"Very nice, Kelly," he said, even though it was obvious he hadn't listened to a word she'd been saying. "Anybody have questions for Kelly? Okay, great, next group - "

Then Mr. Walden blinked at me. "Um," he said, in a strange voice. "Yes?"

Since I hadn't raised my hand, or in any way indicated that I had anything to say, I was somewhat taken aback by this. Then a voice behind me said, "Um, I'm sorry, but that conclusion - that we, as a country, need to start building up our military arsenal in order to compete with the Chinese - sounds grossly ill conceived to me."

I turned around slowly in my chair to stare at Gina. She had a perfectly straight expression on her face. Still, I knew her:

She was bored. This was the kind of thing Gina did when she was bored.

Mr. Walden sat up eagerly in his chair and said, "It seems that Miss Simon's guest disagrees with the conclusion you all have come up with, Group Seven. How would you like to respond?"

"Ill conceived in what way?" Kelly demanded, not consulting with any of the other members of her group.

"Well, I just think the money you're talking about would be better spent on other things," Gina said, "besides making sure we have as many tanks as the Chinese. I mean, who cares if they have more tanks than we do? It's not like they're going to be able to drive them over to the White House and say, 'Okay, surrender now, capitalist pigs.' I mean, there's a pretty big ocean between us, right?"

Mr. Walden was practically clapping his hands with glee. "So how do you suggest the money be better spent, Miss Augustin?"

Gina shrugged. "Well, on education, of course."

"What good," Kelly wanted to know, "is an education, when you've got a tank bearing down on you?"

Adam, standing beside Kelly, rolled his eyes expressively. "Maybe," he ventured, "if we educate future generations better, they'd be able to avoid war altogether, through creative diplomacy and intelligent dialogue with their fellow man."

"Yeah," Gina said. "What he said."

"Excuse me, but are you all on crack?" Kelly wanted to know.

Mr. Walden threw a piece of chalk in Group Seven's direction. It hit their chart with a loud noise, and bounced off. This was not unusual behavior on Mr. Walden's part. He frequently threw chalk when he felt we were not paying proper attention, particularly after lunch when we were all somewhat dazed from having ingested too many corn dogs.

What was not usual, however, was Mike Meducci's reaction when the chalk hit the poster board he was holding. He let go of the chart with a yell, and ducked - actually ducked, with his hands up over his face - as if a Chinese tank was rolling toward him.

Mr. Walden did not notice this. He was still too enraged.

"Your assignment," he bellowed at Kelly, "was to make a persuasive argument. Demanding to know whether detractors of your position are on crack is not arguing persuasively."

"But seriously, Mr. Walden," Kelly said, "if they would just look at the chart, they'd see that the Chinese have way more tanks than we do, and all the education in the world isn't going to change that - "

It was at this point that Mr. Walden noticed Mike coming out of his defensive hunch.

"Meducci," he said flatly. "What's with you?"

Mr. Walden, I realized, did not know how Mike had spent his weekend. Maybe he didn't know about the comatose sister, either. How Cee Cee had managed to find out these things that even our teachers did not know was always a mystery to me.

"N-nothing," Mike stammered, looking pastier than ever. There was something weird about his expression, too. I couldn't put my finger on what, exactly, was wrong with it, but something more than just typical geek embarrassment. "S-sorry, Mr. W-Walden."

Scott Turner, one of Dopey's friends, seated a few desks away from me, muttered, "S-sorry, Mr. W-Walden," in a whispered falsetto, but still audibly enough for him to be heard by everyone in the room - especially by Michael, whose pale face actually got a little bit of color into it as the snickers reached him.

As vice president of the sophomore class, it is my duty to instill discipline in my fellow classmates during student council meetings. But I take my executive responsibilities quite seriously, and tend to correct the behavior of my more rambunctious peers whenever I feel it necessary to do so, not just during assemblies of the student council.

So I leaned over and hissed, "Hey, Scott."

Scott, still laughing at his own joke, looked over at me. And stopped laughing abruptly.

I'm not exactly sure what I was going to say - it was going to have something to do with Scott's last date with Kelly Prescott and a pair of tweezers - but Mr. Walden unfortunately beat me to it.

"Turner," he bellowed. "I want a thousand-word essay on the battle at Gettysburg on my desk in the morning. Group Eight, be prepared to give your report tomorrow. Class dismissed."

