Wrong About the Guy(80)

“EMDs?” I repeated.

“Early morning detentions. You have to come in at, like, seven in the morning and help clean up and stuff like that. Sucks.”

“What’s your name?” I asked, dodging a group of girls in cheerleader outfits.

“Gifford.” Really? Gifford? “And that was Chelsea you hit with the door. You really should be more careful.”

“I’m Elise,” I said, even though she hadn’t asked. “You guys in eleventh grade, too?”

“Yeah. So you’re new, huh? Where’re you from?”

“Amherst, Mass.”

She actually showed some interest. “That near Harvard?”

“No. But Amherst College is there. And UMass.”

She dismissed that with an uninterested wave. “You get snow there?”

“It’s Massachusetts,” I said. “Of course we do. Did.”

“So do you ski?”

“Not much.” My parents didn’t, and the one time they tried to take us it was so expensive that they never repeated the experiment.

“We go to Park City every Christmas break,” Gifford said. “But this year my mother thought maybe we should try Vail. Or maybe Austria. Just for a change, you know?”

I didn’t know. But I nodded like I did.

“You see the same people at Park City every year,” she said. “I get sick of it. It’s like Maui at Christmas, you know?”

I wished she’d stop saying “You know?”

Fortunately, we had reached room 23. “In here,” said Gifford. She opened the door and went in, successfully communicating that her mentoring ended at the room’s threshold.


Over the course of the next four hours, I discovered that:


1. Classes at Coral Tree Prep were really small. When we got to English, I was worried that half the class would get EMDs or whatever they were called because there were fewer than a dozen kids in the room. But when Ms. Phillips came in, she said, “Good—everyone’s here, let’s get started,” and I realized that was the class.


2. The campus grounds were unbelievably green and seemed to stretch on for acres. I kept gazing out the window, wishing I could escape and go rolling down the grassy hills that lined the fields.


3. Teachers at Coral Tree Prep didn’t like you to stare out the window and would tell you so in front of the entire class who would then all turn and stare at The New Girl Who Wasn’t Paying Attention.


4. Everyone at Coral Tree Prep was good-looking. Really. Everyone. I didn’t see a single fat or ugly kid all morning. Maybe they just locked them up at registration and didn’t let them out again until graduation.


5. Girls here wore every kind of footwear imaginable, from flip-flops to spike-heeled mules to UGG boots (despite the sunny, 80-degree weather), EXCEPT for sneakers. I guess those marked you as fashion-impaired.


6. I was wearing sneakers.