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the soda-mucous that flew out into my pocket. So, I would be his first girlfriend.
    She got up to leave. “Coming to Bio, Belle?”
    “Duh, Lululu,” I said.
    “Lucy. My name is Lucy—As in
I Love Lucy.”
    “All right. Lucy—As in
I Love Edwart.”
Maybe I’m special, but I’ve always had a knack for remembering mnemonics. “Trash to the left,” I bellowed, throwing out my leftovers—a
half
-eaten cake. I looked back at Edwart to see if he had noticed that I, too, am a disciplined eater. But strangely, he was gone. In the ten minutes since I had last looked at him, he had vanished into thin air.
    I turned around just in time to see that I’d missed the trashcan by a lot, and my
half
-eaten cake was flying towardss the back of a girl sitting at a nearby table.
    “HEY!” she said, as the cake made impact. “Who did that?”
    “Let’s go,” I said to Lucy, grabbing her arm and running out of the cafeteria as the food fight began.
    When Lucy and I got to class she went to sit with her lab partner and I looked around for an empty seat. There were two left: one near the front of the room and one next to Edwart. Since the front chair had a wobbly leg after I walked past and kicked it in, there was no choice. I had to sit next to the hottest boy in the room.
    I walked towards the seat, circling my hips and raising my eyebrows rhythmically like an attractive person. Suddenly I was falling forwards, sliding down the aisle from the momentous force of my plunge. Luckily, a computer wire wrapped around my ankle and stopped me from slamming into Mr. Franklin’s desk. I quickly pulled it from the wall to untangle myself, stood up, and looked around casually to see if anyone had seen. The whole class was looking at me, but probably for a different reason—I had a hologram patch on my backpack. From one angle it was an eggplant, from another it was an aubergine.
    Edwart was looking at me, too. Maybe it was the fluorescent lighting, but his eyes seemed darker—soulless. He was seething furiously. His computer was open in front of him, and the synthesized melody from before had ceased. He raised his fist at me in anger.
    I wiped the chemical dust off my clothes and sat down. Without looking at Edwart, I pulled out my textbook and notepad. Then, without looking at Edwart, I looked at the board and wrote down the terms Mr. Franklin had written. Idon’t think other people in my situation could do quite so many things without looking at Edwart.
    Facing straight ahead, I let my eyes sort of slide to the side and study him peripherally, which doesn’t count as looking. He had moved his computer to his lap and resumed playing his game. We were sitting side by side at the lab counter, yet he hadn’t started a conversation with me. It was as though I hadn’t applied deodorant or something when in reality I had applied deodorant, perfume, and Febreze. Was my lip gloss smudged or something? I took out my compact mirror to check. Nope, but I did have a few developing pimples up by the hairline. I picked up a pencil on Edwart’s desk and pressed it against the soft, supple flesh of my face. They were the projectile kind. Satisfaction attained.
    I turned to thank him kindly for the use of his pencil, but he was looking at me in horror, his mouth agape, an open invitation to all sorts of airborne organisms like birds. He grabbed the pencil and started wiping his hands with baby-wipes and rubbing the pencil with Purell. Then he drew a circle around himself in chalk and returned to copying notes from the board, singing this jingle amiably to himself:
    “Germs contagious. Contagion alert. But Edwart and Purell are stronger than dirt.”
    I reached out to borrow the pencil again for my notes, but the moment my hand breached the chalk line he screamed. It was an unnaturally high pitch for a boy. The right pitch for a superhero, though.
    Mr. Franklin was talking about flow cytometry, immunorecipitation and DNA microarrays, but I already