I grinned seeing Daphne’s dad drop her off across the street from the school gates, in almost the exact spot Mom had dropped me on Monday last week. The street wasn’t thick with students yet and, spotting us easily, she darted across the road to us, just one more young Hadley Girl dressed according to school code. In her case beneath her tartan skirt she’d chosen the black tights instead of the school-approved below-the-knee or thigh-high socks, and the sweater instead of the vest beneath her blazer, so together the three of us covered the school-approved range of choices.

  Pinky and I waved to Mr. Porter and side-marched Daphne inside to our lockers, where Pinky gave her the same introduction she’d given me, made sure she stashed her phone, checked her new school pad for a full charge, and slipped a battery-pack into her bag. Then we took her to her homeroom classroom to introduce her to Ms. Gallowglass, staying and chatting until the first bell before wishing her luck and scooting.

  Fourteen looked so young I’d have felt like Pinky and I were babysitting if we weren’t surrounded by fourteen to eighteen year olds—and with that thought, I was pushing through a sea of children. Then a taller girl who could be a second year for all I knew knocked me sideways without slowing and my perspective reset. Sixty going on nineteen, older than almost all the teachers here but struggling with half my classes.

  I shook off the weirdness that was seizing me less and less; I’d adjusted to thinking of Pinky and Gemma and Papa and Delia as peers because they treated me as one. Remembering that we were all in the same teen-hormone soup together helped. “Hey!” I spotted Gemma headed into our room. “What did you think of the rest of the Mark Twain readings?”

  *****************************************

  Sitting at Delia’s table with Pinky on one side and a seat with my bag in it on the other, carefully not ignoring Papa, I spotted Daphne entering the cafeteria with a couple of other girls, talking animatedly. They continued the conversation in the line, and I waved when she swiped her card and turned towards us. Splitting off from them, she wound her way through the tables to us and took the empty seat I’d used my bag to hold for her.

  “Hey!” she said, and then looking around the table at the rest of us, froze. Understanding what had to going on in her head even if I didn’t know if it was Delia—obvious Hadley royalty in all her groomed and tanned glory—or the two hot boys flanking her that was pushing her Alert, Alert! button, I ignored her sudden social panic.

  “Daphne, this is Delia and her sister Tracy.” Comportment Club had stressed seniority in introductions. “This is Brad and Chet, they’re Pinky are Delia’s classmates, and this is Gemma, one of my homeroom sisters. Were those some classmates we saw you with?”

  Giving her a question to answer unfroze her quite nicely. “Um, yeah! Two girls from Chemistry. They’re cool, offered to send me their class notes.”

  “April said you’re a science girl,” Delia regally entered the conversation. “Is that why you tested into Hadley?”

  “Yes! We don’t live far away, and the public school district is . . . okay with science? Not the best in the city with the science track.”

  “And you’ve already bonded with two of our budding mad scientists? You’ll do well.”

  If that was sarcasm, Daphne didn’t hear it. “They’re great! I was going to sit with them, but, um. Your invite was first.” She turned to look at Pinky on my other side. “And you were totally right about the nickname. When they heard I was hitting chemistry, physics, astronomy, and geology hard, they . . .”

  Pinky grinned like a cat that had caught the canary. “So . . . Brain?” When the girl nodded, she cackled. “Everyone, let me introduce The Brain. Brain for short.”

  Delia snorted. “Pinky? And The Brain?” Really?

  What? Oh, oh no she didn’t. The distance between Brain and The Brain was three letters and the most groanworthy joke imaginable, and how , even if that Warner Brothers cartoon had been decades after my childhood, had I missed Pinky and The Brain?

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  I blinked when led by Delia, everyone else at the table held up their drinks, mostly bottled water, and declared “All hail The Brain.”

  “Welcome to Hadley, Brain,” Delia said. “Bring glory to the school.” Sipping her water, she turned to Brad. “So how’s the team looking this year? What does Coach think?”

