Chapter 5: Public School

I had not slept, because the match email had been opened six times, every time from the house where I grew up.

My first day at a public school started with forty phones pointed at my face.

The video had gone up overnight, shot from the laundromat doorway.

It showed a girl in a torn jacket telling a lawyer to search her trunks in the street, and a skinny boy in a dish towel saying she was his sister.

It had two million views.

"That's her," someone whispered by the lockers. "That's the Thornquist girl."

"She's not a Thornquist anymore, it said so in the comments."

"The lawyer looked so guilty."

I walked down the hall with my schedule in one hand and did not look at anybody.

I had been trained for this.

At the old academy I had learned to cross a ballroom while two hundred people decided what I was, and the trick was to want nothing from any of them.

A tall girl with a tight braid stepped in front of me at the stairs.

"You're in my homeroom," she said.

"I guess I am."

"I'm sorry about the video. I mean, I'm not sorry I watched it, everyone watched it." She frowned at herself. "I'm sorry your sister's a nightmare."

"She's not my sister," I said.

"Oh." She thought about it. "Then I'm sorry your almost-sister's a nightmare."

I laughed, which surprised both of us.

"Come on," she said. "Third row. The teacher loves anybody who doesn't talk."

I don't know why that was the first moment I felt safe.

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