The chalk squeaked on the board and Ms. Bissette's handwriting was perfect. Each letter precise, evenly spaced, the handwriting of someone who cared about letters. She was conjugating avoir in the passé composé and her accent turned the verb forms into small, careful music that made the back row stop scrolling their phones.
"J'ai eu. Tu as eu. Il a eu." She tapped each one with the chalk. "Nous avons eu."
I was in the third row. The desk had an attached chair, hard plastic, designed by someone who'd never sat in one. My knees didn't fit right. The kid in front of me had dandruff on his collar and the girl to my left was drawing hearts in the margin of her notebook and I was watching Bissette's mouth form French vowels and losing track of what century I was in.
She was in the white blouse and pink cardigan from orientation, reading glasses pushed up on top of her head, a pencil tucked behind her ear. The blouse was buttoned one lower than professional and I noticed and she caught me noticing and her eyes moved to the next student without pausing. Smooth. She'd done that before.
"You." She pointed the chalk at me. "Conjugate être in the passé composé. First person singular."
The room got quiet. The girl drawing hearts looked up. Bissette was seeing where the new kid landed, and I was supposed to be a grieving teenager who'd missed a week of school and probably couldn't find France on a map.
"J'ai été."
Bissette's eyebrows went up. Just a fraction. The pencil behind her ear shifted when her head tilted.
"Très bien." A pause. "Your accent is not terrible."
"I had a good teacher."
I'd had a girl from Montreal who spoke French during sex and it turns out three months of that is better than two years of high school conjugation drills. Bissette didn't need to know that. She turned back to the board and wrote the next verb and I watched the chalk move and her wrist turn and the dust settle on her fingers.
The bell rang. I picked up my bag. Walking past her desk on the way out, I smelled her. Light. Clean. Linen or cotton, fabric pressed with a hot iron. Her own thing.
PE was outside. The side courtyard, a concrete slab with painted lines that didn't correspond to any sport I recognized, and Coach Bridget standing in the center with a whistle and a clipboard and legs that started at the ground and went up for a while before they became the rest of her. She was in athletic shorts and a polo shirt with SUMMERVILLE ATHLETICS across the chest and the shirt was tight across her shoulders because no manufacturer planned for shoulders that wide on a woman.
"Warmups. Four laps, then push-ups. Go."
She blew the whistle and we went.
Four laps of the courtyard was about a quarter mile and by the second lap I knew exactly how fucked I was. The legs were young but they had nothing in them. No conditioning and no base. My lungs started burning on lap three. A girl with a ponytail passed me on the inside like I was standing still. By lap four I was breathing through my mouth and my calves were cramping and I finished last. Erik finished second-to-last, wheezing, and gave me a thumbs up like we'd accomplished something.
Push-ups. I got on the concrete. Hands shoulder-width. The concrete was warm under my palms from the sun. Down. Up. My arms shook on the first one. The second one was worse. By the fifth my elbows were bending wrong and my chest barely touched the ground. The sixth was a lie I told my body and the seventh didn't happen because my arms quit and I ended up flat on the concrete with my cheek against the warm grit.
Seven push-ups. I used to do fifty for a warmup. In my old body, in my old life, fifty push-ups was what I did before I actually started working out. Seven. This body had given me seven and then folded like a card table.
Bridget walked past. I was still on the ground, arms burning, forehead on the concrete. She stopped. White sneakers, grass stain on the toe.
She wrote on her clipboard. Kept walking.
I peeled myself off the concrete. My arms felt like they'd been filled with sand. Good. That meant there was muscle to build.
I changed back into regular clothes in the locker room, which was co-ed because the girls' locker room was supposedly out of commission, which meant a row of lockers and a curtain partition and the sound of girls talking on the other side of it and I kept my head down and my shirt on and got out of there before my past-life instincts got the better of my current-life situation.
