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Reflexively and without thinking. Oh God.
    I feel a buzz in my pocket and check my phone under my desk.
    Dylan: Seed. How are your history notes?
    Me: I noted your departure.
    Dylan: It’s my signature move. Notes?
    Me: I take OCD notes. With footnotes. You still want them?
    Dylan: Afraid so. Maybe for more than today. I don’t think I’ll be there much.
    Me: That was pretty rank.
    Dylan: O the horror. I’ve got better things to do.
    Me: Who doesn’t?
    Dylan: Remain seated. Resist impulse to flee. Take good notes.
    When I’m anywhere near him, even by electronic proxy, even when my texting fingers are hovering three quarters of an inch over his words, I have to resist any number of impulses. Fleeing is not one of them.

C HAPTER S EVEN
    IT WOULD MAKE LIFE A lot easier if I were the kind of bad seed with a hard, protective shell and thorns that leave splinters if you try to crush them in your hand. The kind Chelsea wouldn’t mess with.
    But in the absence of a shell, there’s Siobhan.
    “We should burn her at the stake,” Siobhan says.
    We’re reading Saint Joan in English class, and Ms. Erskine insists that what happened to Joan (hint: she pissed off all the important men in France and then they burned her at the stake) is the perfect metaphor for the fate of women in the cruel, cruel modern world. Discuss.
    A large number of boys grab hall passes and don’t come back. Dylan is out of there in five.
    And every time I speak, Chelsea mimes an imitation of me with the added touches of protruding tongue and hands clenched like two claws in rigor mortis.
    Kimmy, the horsiest of horse girls, mouths, “Stop it, Chels,” but Chelsea doesn’t stop.
    I try to gut it out, but I choke on my words. What I was trying to say about the Bishop of Beauvais is lodged in the back of my throat, like a mouthful of gristle.
    “My horse has more interesting things to say,” Chelsea mutters after class, falling into her little brigade with Mel Burke and Lia Graham.
    Siobhan keeps saying that it’s going to get better, but I don’t believe her.
    For me, better is when Sib and I are alone together somewhere else. When we’re sitting in the screening room at her house, semi-watching a French film Paris Match said was stupendous, which I guess it is, if you like attractive naked people who can’t act.
    Siobhan is trying to get her laptop to Skype-connect with William, her best friend on all continents except North America, where I am the reigning best friend. She can see him, but there is no sound.
    Whenever I look away from Siobhan’s laptop to the movie screen that spans the front of the room, I get an eyeful of full frontal nudity.
    Siobhan says, “You need a drink, right?”
    I say, “Thanks. I’m fine.”
    “Oh Jesus, don’t go all American on me. Montreal is practically France. Say you haven’t been guzzling wine with dinner since you were eight.”
    All right, I have, liberally cut with water, but I am unprepared for high-octane vodka in orange juice.
    “Better, right? Wait!” She lunges for her laptop, which has started to make dial tone noises. “William! Where the fuck are you?”
    Siobhan and William are bound by years of little-kid pacts. It is difficult to reconcile her stories of their childhood—jumping into fountains in Milan, riding scooters down staircases at his country house in Umbria—with chain-smoking, insomniac William, who is always up no matter what time it is in Switzerland. His boarding-school buddies, half passed-out, dispense crude comments in three languages in the background.
    Siobhan and William have pacts from when they were twelve to get married at thirty and become gamekeepers in Africa, pacts filled with adventure and secrecy and a long-remembered rush that will keep them friends forever.
    “A gamekeeper?” I say when she tells me about it.
    Siobhan says, “It’s a pact. We’re stuck with it.”
    Then, over the din of the grunting French actors, Siobhan screams, “Fuck this