There is no bell system at the Mission Academy. We change classes on the hour, and are supposed to do so quietly. All of the classroom doors at the Mission Academy open into arched breeze-ways that look out into a beautiful courtyard containing all these really tall palm trees and this fountain and a statue of the Mission's founder, Junipero Serra. The Mission, being something like three hundred years old, attracts a lot of tourists, and the courtyard is the highlight of their tour, after the basilica.

The courtyard is actually one of my favorite places to sit and meditate about stuff like … oh, I don't know: how I've had the misfortune to be born a mediator, and not a normal girl, and why I can't seem to get Jesse to like me, you know, in that special way. The sound of the bubbling fountain, the chirping of the sparrows in the rafters of the breezeway, the buzz of hummingbird wings around the plate-sized hibiscus blossoms, the hushed chatter of the tourists - who feel the grandeur of the place, and lower their voices accordingly - all made the Mission courtyard a restful place to sit and ponder one's destiny.

It was also, however, a favorite place for novices to stand and wait for innocent students to slip up by talking too loudly between classes.

No novice has ever been created that could keep Gina quiet, however.

"Dude, that was so bogus," she complained loudly as we walked toward my locker. "What kind of conclusion was that? I am so sure the Chinese are going to come rolling over here in tanks and attack us. How are they going to get here, anyway? By way of Canada?"

I tried not to laugh, but it was hard. Gina was outraged.

"I know that girl is your class president," she went on, "but talk about dumb blondes...."

Cee Cee, who'd been walking beside us, growled, "Watch it." Not, as I'd thought, because, being an albino, Cee Cee is the blondest of blondes, but because a novice was staring daggers at us from the courtyard.

"Oh, good, it's you," Gina said when she noticed Cee Cee, completely missing her warning glance at the novice, and not lowering her voice a bit. "Simon, Cee Cee here says she's going to the mall after school."

"My mom's birthday," Cee Cee explained apologetically. She knows how I feel about malls. Gina, who'd always had something of a selective memory, had apparently forgotten. "Gotta get her some perfume or a book or something."

"What do you say?" Gina asked me. "You want to go with her? I've never been to a real California mall. I want to check it out."

"You know," I said as I worked the combination to my locker door, "the Gap sells the same old stuff all over the country."

"Hello," Gina said. "Who cares about the Gap? I'm talking about hotties."

"Oh." I got rid of my world civ book, and fished out my bio, which I had next. "Sorry. I forgot."

"That's the problem with you, Simon," Gina said, leaning against the locker next to mine. "You don't think enough about guys."

I slammed my locker door closed. "I think a lot about guys."

"No, you don't." Gina looked at Cee Cee. "Has she even been out with one since she got here?"

"Sure, she has," Cee Cee said. "Bryce Martinson."

"No," I said.

Cee Cee looked up at me. She was a little shorter than me. "What do you mean, no?"

"Bryce and I never actually went out," I explained, a little uncomfortably. "You remember, he broke his collar bone - "

"Oh, yeah," Cee Cee said. "In that freak accident with the crucifix. And then he transferred to another school."

Yeah, because that freak accident hadn't been an accident at all: the ghost of his dead girlfriend had dropped that crucifix on him, in a totally unfair effort to keep me from going out with him.

Which unfortunately had worked.

Then Cee Cee said, brightly, "But you definitely went out with Tad Beaumont. I saw you two together at the Coffee Clutch."

Gina, excited, asked, "Really? Simon went out with a guy? Describe."

Cee Cee frowned. "Gee," she said. "It didn't end up lasting very long, did it, Suze? There was some accident with his uncle, or something, and Tad had to go live with relatives in San Francisco."

Translation: After I'd stopped Tad's uncle, a psychotic serial killer, from murdering us both, Tad moved away with his father.

That's gratitude for you, huh?

"Gosh," Cee Cee said, thoughtfully. "Bad things seem to happen to the guys you go out with, huh, Suze?"

Suddenly feeling a little depressed, I said, "Not all of them," thinking of Jesse. Then I remembered that Jesse:

(a) was dead, so only I could see him - hardly good boyfriend material - and

(b) had never actually asked me out, so you couldn't exactly say we were dating.