Art was third period. Ross's room was at the end of the first-floor hallway and it smelled like turpentine and old paint and incense. The walls were covered in student work from previous years, some good, some terrible, all pinned up with equal care. A half-finished clay sculpture of a hand sat on a shelf near the door, the fingers curled around nothing.
Ross was barefoot. Barefoot in a classroom, standing on the linoleum in paint-stained toes, her smock hanging loose over whatever she was or wasn't wearing underneath. Auburn hair, headband, bohemian jewelry that clinked when she moved. She looked like she'd walked out of a music festival in 1972 and hadn't found her way back.
"Free draw, everyone. Twenty minutes. Whatever speaks to you. Let the energy flow through the pencil." She waved a hand. "Don't think. Just feel."
I picked up a pencil. The sketchpad was cheap, cardboard back that flexed when you pressed too hard. I looked at the room. The window. The light coming through it, catching dust in a column that hit the floor between two easels.
I drew the window. The frame, the glass, the dust column, the easels. Clean lines. Steady hand. The pencil felt right in my grip. My old hands had been good at this. I'd sketched in bars and on napkins and in the margins of other people's notebooks while I waited for them to get dressed. The skill had come through the transmigration. The body was new but the hand still knew how to see a line and put it on paper.
Ross walked the room. She stopped at each desk for a few seconds, nodded, moved on. She got to mine and stopped. Looked at the sketch. Looked at me. Looked at the sketch again. Her lips pressed together and her head tilted and she didn't say anything and she moved on.
She came back before the twenty minutes were up. Stood behind me, close enough that the turpentine and incense were warm in the air. She looked at the finished sketch.
"Interesting energy," she said. Slow, languid. "You've drawn before."
"A little."
"Mm." She moved on.
Lunch was on the second floor and the cafeteria hadn't changed since orientation. Bad lighting, floor cleaner, pizza-box smell. But the social geography was sharper now because people had settled into their spots and the spots told you everything.
Roxxy's table was dead center and she'd added a fourth chair. The cheer trio plus a guy with a letterman jacket who was laughing too hard at whatever Roxxy said. Becca was on her phone, thumb scrolling, occasionally looking up to deliver a comment that made the letterman guy's laugh get uncertain. Missy was eating a salad and watching Roxxy talk with her whole face, mouth open, nodding along. The table was loud enough that you could hear Roxxy's voice from the food line.
Two tables over from the cheerleaders, a group of guys from PE. One of them was big, dark-skinned, basketball jersey, sitting with his arm stretched across the back of the empty chair next to him. Dexter. Roxxy's boyfriend. He was watching her across the cafeteria with his jaw working on nothing. I'd have to deal with him eventually. The game had a fistfight.
Mia was in her corner. Different book, thicker, cracked spine. She'd built the wall again, eyes down, eating a sandwich without looking at it. Two tables of empty space between her and the nearest group.
Eve wasn't there. Erik mentioned she ate on the roof, which was technically against the rules, which was probably why she did it.
I sat with Erik. He opened a bag of chips and started telling me about the World of Orcette expansion's crafting system and I ate a sandwich from the line that tasted like refrigerator and listened with one ear.
Judith was two tables over. I caught her looking at me and she jerked her eyes down to her tray so fast she knocked her milk carton sideways. She caught it before it spilled. Her face went red. She didn't look up again for a while, but when she did, I was already looking away, and I don't think she knew I'd seen.
She'd dropped books on me yesterday. Her hands had shaken when she picked them up. Her locker in the game had "COW" scratched into it and I remembered that detail now, sitting here, watching her eat lunch alone with her red hair and her glasses and her purple headband and wondering who'd written it and whether it was already there.
Erik was drawing a map of a dungeon on a napkin with a pen. The cafeteria buzzed around us. A janitor pushed a mop bucket past the door and the wheels squeaked on every rotation. The clock on the wall above the food line was three minutes fast, or every other clock in the building was three minutes slow, and nobody had fixed either one.
I ate my sandwich. I thought about push-ups.
Seven. I'd done seven.
By the time I was done with this place, Bridget was going to need a bigger clipboard.