In American Lit, Amelia Kindl asked to borrow my pen. She used my name, too. She leaned over from the desk next to mine and whispered, “Hey, Elise, could I borrow a pen?”

I said, “Sure,” and smiled at her, because I read in a psychology study that people like you more when you smile.

She said, “Thanks,” and smiled back. Then we both turned our attention to the teacher, so it’s not like that was the beginning of a lengthy and fulfilling conversation, but it was something. It was an acknowledgment that I existed. If I didn’t exist, why would I have pens?

I liked Amelia. I always had, ever since I first met her, in middle school. She was smart but not nerdy, artistic but not weird, and friendly to everyone. Amelia wasn’t popular in the Lizzie Reardon sense of the word, but she had a core group of girl friends, and I imagined them having slumber parties every weekend, making popcorn and doing craft projects and watching movies. I would like to be someone like Amelia.

After American Lit, I made the mistake of passing Lizzie Reardon in the hallway. Last year I knew Lizzie’s entire schedule and would follow incredibly byzantine routes, or hide in the bathroom until I was late to class, just to avoid her. This was a new year, with new schedules, so there was no accounting for Lizzie yet. She could be anywhere. Like in the hallway between American Lit and Chem.

I stared straight in front of me, using the ostrich approach: If you can’t see her, she can’t see you. But Lizzie is more wily than an ostrich.

“Elise!” She got directly in front of my face. I tried to ignore her, to keep walking. “Elise!” she called out again, in a singsongy way. “Don’t be rude. I’m talking to you.”

I stopped walking and stood very still. That’s the rabbit approach: If you don’t move, she can’t see you.

Lizzie looked me up and down and then up again, to stare directly into my eyes as she said, “Wow, you look like a ghost. Did you go outside once this entire summer?”

This was not, by any stretch of imagination, the worst thing Lizzie had ever said to me. By some stretches of the imagination, this was the kindest thing she had ever said to me.

But it cut me, the same way Lizzie always knew how to cut me. I realized now that for every moment I had spent inside, watching popular movies and reading celebrity gossip blogs, I should have been outside, tanning. For everything I had done, there was something just as important that I had never thought to do.

Aloud I said nothing, and in a fit of mercy or boredom, Lizzie left me to go on to class.

Soon it was lunchtime. Still no one had directly addressed me, other than Lizzie, and Amelia, that time she asked for a pen. Maybe my clothes were wrong. Maybe my haircut was wrong. Maybe my headband was wrong.

Or maybe, I reasoned, everyone was still getting caught up from their summers apart. Maybe no one was thinking about making new friends yet.

I went to the cafeteria, which is easily the worst place in the entire world. Like the rest of Glendale High, the cafeteria is dirty, loud, and low-ceilinged. It has almost no windows. Presumably this is because they don’t want you to be able to look outside and remember that there is a real world that isn’t always like this.

I walked into that cafeteria clutching my brown-bag lunch so tightly that my knuckles turned white. I faced a room filled with people who either hated me or didn’t know who I was. Those are the only two options. If you know me, then you hate me.

But I was not going to be intimidated. I was not going to give up. This was a new year, I was a new girl, and I was going to use the next thirty-five minutes to make new friends.

I saw Amelia sitting at the same table as last year. She was one of ten shiny-haired girls, all in sweaters and no makeup. One of them took photos for the Glendale High Herald. A couple of them were in the school a cappella group. Another one of them always got to sit out gym class because she had a note saying that she did yoga three evenings each week. I felt like if anyone in this room could be my group of friends, it would be them.

So I put one foot in front of the other and, step by step, approached Amelia’s table. I stood there for a moment, towering over the seated girls. I forced myself to speak, for one of the first times since leaving home that morning. My voice came out squeaky, like a wheel in need of grease. “Would it be okay if I sat here?” is what I said.

All the girls at the table stopped what they were doing—stopped talking, stopped chewing, stopped wiping up spilled Diet Coke. No one said anything for a long moment.

