The bell rang. The other students went from bored stiff to energized as they poured out of the sticky, humid classroom. Mr. Steuben was still talking when the last bodies ambled out the door. The last besides Virgo and her interloper.

"Come on already, we're gonna be late for Bio."

Virgo didn't have to check her schedule to remember Biology was her first class of the day.

"How'd you know I had Bio first?"

She waved a rumpled piece of card stock in front of Virgo's face. It was her schedule, the exact same copy she'd had shoved in the pocket of her hoodie, right down to the smear of strawberry jam on the back.

She snatched it back, snarling, "What the fuck? Why do you have that?" She patted at her pockets and bag. "How'd you even get that?"

"You should keep stuff in your pockets you don't want people to take. Welcome to school. You've got a lot to learn."

"You are so weird."

Girl inspected her glittery fingernails like they were more interesting than Virgo wigging out over an invasion of privacy. She had no idea what somebody would have done to her in juvie if she'd done that to one of the ones who showed no remorse. There wouldn't be enough hair and fingernails left to make a voodoo doll to mail back to her family.

"Don't ever touch me again."

Girl narrowed her olive green eyes. "I didn't have to touch you to wind you up. Simmer down...Valerie, was it?" She looked Virgo up and down. "You don't really look like a Valerie."

"You look like a Jane Doe. Try me and we can find out."

"Touchy much?" She turned to leave. "Hurry up. Mr. Steuben has English class in..." She checked a silver watch dangling from wrist. It was made of interlocking chains that tinkled under the weight of charms. "Right, 90 seconds. Bye now."

Mr. Steuben had ignored them the entire time. He was too busy writing on the dry-erase board in green ink: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

Please don't let me be stuck in his class for the rest of the semester, she prayed offhandedly to a god she hardly believed in. She was tired of reading about angsty white dudes and the angstier white dudes that loved them. Give her N.K. Jemisin any day. Please. Or Amy Tan or Isabel Allende. Let her have something to hold onto that didn't feel like painting herself in invisible ink and being content with the nothing reflected in the mirror. Virgo loathed institutional everything; they were all their own little fiefdoms, smothered in a hive mind mentality under the guise of the universally acceptable word, 'standards.'

Virgo hated standards.

Girl, who needed to offer a name before Virgo tried her hand at picking her purse to find her school ID, led her up to the third level of the main building. She weaved through the milling students to a classroom a third of the way down the hall. She went right in, didn't even hold the door open for Virgo. Not that Virgo needed to have the door held open for her. She was just used to that. People handling her things because she wasn't allowed to touch them. Opening doors because her hands were in cuffs. Sometimes she still found herself pausing waiting for a buzzer to sound before a door unlocked and was shocked when it didn't. Taking a girl out of prison didn't take the prison mentality out of the girl.

She entered to find the class full of the overwrought and the underprepared. Lab books were flipped from end to end, people were mumbling into the binding like they'd forgotten there was going to be a quiz today. Virgo didn't even have a book yet. She wasn't supposed to pick them up till lunchtime, but not having anything left her feeling naked. Being out of the loop was asking to be blindsided in the yard.

Girl had sat herself down at a full lab table with three other students and they were chatting like old friends. Virgo sat down in the first chair she reached, the last empty seat at a pentagon-shaped table closest to the door. The lab sinks and computer monitors mounded on the platform in the middle blocked her view of the rest of the class and theirs of her. She liked it that way.

The teacher was the last to arrive, a ruffled woman going by Adrienne Ledbetter. Former NIH researcher turned high school bio teacher for reasons unknown. Serious downgrade. She made the students nervous, Virgo read it in the air. Homeroom had been nodding off and shuffling feet to fill the time. The students in Ledbetter's bio lab watched her the way spectators locked in aquarium watched a shark in a cracked tank.

Mrs. Ledbetter put her things down behind her desk. She'd come bearing a tote, a backpack, and what had to be a baby gear bag. No baby, though. Don't baby bags usually stay with the baby?

"I hope you aren't wasting the last minutes of your academic life staring at me. You have a quiz in three minutes and the answers aren't written on my face. Get started."

Virgo thought she'd better introduce herself, again. It was getting old. She threw her hand up. Juvie taught her a lot about strategic shows of respect. Disrespect to the dicks in charge could net you a reputation among the inmates, but it'd make life harder than it had to be in the long run. A surplus of ass-kissing upstairs would get your head shaved and glass in your Crocs. But this wasn't juvie. You raised your hand or you were a problem. Virgo wasn't anybody's problem anymore.

Ledbetter rounded the desk to the far side where Virgo was fighting her natural inclination to slump. "Yes?"

"I'm V-Val. I'm new here. I just started today."

"You're late."

"Yeah." She couldn't explain the delay in her release that had put her transfer of custody behind and so postponed her arrival in Las Vegas. She was basically living out of a secondhand duffel bag in her foster parents' attic right now. She hadn't had time to unpack. Not that she had anyplace to put her handful of belongings anyway.

"Fine. You'll make up the work at the end of the semester. We'll talk about it after class. I'll get you a copy of the syllabus and we can go over my expectation for your performance while they finish their quiz. I assume you can keep yourself occupied for twenty minutes."

"Uh, yeah."

"Do that." Mrs. Ledbetter clapped to get everyone's attention. The smell of flop sweat was overwhelming. "That's your three minutes, duckies." Her accent smudged from flat, non-descript American to some kind of English, like she'd been away from home a long time. "Put your books into your cabinets snug as a bug and, yes, I will be checking." She retrieved a stack of papers from her desk and began to distribute them. "Per tradition, quizzes are completed by hand on paper. Exams are handled electronically. Put your mobile phones away now as I will also be checking for them. If I see so much as suspicious reflection on the ceiling I'm throwing out the quizzes and everybody gets a big, fat naught." There was a collective gulp. "You'll be able to spot the guilty party by the tear-stained face, I suspect. I'm a heartless wench immune to your gross sobbing so don't waste your time or mine. Very valuable, that."

She returned to the front of the classroom. "All right, ducklings. Begin! Don't forget to write your name up top, I won't bother to guess. Val, with me."

Virgo was going to find her terrifying as the rest of them did, she could feel cold perspiration beading under her arms. It was always the ones with the accents who made the best villains in a girl's story.

Just don't mistake the ones who sound like you for friends.