Turn 14 of 26

The phone stops ringing as it disappears. You are nerds, you don’t use phones. You get back to focusing on your notes just like everyone else while giggling and snorting. The class ends 2 hours later with everyone sounding the same they did 2 hours ago. Everyone packs up the same as they leave the classroom and walk back to the honors dorm. You look at Ruth and see something about them.

The buzzing stops — not silenced, gone. Your hand goes to your pocket and finds flat fabric, no weight, no rectangle, and the confusion lasts half a breath before it dissolves. You don't have a phone. You're a nerd. Nerds don't use phones. The thought settles over the empty pocket like snow, and you're already back in your notes, giggling when Priya snorts, snorting when Megan's pencil snaps.

Two hours pass in that warmth. The bow-tied professor walks your row once, reads your work, and says, "Excellent, Miss Kessler," and the pride that floods you feels older than you are. Then thirty pencils cap in one motion, thirty notebooks square themselves, thirty girls rise — and the gap comes again, smooth white nothing where the door should be, and on the far side of it you're descending the stairwell in a tide of cardigans toward evening.

The honors dorm takes you all in like it's been expecting you for years. Brick, ivy, warm windows. The girls peel off down corridors toward their own rooms, calling lisped goodnights, and you climb the second-floor stairs with Ruth beside you.

And you look at her. Really look, for the first time today — at the fat girl with the two high braided pigtails, the thick glasses, the braces, the knit cardigan with a name tag stitched to the breast. Something about her. She's the same as you now. That's the thing. Same build, same pale freckled skin, same fuzzy ginger hair, same wet whistling lisp. She's what you're becoming, or you're what she is — there's no longer a difference you can point to. And she has been watching you all day with that calm, patient satisfaction, like a gardener checking a cutting she planted, pleased that it took.

She catches you looking and smiles, braces to braces.

"Thame theath tomorrow," she lisps, patting your soft arm. "And don't forget your dentitht appointment. They're wiring your braceth permannently." She says it like a gift.

"Thleep well, Emma."

Then she's gone into her own room, and the corridor is empty, and your door is in front of you with a paper nameplate: E. KESSLER. Behind it, a room you've never seen. Inside you, under all the warm belonging, one small cold thing is still knocking.