This Song Is (Not) for You Read Online Free Page B

like a mess, and I loved it.
    When I walked into my first class that morning, Emmalyn gasped out loud and squeaked, “Oh my God, what happened to you?”
    So I rolled my eyes and said, “Obviously nothing that I didn’t want to happen. I’m not a sheeple like you.” Everybody laughed, and Tony Smith went, “Baaaa.”
    From then on, everything I did was subject to Emmalyn Evans’s disdain. And it wasn’t just about my hair. If I answered a teacher’s question wrong, she snickered. If we played dodgeball in gym, she targeted me. The first time I was called to the principal’s office for wearing Sam’s tie, Emmalyn said in a loud whisper, “She’s always trying to get attention, isn’t she?”
    Over the past four years, I’ve continued to cut, braid, grow out, and shave different sections of my hair however I’ve pleased.
    Every semester I have had at least three classes with Emmalyn. I had this dumb hope that maybe this year I would see a little less of her, but apparently the universe needs us working against each other to keep its balance, because for senior year, Emmalyn Evans is in my homeroom.
    On the first day of school, when she walked in the room and saw me, she sighed in this resigned way, as if I followed her there or something. I was tapping a five-four beat on my desk with my index fingers. I knew from previous years that my desk drumming annoys her, or at least she likes to pretend it annoys her. Here’s the thing: she always sits near me. Not right by me, but near me. I guess so that I can overhear all her snide comments and smug giggles.
    I wanted Emmalyn to know that if she was gonna pull that move in homeroom, then she was gonna have to deal with me tapping out beats and fills every morning, so I played louder. Emmalyn sat down in the row next to me, two desks ahead, even though there were plenty of empty seats farther away.
    It’s like she wanted me to get on her nerves.
    I tapped louder on the desk. Em-Uh-Lin EV-ans.
    She sighed loudly again. As she flipped her hair over her shoulder, she turned to give me a quick glare. I rolled my eyes.
    Emmalyn Evans, she’s such a bore. Emmalyn Evans, she’s always sore.
    One more school year and I’m done with this place.
    • • •
    It was important to Dad that I attended Saint Joe’s. He’s been teaching here for almost thirty years. He’s old. Like, actually old, not regular-parents old. He was fifty when I was born. My mother was forty. They thought that they couldn’t have kids.
    Anyway, being a single parent with a teacher’s salary and all, Dad was really proud that I’d at least get the best possible education. Saint Joseph’s Preparatory is a little bit famous, and a lot of the graduates go on to Ivy League universities. So, yeah, I know I’m lucky that I get to go to school tuition free, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a cost.
    My classmates think that having certain names on the soles of their shoes is a personal achievement for which they should be admired. As if they have these shoes not because of their parents’ money, but because they earned them by being intrinsically better beings.
    Consequently, most of the conversations that I overhear in the girl’s bathroom exasperate me. Someone’s new lake house being in the wrong neighborhood is what passes for juicy gossip around here. A scandal is when a purse turns out to be a knockoff.
    Thank God for Sam. He’s so different from all of them that it’s like he’s from another planet. While I find our classmates insufferably annoying, Sam finds them utterly baffling.
    Thankfully, Sam and I have the same lunch period and we were able to snag a picnic table in the courtyard to sit at. Well, Sam is sitting at it, and I’m sitting on it, next to his sandwich.
    “In bio, I was in a group lab with Kaylie Rushton and Pam Jones, and instead of helping me with the microscope, they recited for each other the outfits they wore to every party all summer. Why?”
    “Why what?”