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  I felt a hand on my back and heard a voice say, “Are you all right?”

  I whirled around. It wasn’t Shannon behind me. It was the girl in the head scarf.

  We stared at each other for a moment, and then she said, “I think I scared the coughing away.”

  She had a faint accent, but I couldn’t place it, and I wasn’t about to ask where she was from. But it would be weird if I didn’t say anything, so I agreed. “You cured me! Thanks, um—”

  “Jala,” she said, vaguely pointing at herself, as if she thought I might need that to understand.

  “Becca,” I said, making the same gesture.

  She didn’t seem to know what to say after that. I was stricken by a fear that she would settle on the same question Shannon had chosen—“Where are you from?”—and I didn’t have a safe answer yet.

  Head off a question with another question, I told myself, and so I blurted out the first one that came to my mind: “Does it help? The head scarf, I mean?”

  Something in her expression closed down, and I remembered she was a new kid too. She probably didn’t know anybody at Deskins High School, either.

  “It’s called a hijab,” she said flatly. For a minute I thought that was all she was going to say, but then she went on, “Do you mean, does it make people stare more than they would otherwise? Does it make them say mean things, and act like they think I can’t hear them through the cloth?”

  I was suddenly frantic at how completely she’d misunderstood.

  “No, I mean, does it help you remember who you are—who you’re supposed to be, what you believe—even though you’re in a strange place, among strangers?” I asked.

  She tilted her head, considering this seriously.

  “It should,” she conceded. “The fact that it doesn’t—that’s probably my fault. I shouldn’t worry so much about everyone staring. But at my old school back in Michigan, there were a lot more Muslims. I’m not used to being the only one in a classroom.”

  Jala was just from Michigan? Her accent was just Michigan-ish—Michiganian? Michigander? I guess it sounded exotic to me because I was used to the way people talked in the South.

  Jala didn’t seem angry at me anymore, but I wasn’t going to let talking about her old school lead to questions about my old school. I saw that she had a piece of paper in her hand labeled “Class Schedule Requests.”

  “What are you signing up for?” I asked.

  Jala handed me her paper. I could tell she was a freshman like me because she’d listed Phys Ed I. Other than that, all her classes started with the words “honors” or “advanced.”

  If Daddy hadn’t been arrested and convicted and sent to prison, and Mom and I hadn’t run away, I would have moved naturally from McCormick Middle School to Belpre High School without so much as a hiccup in my life. I would have hung out with people like Shannon, not like Jala, and not just because there probably wasn’t a single Muslim at Belpre High. I would have chosen my friends based on who was popular and good-looking, and whether they could make me seem popular and look good too. I would have picked my classes based on what I could glide through with the least effort, so I had time for hours of texting and exchanging gossip on Facebook and planning parties and hanging out.

  But I couldn’t be around people who lived for gossip anymore, because, if I wasn’t careful, the gossip at Deskins High School would be about me. I needed to be around people who were quiet and trustworthy and kind—and maybe studying too hard to care about gossip or nosy questions. And if the Jalas of Deskins High School were all in the advanced and honors classes, then those were the classes I would take too.

  I handed Jala’s class schedule request sheet back to her.

  “That’s almost exactly what I’m signing up for,” I said. “Except for that one.”

  I pointed to the last course title she’d filled in: Honors Computer Programming I.

  “You don’t like computers?” Jala asked.

  “No, not at all,” I said, shaking my head for emphasis. “I hate everything about them. I’m horrible with computers.”

  And that was the first lie I told at Deskins High School.

  Between Then and Now

  I became a normal kid again, with a normal life.

  Well, sort of. As much as possible. As long as nobody looked too close.

  And believe me, I didn’t let anybody look too close.

  Now—

  Three Years Later The Beginning of Senior Year

  I slip into an aisle seat in the school auditorium. Three rows behind me, Jason Sprunger and Martin Lee are pounding their fists on the seat backs and chanting, “Sen-iors! Sen-iors! Sen-iors!” Three rows ahead of me Shannon Daily—the redheaded girl I met at new student orientation and have barely spoken to since—is holding court with her usual crowd, the self-proclaimed “popular girls.” Pretty much everyone else refers to them as the mean girls, but they’re mostly just cannibalistic, constantly fighting among themselves about who’s queen bee and who’s second tier and who’s kicked out of the group. They consider the rest of us beneath their notice, which is fine with me.

  “You know, my mother was homecoming queen at her high school, and my grandmother was homecoming queen at her school, so it’s almost like a family tradition,” Shannon is saying, a little too loudly. “I wouldn’t want to let them down.”

  I bend my head down so I can roll my eyes without anyone seeing. Poor Shannon is so good at clawing her way to the top of the mean-girl clique, but she’s totally inept at staying there. The power always goes to her head. She’ll probably be out as queen bee by the end of this assembly. Maybe temporarily out of the group entirely. Sometimes I’ve considered sidling up to her and giving advice—as a secret power behind the throne, perhaps—but I don’t want to make myself a target of the other mean girls. A few would be devious enough to find out the secrets in my past—and evil enough to use them against me. Helping Shannon isn’t worth the risk.