“Sure,” Amelia said finally. Had she waited an instant longer, I would have dropped my lunch and fled. Instead, she and four of her friends scooched down, and I sat on the end of the bench next to them.

So it’s that easy, then? I thought, staring around the table. It’s that easy to make friends?

Of course it’s not that easy, you idiot. Nothing is that easy for you.

The girls immediately returned to their conversation, ignoring me. “Lisa swore she’d never been there before,” one of them said.

“Well, she was lying,” said another. “She’d been there with me.”

“Then why would she say she hadn’t?” countered the first girl.

“Because she’s Lisa,” explained a third girl.

“Remember that time she told us she’d hooked up with her stepbrother at that party?” said one of the girls. “At, um…”

“At Casey’s graduation party,” supplied another.

“Wait, you mean she didn’t?” the first girl asked.

“No,” they all groaned.

And I hung on their every word, and I laughed a beat after they laughed, and I rolled my eyes just as soon as they rolled their eyes—but I realized that somehow I hadn’t prepared for this situation. In all my studies of celebrities and fashion and pop stars, it had never occurred to me that my potential friends might just be talking about people I didn’t know and things I hadn’t done. And I couldn’t research that. That was just their lives.

The weight of this truth settled onto me until I felt like I was suffocating from it. How do you suddenly make friends with people? It’s ridiculous. They have years and years of shared memories and experiences. You can’t drop into that midway through and expect to know what’s going on. They wouldn’t have been able to explain it all to me if they had tried. And they weren’t trying.

The girl sitting across from me picked a bean sprout out of her front teeth and said something that sounded like, “We sent rappers to the gallows on Friday.”

I giggled, then stopped when she pursed her lips and raised her eyebrows at me.

“Sorry,” I said. “You just said … I mean, what are the gallows?”

People also like you more when you ask questions about them, by the way. They like it when you smile, and when you ask them to talk about themselves.

“The Gallos Prize for the best student-made documentary film,” the girl explained.

“Oh, I see. Cool. And what’s rappers?”

“Wrappers,” she said. “It’s my film about people who go to mummy conventions.”

The sheer amount of things I didn’t know about these girls, that they were never going to tell me, was overwhelming. It was like the time my mom and I went to Spain on vacation and I’d thought I knew how to communicate in Spanish because I’d studied it in school for three years, but I didn’t know. I didn’t know at all.

But you can see, can’t you, how these are the sorts of girls I would want to be friends with? If that were at all possible? They did things like film documentaries about mummy conventions! I wanted to do that, too!

Well, not that, per se. I didn’t know anything about filmmaking, and the idea of mummy conventions was honestly a little creepy to me. But I wanted to do stuff like that.

I was so caught up in trying to follow the conversation, in trying to look like I belonged, that I didn’t even notice that the lunch period was nearly over until everyone at the table touched her finger to her nose.

“You,” said a girl in a bright flowered scarf, pointing at me.

“Yes?” I said, smiling at her. Remember, smiling makes people like you more.

She looked directly into my eyes, and I felt that same excitement as when Jordan and Chuck had asked me what music I was listening to. Like, Hey, she’s looking at me! She sees me!

When will I learn that this feeling of excitement is not ever a good sign? That no one ever sees me?

“You,” she said again. “Clean up.”

Then the first bell rang, and everyone at the table stood up, together, and walked away, together, leaving all their soda cans and plastic bags and gobs of egg salad littering the table.

I stayed seated as the cafeteria emptied around me. Amelia hovered for one moment, letting her friends get a head start. “We always do that,” she said to me, her eyebrows pulled together with a little bit of worry. “You know, the last one to put her finger on her nose has to clean up. That’s our rule. So, today that was you.”

Amelia smiled at me apologetically, and I guess that study was right, because her smile did make me like her more. I could have said, That’s a messed-up rule. Or I could have said, But I didn’t know. Or I could have said, Do you honestly always do that? Or did you just do that to me? Or I could have said, Why don’t you stay and help me?

I could have said anything, but instead I said, “Okay.”