They had stopped paying attention to her. She let the conversation wander on without her as it turned into Rochelle rating the cuteness of the male teachers and Cathy agreeing with everything she said. What’s wrong with me? This is the kind of stuff people talk about. I want to be normal. I want to fly under the radar … what’s “cute” mean, anyway? For years now, Freddy had survived school by walking what Mel called “the fine line between fame and notoriety.” She’d had to look up “notoriety,” but once she had, she’d admitted that Mel had got it right. She’d never been popular, but she’d never been unpopular, either. She’d just sort of been there. She could fade into the background. Now the background itself was changing, and she could feel herself becoming more visible. A boy Freddy didn’t know walked past and leered at Rochelle, and Rochelle made such a meal of pretending he wasn’t there that it was obvious to everyone at the table that she wanted him to leer at her some more.
The problem was that school was really just a series of invisible lines. When you stayed on your own side, no one knew the lines existed. When you crossed one, everybody noticed. Freddy had once been good at telling where the lines were.
She escaped as soon as she could. She knew, realistically, that nothing had really happened over lunch, but she still felt the conversation with Rochelle and Cathy had more or less summed up why school was worse than anything anywhere.
This semester, she was in English, science, math, PE, band, and drama. English and PE were on alternate days, as were band and drama; those classes would run all year. Science and math were daily and would be replaced by social studies and French in the second semester. Ordinarily, she would have had four classes a day, two in the morning and two in the afternoon. Today, thanks to the morning assembly, all four classes had been crammed into the afternoon, with each only forty minutes long. The first bell rang, and the lights flicked off and on again so the kids from the School for the Deaf would know the period was changing. There were five minutes until English. Freddy was actually glad she would get English first thing every other morning. It wasn’t her favourite class, but growing up with an English professor for a mother had forced her to read beyond her grade level in self-defence. She could enter the classroom and just stop paying attention. Of course, the fact that she had English first period every other day also meant that she had PE first period every other other day. She would try not to think about that now.
She knew neither Rochelle nor Cathy was in her class; both of them were in the afternoon English class with Ms. Chang. She shared only one class with each of them this semester. A week ago, she wouldn’t have thought that would be a relief. It turned out now that it was. There would be no whispering and giggling and pitying glances to distract her from the soothing boredom of the class. She took her seat and tried to disappear into it. Despite the shifting background, Freddy still considered that making people not notice her was one of her few really useful gifts.
Of course, it only worked if the weird new kid didn’t thump into the seat next to her and say loudly, “Fancy meeting you again. Why are you all scrunched up like that?”
Freddy’s stomach rolled over. Damn Josiah. It was the bits between classes that were supposed to be dangerous.
“You should scrunch up, too,” she whispered. “Stop drawing attention to yourself.”
“What? I’m not. How am I?” said Josiah in a clear, carrying voice.
“Be … quiet,” she said.
“Oh,” said Josiah, “you’re wanting me to conform. I’d rather not, but thanks all the same. Shall we have a bet on how long it takes me to get beat up for the first time?”
Heads were turning all over the classroom. Freddy suspected they would have done so even if Josiah had spoken softly and kept his head down. He was that sort of person. And she was talking to him. In public. Why was she?
And I was all worried about being in a class with Roland again, thought Freddy.
Mr. Dillon entered the room exactly as the second bell rang. He had been Freddy’s English teacher the year before as well, and she knew he always made a point of being precisely on time. As a teacher, he was just barely okay. He was likely in his mid-twenties, but he struck Freddy as wanting to be older. Mr. Dillon had a brown vest and a tweed jacket with elbow patches. He had the students sit in strict rows, and unlike the other English teachers at the school, he taught grammar and logical argument. He spoke in a droning monotone that everybody knew he was putting on. They had all heard him talking normally to other teachers in the hallways.
She sank into her usual Dillon-enabled daydream before he was halfway through the attendance sheet. She already knew everything he taught them; Mum could be truly terrifying when someone misused an apostrophe in her presence. Freddy found that all she had to do to achieve a reasonable grade in Mr. Dillon’s class was show up and occasionally answer a question about Shakespeare. She half listened as Mr. Dillon told them they would be starting with poetry and eventually moving on to A Midsummer Night’s Dream and some novel involving a young boy dealing with the death of his dog. Most of the novels she’d been forced to read in school were along those lines. It seemed as if this year was going to be pretty much like last—
“Brilliant,” said Josiah.
Mr. Dillon paused in his droning monologue. Twenty-nine students swivelled their eyes towards Josiah. Freddy was pretty sure most of them had never before heard anyone outside a Harry Potter film say “Brilliant.”
“Mr.… Lachance?” said Mr. Dillon, the only teacher in the school who used surnames.
“I’ll kill her for registering me as Josiah Lachance.” Josiah sounded quite pleasant about it. “I said ‘Brilliant.’ I was approving of your curriculum.”
“Oh,” said Mr. Dillon, raising his eyebrows, “good.”
“It’s designed to teach us nothing of value,” said Josiah, ignoring the muttering and giggling that were beginning to fill out the space behind his words. “I’ve covered more interesting material while trapped in a cave for a year.”
Mr. Dillon was evidently startled enough that he forgot to drone. “Have you been trapped in a cave for a year?”
“Metaphorically speaking,” said Josiah. “Everything I say should be taken as metaphor ninety percent of the time. Have you thought of assigning a real novel? One with characters and a plot, not just profound messages about death?”
“Mr. Lachance,” said Mr. Dillon, “when we begin And the Dog in the Midnight Sun next semester, you’re free to express your opinion—”
“I’m expressing my opinion now,” explained Josiah. “I’ve read it. It’s earnest and uplifting, and it ends with a heart-wrenching scene designed to provoke tears in even the most jaded of readers. Are there any novels read in high school that aren’t written by people who have never learned the meaning of the word ‘subtle’?”
The background giggling was threatening to leach into the foreground. “Shutupshutupshutup,” Freddy hissed out of the corner of her mouth. She wouldn’t have bothered if she hadn’t been seen talking to him just before.
“Miss Duchamp,” said Mr. Dillon, “do you have something to say? Do you, too, have some objection to And the Dog in the Midnight Sun?”
Freddy opened her mouth to tell Mr. Dillon she had no objection to anything at all. “Are you going to ‘teach’ it by spending two weeks describing the plot?” she said.
The giggling stopped as if it had been switched off. Freddy put her head down on her desk. She had not said that. There was no possible way she had said that. Maybe Mel had been right about them being enchanted after all.