“That’s it?” she asked.

“I’m not really hungry.” I never was in the mornings; my appetite usually slept in until noon.

“I can’t sign off on this,” she said, as though I should have known better. “If you’re too unwell to eat a full meal, you talk to the hall nurse before breakfast.”

Too unwell. God, how embarrassing.

“It’s my first day,” I said desperately. “I didn’t know.”

I glanced behind me, uncomfortably aware that I was holding up the line. Way to make an impression. I hadn’t known it was possible to fail breakfast.

Actually, I should have known. Grant should have told me.

“You can go back through for some protein. Or you can take a strike.”

She glared at me, all pursed lips and leathery-tanned skin, waiting.

The thought of slinking to the back of the line, with everyone watching, filled me with a sense of horror. She couldn’t mean it. But apparently, she did.

“Well?” the nutritionist asked.

I wished I were the sort of guy who’d take a strike, whatever that meant, just to prove that I didn’t have to play by the system. But I wasn’t. At least, not yet. I was a head-down-and-grades-up sort of guy. When the warning bell rang, I hustled. When Scantron tests were given, I brought a spare No. 2 pencil. And so, with everyone watching, I took a deep breath and went to the back of the line.

“THAT WAS BRUTAL,” the boy in front of me said. He was my age, a pudgy Indian kid with a pair of old-fashioned glasses and a mess of black hair. Even at eight a.m., he was all nervous energy. “Not many people can say they’ve flunked breakfast on their first day.”

“I didn’t do the homework,” I said. “I had too much on my plate.”

He grinned, picking up on the pun.

“Or apparently, not enough,” he said. “I’m Nikhil. Everyone calls me Nick.”

“I’m Lane.”

“So, Lane,” he said. “Here’s a crash course on meals: You take a dish from each station. You don’t have to eat it all. Hell, you could sculpt the Colosseum out of eggs and toast, but you take full plates and bring back empty ones.”

“Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of having a nutritionist?” I asked.

“Precisely. Which is where the plan comes in.”

“We have a plan?”

“We do indeed. Because lovely old Linda up there told you to go back for more, but she didn’t tell you how much more.”

I saw where he was going with this immediately.

“Oh no,” I said. “I’m not really—”

“You’re looking pretty hungry there, Lane.” Nick grinned hugely as he slung a plate of scrambled eggs onto my tray. Before I could protest, he’d topped the scrambled eggs with hard-boiled ones.

I looked down at my tray. The damage was done. I’d been egged. And so, with Nick egging me on, I added a stack of toast.

“Perfect,” he said. “Now how about a muffin?”

He reached into the case and held up an entire platter, offering it to me with a flourish.

“How about two?” I said.

We were halfway to the front when the line stopped moving again.

“You can’t be serious,” the nutritionist said.

Everyone craned forward to see what was going on. It was a girl. She was small and blond, with a messy ponytail. On her tray was a single mug of tea.

“So give me a strike,” the girl said. It sounded like a challenge.

“Go back through.”

“You and I both know there isn’t enough time for that,” the girl said.

It was true. There were maybe twenty minutes before we had to head to class.

“My tea’s getting cold, so if you don’t mind?” said the girl.

She held out her wrist with the black silicone bracelet, daring the nutritionist to scan it. The dining hall was silent. We were all watching to see what Linda would do.

And then she scanned the girl through, typing furiously into the computer bank.

“Strike two this month, Sadie,” she warned.

“Ooh. After my third strike, do I get out?” the girl asked, laughing.

She exited the line in triumph, the mug of tea in front of her like a trophy. As she walked toward the tables, I saw her full-on for the first time. She was a miraculous, early-morning kind of pretty, with a ponytail she’d probably slept in and a sweater slipping off one shoulder. Her lips were painted red, and her mouth quirked up at the corner, and she looked like the last girl you’d expect to start trouble in the cafeteria on a Monday morning.

But that wasn’t why I was staring. There was something oddly familiar about her. I had the unshakable impression that I’d seen her somewhere before, that we’d already met. And then I realized we had. At Camp Griffith, four years ago. That awful place in Los Padres my parents had shipped me off to when I was younger, so they could go on vacation without me.

“Well, that’s the other way to handle it,” Nick said, interrupting my train of thought.

Belatedly, I realized he was talking about Sadie.

“Won’t she get in trouble?” I asked.

“Of course.” Nick snorted. “But Sadie only gets in trouble when she wants to.”

I didn’t know what he meant, and I was about to ask, but we’d reached the front of the line.

“Hey there, Linda. Made you a Picasso this morning.” Nick smirked, presenting the nutritionist with his tray, upon which he’d arranged his tofu sausage, eggs, and English muffin into the unmistakable shape of a penis.

I was scanned through with equal disgust, and was about to follow Nick over to his group of friends, when he gave me a chin nod and said, “You probably want to catch up with your tour guide and kick his ass for not warning you about the food stations, huh?”

“Something like that,” I mumbled.

“Well, I’ll see you around.”

Before I could answer, he was gone.

I stood there alone, trying not to despair as my unwanted breakfast slid around on my tray. It was too dark inside the dining hall, the paneled wood and brass chandeliers swallowing all sense of time. The tables were small, round things. Six seats each, like some disastrous King Arthur’s court. I thought longingly of Harbor High, with its palm trees and plastic-wrapped sandwiches, where my group and I hung out in the little courtyard behind the science labs.

We were the marginally acceptable AP crowd. Liked enough to hold officer positions in the Model United Nations Club, but not on the radar for something like student council. Most days, my girlfriend and I would check homework answers, or study for next period, and we’d pass a can of Coke back and forth while we ate our sandwiches. It wasn’t the kind of group where we hung out at each other’s houses, but I’d never once doubted that I had a place to sit.

I watched as Nick joined Sadie’s table, striking a pose with his breakfast art that made everyone laugh. I understood then that he hadn’t made the plate of, uh, junk food to piss off the nutritionist. He’d made it to amuse his friends. There were still two seats left, but Nick hadn’t invited me to join him, and anyway, they probably belonged to people who were still in line.

I hoped that my missing tour guide would see me standing there and wave me over to his table with a sheepish apology, but no such luck. The 2.5 breakfasts on my tray were starting to get heavy, and I had to put the thing down somewhere. So I took a deep breath and walked to the back of the dining hall like I knew where I was going.

I SAT DOWN randomly, at a table with four empty seats and two boys intensely playing a game of travel chess, who seemed to be off in their own world. I sighed and poured my milk into my cereal, dumping in the whole carton instead of trying to get the proportions right. The Cheerios floated to the top, bobbing like empty life rafts.

“Hi, I’m Genevieve. Are you new?” a girl asked, taking the seat next to mine. Her smile was friendly, but there was something about the combination of freckles and ponytail and teeth that made me certain she had a dozen horse-riding ribbons pinned over her desk.