  “Borderline personality disorder,” my friend Rosa Alvarez mutters beside me.

  “Are you diagnosing Shannon or just doing your AP psych homework?” I ask.

  Rosa grins at me from beneath her unfashionably heavy bangs.

  “Both,” she says. “This is going to be a tough year. I’m all about the multitasking.”

  Rosa is the only one of my friends who will join me in keeping track of the machinations of the in crowd. She says it reminds her of the telenovelas she watched back home in Mexico. Since Mom sold our TV the first winter we spent in Deskins, I’m similarly starved for entertainment.

  But I wouldn’t want to be in the middle of all that drama, I tell myself. Who needs it? Even if it weren’t for Daddy, I’d be happier flying under the radar.

  I’ve taken to automatically labeling many of my thoughts “truth” or “lie,” and I’m not sure about that one.

  “People, people, quiet down,” our principal, Mr. Gordon, says from the stage. “You don’t want to disturb the underclassmen, do you?”

  The “Sen-iors! Sen-iors!” chant behind me dissolves into sarcastic comebacks: “Why not?” and “Who cares?” and “We’re seniors! We can disturb anyone we want!”

  “Jala had the right idea graduating early, if this is how everyone’s going to act all year long,” Rosa mutters beside me.

  I nod distractedly. I’ve learned it isn’t wise to dwell on who or what you’ve lost, and Jala is the closest thing I had to a best friend for the past three years. That’s weird to say when neither one of us has even been to the other person’s home—Jala has six younger brothers and sisters who make her house, as she put it, “chaos to the nth degree,” and I’ve always used the excuse that my mother worked nights and I didn’t want to bother her when she was sleeping during the day. But Jala was a good school friend, and school doesn’t seem right without her.

  Really, all I have now are school friends: the kind of people you partner with in chemistry lab or sit with at lunch or shoot the breeze with walking
to class. I don’t have the kind of friends you’d tell deep, dark secrets to.

  In the past three years I haven’t told a single soul about my father.

  And nobody has figured it out.

  And it isn’t like Daddy’s in the news anymore. So what do I have to worry about?

  Mr. Gordon pounds his hand against the podium, a signal that he’s getting mad.

  “Let me remind you gentlemen in the back that you are still subject to my authority until graduation day, and I personally can determine whether you graduate or not,” he threatens.

  To my surprise, the rowdies behind us actually quiet down.

  “Thank you,” Mr. Gordon says with exaggerated patience. “Now, seniors, this assembly is for your benefit. If statistics hold, some ninety-five percent of you are planning to further your education after high school, which is a really good idea if you intend to make more than minimum wage. So hopefully you all picked up the handouts in the back—”

  “Wait!” someone cries out. It’s Ms. Stela, my guidance counselor, who’s running down the far aisle waving a stack of papers. “The copier broke this morning, and I just printed the last one and . . . here! Pass them down!”

  She starts thrusting papers at the kids at the end of each row.

  “Couldn’t she have printed those handouts before today?” Rosa mutters disgustedly beside me.

  “That’s Ms. Stela for you,” I mutter back.

  Ms. Stela’s maybe twenty-eight, and always frantic. She said to me once, “I’m so glad there are kids like you who don’t have problems, so I have time to deal with the ones who do.”

  I think that comment alone should disqualify her from her job—shouldn’t guidance counselors be more observant? But it’s not like I’m going to turn her in.

  The handouts flow down the row toward me. When Rosa hands me the stack, I take one and stand up and walk across the aisle to pass the rest on. I’ve grown four inches since moving to Deskins, and it’s a little amazing to me how quickly I can move now that I have long legs. Still, by the time I get back to my seat, Rosa has already flipped through the whole packet and is ready to rattle off all the ways it’s objectionable.

  “Like we don’t already know that grades and course selection and extracurriculars really matter for getting into the college of our dreams?” she asks scornfully. “Didn’t they tell us that a million times freshman year alone?”

  “Oh, who remembers freshman year?” I murmur back, shrugging.

  If I hadn’t put that as a question, it would count as an immense lie. Because I remember everything from freshman year. I remember how cold our apartment felt when I sat in it alone after Mom left for work each night. I remember how I cried when Mom told me Daddy was being transferred to a federal prison in California, of all places, and there was no way we could afford to visit him any time soon. I remember how, most of the time, I couldn’t decide if I was more angry than I was sad, or more sad than I was angry—when I did see Daddy again, would I want to hug him or slug him? If I ever wrote him a letter, would I curse him out or try to comfort him?

  I didn’t write any letters. I sat staring at blank sheets of paper for hours on end and then put the paper away, still blank. I let Mom tell him whatever she wanted about us and our new lives in Deskins. To keep anyone from knowing our connection to Daddy, all her letters—and Daddy’s, back to us—had to be sent in care of his attorney. I told myself that was what made it impossible to write. And, because phone calls are so easy to trace, the attorney said we shouldn’t talk to Daddy by phone, either.

  What did I feel the strongest: relief at not having to communicate? Or just more of that battle between sorrow and fury?

