Chloe in India Read Free Page B

Prisha Kapoor, of course. They were sitting right behind Dhruv, their heads huddled together. Now they were whispering. They peeked over Dhruv’s shoulder. Then they giggled.
    Alarm bells went off in my head.
    “Hey!” I said to Dhruv. “Hey, let me see!”
    I reached for Dhruv’s paper, but before I could grab it, he had twisted it out of my reach.
    “Hey, what did you do to me?”
    I grabbed again. This time I got one end of the paper. Dhruv was still holding tight to the other end. I pulled hard and Dhruv lost his grip. As the paper slipped out of his hands, he fell backward onto the floor.
    I looked down at the paper.
    I gasped.
    Oh my God.
    It was me. But I looked like some kind of nutso porcupine with beady eyes, buckteeth, and hair that stuck straight up from my forehead like a row of quills.
    It was my hair! Everyone hated my hair!
    Before I even knew what I was doing, I had crushed the paper into a ball, pulled the window open, and thrown the ball of paper as far as I could. It hit the roof of the jungle gym in the playground and then bounced down the slide, landing in the bowl of dirt at the bottom. A crow swooped down and pecked at it.
    “Mrs. Singh!” Dhruv shrieked from his spot on the floor. “Mrs. Singh!”
    —
    Sitting alone at my desk in the middle of the empty classroom, my back to the door, I could hear the shrieks of my classmates as they ran around outside during second break. I wasn’t even allowed to read. I was supposed to be thinking about what I had done.
    I nibbled at a hangnail on my pinkie. According to the clock on the wall, I had been sitting here for thirteen minutes. It felt like an hour at least. Maybe two.
    Whenever I get in trouble, my mom—remember, she’s an investigative journalist—tells me to “get to the source.” And so I tried to think backward.
I was in trouble because I threw Dhruv Gupta’s picture out the art room window.
    I threw Dhruv Gupta’s picture out the window because he had drawn my head all ugly.
    He drew my head all ugly because my mom had cut my hair.
    My mom cut my hair because I had colored it black.
    I colored it black because I wanted to look like the other girls at Premium Academy.
    I wanted to look like the other girls because I live in India and I go to Indian school.
    I live in India because my parents moved me here.
    So technically, this detention was my parents’ fault.
    My parents—they were the ones who had brought me to this hot school in this hot country where, even though I wore the same tan uniform and black shoes as everybody else, I stood out like a piece of peppermint in a bowl of licorice. It wasn’t fair. If only I had dark hair like Anna’s. If only I were neat like her. If only…
    I put my head down on my desk, resting my cheek on its sticky plastic surface. One tear slipped out of the corner of my eye and sat trapped there for a moment until it spilled over the bridge of my nose and across my cheek. I didn’t even bother to wipe it away.
    I closed my eyes. It wasn’t fair. I am a blond girl. I am an American girl. I shouldn’t even be here.
    The fan whirled above me, ruffling my porcupine hair. Suddenly, I felt very, very tired.
    —
    Before I even opened my eyes, I could already feel another person in the room. I sensed the weight of a gaze on my face.
    I opened my eyes.
    A girl was standing by the window, watching me.
    In my two months at Premium Academy, I had never seen this girl before. Even though she was in uniform like everyone else, I could tell there was something different about her. Maybe it was her hair, which was shiny and hung in thick black braids like ropes down both sides of her face. The braids were tied with big navy-blue bows at the ends, all the way down by her waist. Only the littlest girls at Premium Academy wore their hair like that.
    This girl seemed shorter than the other kids in Class Five, and skinnier, too. And there was something funny about her uniform. Her shoes were too big. They stuck