“You bring up an interesting point,” Mr. Larson said encouragingly. “Is Holden a reliable narrator?”

The bell rang before anyone could answer, and over Mr. Larson’s instructions to read the first two chapters of Into Thin Air, which we would discuss later in the week, everyone swept notebooks and pencils into their book bags before storming out in a rush of Steve Madden clogs and peach-fuzz-covered legs. I didn’t understand how everyone got out the door so quickly. It was the first time I noticed it, but once I did, I noticed it for the rest of my life: I was slow. What comes effortlessly to others doesn’t for me.

When I realized I was alone with Mr. Larson my cheeks blushed underneath the Cover Girl Mom said I needed and I assumed the other girls would be wearing. They weren’t.

“You’re joining us from St. Theresa’s, am I right?” Mr. Larson hunched over his desk, shuffled through some papers.

“Mt. St. Theresa’s.” I finally managed to zip my book bag.

Mr. Larson looked up from his desk, and the crease in his lip deepened. “Right. Well, the book report you did was very good. Very thorough.”

Even though I would lie in bed later, replaying this moment over and over until I gritted my teeth and clenched my fists to keep from spontaneously combusting, all I wanted to do was get out of there. I’ve never known the right thing to say, and my face probably looked like my Irish aunt’s when she has too much red wine and starts stroking my hair and telling me how much she wishes she had a daughter. “Thanks.”

Mr. Larson smiled and his eyes disappeared. “Happy to have you in my class.”

“Uh-huh, see you tomorrow!” I started to give a wave and changed my mind halfway through. I probably looked like I had some kind of Tourette’s tic. I’d learned about Tourette’s on a sick day, watching an episode of the Sally Jessy Raphael show.

Mr. Larson gave me a small wave back.

There was a broken desk a few steps outside of Mr. Larson’s classroom, and Arthur had his book bag propped up on it. He was rummaging around in there but looked up as I approached.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hi.”

“My glasses,” he said by way of explanation.

“Oh.” I slid my hands underneath the straps of my book bag and gripped tightly.

“Do you have lunch now?” he asked.

I nodded. But I’d planned on spending it in the library. I couldn’t imagine anything worse than that moment after paying for my food, looking around the room at the expanse of nameless faces and being forced to sit down where I wasn’t wanted because you weren’t allowed to bring food outside the cafeteria. There was so much to talk about on the first day of school, no one wanted to waste that precious gossip time by taking on the responsibility of making the new girl feel included. I got it, I would have been just as disinterested. I knew things would shift to the familiar eventually, that the curly redhead with soft blue veins in her forehead would become the girl with the highest IQ in class, who would apply early decision to Harvard and have the distinction of being the first Bradley student from the class of 2005 to be accepted. (Out of a class of seventy-one students, there would be nine overall. Main Line Magazine hadn’t determined Bradley an “exemplary” college preparatory option for nothing.) That the short, stocky soccer player with actual pecs would become the guy who had gotten a blow job from Lindsay “Biz” Hanes in his best friend’s basement last summer while his best friend watched. These faces and identities would eventually come together for me, and I would eventually become someone to everyone else too, with anecdotal lore to explain why I sat with who I sat with, why my allegiances resided where they did. But until then, I preferred to maintain my dignity by getting a head start on my Spanish homework in the library.

“I’ll walk with you,” Arthur offered.

He slung his lumpy backpack over one shoulder and led the way, his swollen, pale calves brushing against each other as he plodded down the stairs. I knew what it was like to have your body betray you—I was only fourteen and I already looked like a college student who needed to lose the freshman fifteen. Teenage boys were stupid though, and because I had relatively skinny arms and legs and a chest that looked pornographic in V-neck tees, they thought I had the perfect body. This despite the fact that underneath the clothes was a genetic mess that not even a prom dress–induced bout of anorexia could fix—a stomach that was rippled with fat, a belly button that winked like an Asian eye. It was the summer the tankini came into style, and never had I been more grateful for a piece of clothing in my life.

“Are you, like, in love with Mr. Larson like every other girl here?” Arthur grinned and pushed his glasses, which he’d found, higher on his shiny nose.

“My teachers were nuns before this. Can you blame me?”

“A Catholic girl,” Arthur said, solemnly. They didn’t get a whole lot of my kind around here. “Where?”

“Mt. St. Theresa Academy? I waited for his reaction, which I didn’t anticipate would be favorable. When his expression remained blank I added, “In Malvern?” Malvern was technically considered the start of the Main Line, but it was like the lowest tier of troops, shielding the generals and the captains in the cushy heart of the camp. The plebeians toeing its border prickled most storied Main Liners—Malvern wasn’t really a member of their dynasty.

Arthur made a face. “Malvern? That’s far. Is that where you live?”

And so started the years of explaining—no, I don’t actually live there. I live in Chester Springs, which is even farther out, crawling with commoners, and while there are beautiful old houses that would certainly be met with approval, I didn’t live in any of them.

“How far away is that?” Arthur asked after I finished my spiel.

“Like half an hour.” It was forty-five minutes, fifty some days, but this was another lie I learned to tell.

Arthur and I arrived at the entrance to the cafeteria and he gestured for me to go in first. “After you.”

I didn’t know who to be afraid of yet, so even though the cafeteria was packed and brimming with an energy that could have been interpreted as threatening, I was oblivious. I watched Arthur wave to someone and followed him when he said, “Come on.”

The cafeteria was the confluence where the old mansion and the new school met. The lunch tables were wood, a worn shade of espresso, chipped to reveal their sandy skeletons in places. The dark, matching floors ended at a large entryway, which opened up into a newly constructed atrium with skylights, terrazzo gleaming underfoot, and floor-to-ceiling windows that watched the quad, middle schoolers roaming the grass like cattle. The food was contained in a U-shaped room that welcomed students from the old mansion with a deli bar and spat you out into the new atrium, shortly past the bony arms of recovering anorexics reaching into the salad bar for broccoli and fat-free Italian dressing.

I followed Arthur, who stopped at a table by an antique fireplace. It looked like it hadn’t been used for years, but its soot-stained mouth suggested that the former inhabitants had appreciated it. Arthur dumped his book bag into a chair across from a girl with big brown eyes set so far apart they were practically in her sideburns. Kids called her the Shark behind her back, but her unusual eyes were actually her best feature and the thing her husband would eventually love the most about her. She was wearing bulky khakis and a white cotton sweater that gathered underneath her large breasts in a wrinkled pouch. She was flanked by another girl, chin in her hands, her long brown hair spilling over her shoulders and pooling on the table around her elbows. She was so pale I was shocked by her short skirt, that she would put her white legs on display so brazenly. Mom would have strapped me into a tanning bed before allowing me to go out with skin as blanched as that. It didn’t seem to be working against her, though. The guy next to her wore a soccer jersey that seemed mandatory next to his wholesome good looks, and his hand rested on a quadrant of her lower back that only a boyfriend would touch.