  Not much has changed in three years. I’m still angry and sad, but I’ve buried all those emotions deep down inside me. When our junior-year AP language teacher made us write character studies of each other, Jala described me as “the most even-keeled person I know.”

  So I’ve fooled even my best friend. I deserve an acting Oscar.

  Rosa is still ranting about Ms. Stela’s handouts.

  “And this sheet,” she says, turning to the last page. “Are they trying to convince us that we can afford college or that we should just give up because we can’t?”

  She shakes the packet at me, so I have to dart my eyes back and forth to see what she’s talking about. That last page is a reprint from some magazine, and the headline says, “What If the Middle Class Really Can’t Afford to Send Their Kids to College Anymore?”

  And below that headline, there’s a picture of my father.

  Now

  “Gaa,” I croak.

  Rosa looks at me strangely, because there are rules to responding to her sarcasm, and one of them is, you never take anything too seriously. And in addition to making weird, incoherent sounds, I’m sure I look seriously disturbed. I can feel the blood draining from my face—my skin is normally about two shades paler than Rosa’s, but now it’s probably more like fifty. And I can’t seem to regain control. My eyes refuse to stop bugging out; my jaw just keeps hanging.

  Rosa pounds me on the back—evidently she thinks I’m choking.

  “Relax! Calm down! You’ll get tons of scholarships. It’s the C students who really have to worry,” Rosa says.

  Even though her voice seems to come from a million miles away, I understand: She thinks I’m just worried about paying for college.

  What a relief.

  I shake my head, throwing myself into full acting mode.

  “Sorry,” I mutter. “Panic attack. College just never seemed real before, you know?”

  Rosa is still regarding me with the same kind of curiosity she usually reserves for the daily ups and downs of the popular crowd.

  “My sister warned me everyone freaks out about college senior year, but I didn’t think you’d be the first victim,” she says.

  I’m saved from having to answer because Mr. Gordon bangs on the podium again.

  “Okay, people, now you have the handouts, so look at the first page,” he orders.

  Rosa obeys. I pretend to forget the difference between “first” and “last,” and flip my packet open to the article with my father’s picture. I just intend to glance quickly, to make sure I wasn’t imagining it was him and panicking over nothing. But I can’t help skimming the opening of the article:

  Infamous scammer Roger Jones, who bilked innocent victims out of millions, tried to justify his crimes with the excuse, “How else could someone like me be able to afford to send his own kid to college?”

  Obviously that was the wrong approach, as Jones is now serving time in prison. But other parents, faced with college costs that escalate at a pace far beyond inflation, might be tempted to turn to similarly desperate measures. The reality is . . .

  As far as I can tell from reading quickly, that’s the only mention of my father in the whole article. Why did they even use his name or show his picture? My gaze drifts to the offending image.

  Daddy . . .

  I’m pretty sure this picture was taken the day of the verdict, as he was being taken in to court. It’s a fuzzy reproduction, so I can just barely see the handcuffs glinting around his wrists. He’s holding his head high, a cocky expression on his face. It looks like he was thinking, You people do not have the goods on me! You may have caught me, but you don’t really have enough proof now, do you? Or maybe he was just thinking, I have to look like I’m confident I’m going to get off. Act cocky! Maybe inside he was terrified.

  Oh, Daddy . . .

  Probably millions of people have seen this picture in the past three years, and probably practically every one of them thought, What a jerk! That guy deserves to be punished! It’s a shame they didn’t catch him sooner! But I see the man who pushed me on my backyard swing set again and again and again when I was a preschooler; I see the man who introduced me to rocky road ice cream; I see the man who bought me practically anything I ever asked for . . .

  With other people’s money.


  Rosa jabs her elbow in my side.

  “Do not go all loca on me about paying for college!” she whispers. “You know Clarice and Stuart and Lakshmi are going to be psycho all year long about whether or not they’re going to get into Harvard—I’ve got to have someone sane around me!”

  I shrug apologetically and try to keep my hands from shaking as I flip the packet back to the first page. But that page might as well have been covered in random squiggles, for all I read of it. I don’t hear Mr. Gordon’s droning voice, either.

  What if, when we get to that last page, and Mr. Gordon has everyone staring at that picture of Daddy . . . what if someone says, “Hey! Doesn’t this guy look like Becca? And his last name is Jones, too! What do you bet they’re related?”

  I do look a lot like Daddy. We have the same chestnut-brown hair, which he always wore a little bit too long for a typical suburban dad. And mine streams most of the way down my back now. That’s mostly just because haircuts cost money—I stopped thinking of my long hair as a disguise a long time ago. But now . . .

  So what if we have the same hair color? That’s a black-and-white picture! No one’s going to be able to tell what color hair Daddy has!

  But Daddy and I also have the same wide-set eyes, the same high checkbones, the same slightly arched nose. We even have the same teeth. The only feature I inherited from my mom was my heart-shaped chin.

  Stop it! Think of a good comeback! How about, “Yeah, of course two people named Jones would have to be related. Because Jones isn’t a common name at all.” Deliver that with the right tone, and you’ll be fine.