You shrug. “A little.”
“Try not to suplex anyone during vocabulary quizzes.”
A few kids laugh.
You actually smile.
By lunchtime, the social weather has fully changed. Nobody sits at your table uninvited, but nobody bothers you either. The cafeteria gives you a respectful radius, as if you might explode if someone reaches for your fries. It would be funny if it were not so lonely. Safety and isolation sometimes wear the same coat.
Then someone sets a tray down across from you.
Not cautiously. Not aggressively. Simply like she has every right to sit where she wants.
A Black girl with honey-brown skin, hoop earrings, and a denim jacket patched at the elbows gives you a level look. “I’m Tasha,” she says. “And before you ask, no, I’m not sitting here because you folded Brad like a lawn chair.”
You blink.
“Then why are you sitting here?”
She unwraps her straw with the kind of calm confidence you immediately respect. “Because anybody who tells Brad Thompson to reconsider his life choices on day one deserves better than eating alone.”
You laugh despite yourself.
“Emily.”
“I know.”
Of course she does.
Tasha turns out to be the kind of person who talks fast, observes faster, and misses almost nothing. Within eight minutes, you know which teachers assign unreasonable homework, which bathrooms to avoid, which cheerleaders are secretly cool, and which football players function mainly as decorative furniture with opinions.
Brad, according to Tasha, has run Lincoln High like a minor duke since sophomore year.
His dad owns a construction company that sponsors half the town’s charity golf events. His uncle sits on the school board. He dates whoever boosts his image and dumps them when they stop performing correctly. Nobody had really stopped him because most people found it easier to bend around him than collide with him.
“Until yesterday,” Tasha says, popping open a yogurt.
