rise and walk together across campus to the mathematics building, a slow parade of pigtails and cardigans, and you walk in the middle of it like you've walked in the middle of it for years. Room 117. Same rows. Same seat, third from the left. Your notebook is out and squared before you finish sitting.

And this class is different. A tall man with a beard and a bow tie says, "Good afternoon, honors section — conversation is permitted, provided it concerns the material," and the room blooms with sound. Thirty lisping voices at once, giggling over the problem set, comparing answers, snorting at each other's mistakes.

"I got thirty-thevin for the third one," Megan says, and Priya snorts, "The anther'th thirty, you forgot the thingular term," and the argument goes on happily, braces flashing, and your voice is in the middle of it, arguing Megan's side with total commitment.

It is the best class of your day. It is the best class of your life, some installed part of you reports, and the report arrives with a warm glow attached. You take notes. You laugh. You snort. Your hand knows every answer.

Halfway through, your phone buzzes in your pocket. Then again. Then a third time, buzzing and buzzing, a call. The girls around you don't glance over — phones aren't part of this class's world — but the buzzing keeps on, insistent against your thigh, and the name on the screen, if you looked, would be one you used to know better than your own.