Turn 2 of 26

Sit down at the desk with your name on it. The end of the third row of 10 girls in each. Your sitting next to on your right who’s name tag says Ruth, her hair is done is high braided pigtails. You sit down and get ready to be on your phone all class as you vision starts to blur up. You can’t see anything as Ruth pulls out a pair of glasses and puts them on your eyes. No one notices at all.

You sit. The chair is too small for you and somehow already shaped to you, and the desk next to it has been left with a gap exactly one Emma wide. The girl on your right — Ruth, according to the tag pinned to her cardigan — has her pigtails braided up into two stiff towers, and she watches you settle with the placid attention of someone minding an aquarium.

You get your phone out under the desk, thumb already scrolling, because whatever this is, you are not participating in it. The screen swims. You blink, and the blur gets worse, the whole room going soft at the edges like a photo of a photo. By the time you try to look up at the chalkboard, the numbers have melted into gray smears and you can't read your own lock screen.

Ruth's hand comes into your swimming field of view. She's holding a pair of glasses — thick black frames, taped at one hinge — and she puts them on your face with both hands, adjusting the arms over your ears the way you'd do it for a child. The world snaps into focus so hard it hurts. The board. The smears. The number underlined twice. All of it crisp.

"Better," Ruth says. It isn't a question.

You start to reach up to take them off, and your hand stops. Not because she stops it — because your hand stops. It comes back down to the desk, picks up the pencil, and lays it parallel to your notebook, centered with a precision that makes something in your chest go cold. Your posture straightens. Your feet slide flat under the chair. You are still you, you are screaming you, and your body is sitting in this desk like it has sat here every Tuesday for years.

At the front, the woman in the gray cardigan begins the lecture.

"As I was saying before we were interrupted —" and no one at all looks at you, because as far as this room is concerned, you were never late, and you were never anywhere else.