  Stunned, I still silently admired Queen D’s social instincts as tension bled from Daphne’s shoulders as the spotlight left her. “What did she mean by that?” she whispered.

  “Bring glory to the school?” I shrugged. “Maybe join the academic decathlon team? I’ll bet they have a club and they admire grit.”

  ***************************************

  “How’s your new sister?” Carl asked. I’d come home and gotten my homework out of the way before he got home from work, and now we shared the kitchen as he put together a charcuterie board of meats, cheeses, crackers, cherry-tomatoes, carrots, pickles, and anything else that qualified as finger food for dinner, and I made chocolate.

  It had been weeks since I’d done it, not since my transformation, but finishing my last assignment I’d been seized by the irresistible urge and gone back to my own kitchen to gather the ingredients and bring them over. His question caught me pouring pure melted goodness into the square molds.

  Forever and always couverture chocolate—higher in cocoa butter content than store-bought chocolate—with purest vanilla extract, a light honey directly sourced from a local apiary for sweetness, fine kosher salt with zero additives, none of the emulsifiers and preservative crap stuffed into mass-produced junk chocolate.

  “She’s good,” I said carefully, eyes on the mold tray and hands shaking a little. Smaller hands, far less grip-strength, and the big pot was proving a challenge. “I don’t think she’s like me—she’s an extrovert when she’s comfortable.” Getting to the end of the last row, I put the pot down and centered another mold. “I think I’m going to wrap some of these as a thank-you to Delia.” Before I’d retired last year to save myself, The Boss’s Chocolate had been a semi-regular thank you gift for my people, left without comment in a bowl in the Ross Enterprises break rooms.

  I grinned. Now that I thought about it, it was a purer form of Mom’s Lethal Chocolate cookies. You could only get so much chocolate into a cookie before it ceased to be a cookie, but this was chocolate in its Platonic form, Platonic Chocolate, cut by other organic ingredients only to enhance its delivery to the tongue’s taste receptors. I resolved to plate a few of them like she did her own cookie-delivery plates and leave them on her home office desk before school.

  “Delia . . . That’s the top It Girl in the class above you?” Carl asked.

  “The one who’d be voted Ms. Popularity if Hadley gave out the title, yeah. I think mostly because of her family money—you saw her place—but she’s got the whole iron-fist-in-a-velvet-glove thing down.”

  He stopped his chopping. “You don’t like her?”

  His response stopped me. That had been uncharitable enough that I thought about what I was thinking. “I don’t really know her? I’ve just seen her social face. She helped launch me and with . . . a thing. And she helped launch The Brain—Daphne. But there’s history between her and Pinky?” I wasn’t sure what it was about, but Pinky did not like her. “Because of some dirt Delia tried to do her last year, but I don’t think that’s all of it.” And really, I didn’t fucking care. Maybe someday I’d find out why my big sister wanted to cunt-punt the Queen D, but why, if they were enemies, did we sit at Delia’s table?

  I shook my head. If it was something that was going to bite us in the ass, I’d worry about it then. “She let Daphne join us at her table for lunch today, talked to her like a human being. It sort of marked her as off-limits for jerking around.”

  Or . . . it might have marked her as competition for the climbers in her class. I had seen a group of younger girls she hadn’t come in with watching us. Fuck. High school social fuckery could get pretty fucked up; it was only with the hindsight of decades that I’d realized I’d come out of my first high school experience needing therapy for all the passive-aggressive gaslighting bullshit. The perspective of age.

  Dipping a finger in the bowl, I licked it off, the rich and flavorful taste flooding my mouth and lightening my mood. If I hadn’t come out of high school beaten down to almost nothing by the low-grade but relentless social bullying campaign of those years, I might have had enough confidence to stand up to my father and not just become the next (and last) Ross of Ross Enterprises. My whole life could have been written differently.

  Well, it’s getting rewritten now.

  “I think everything’s going to be okay,” I said finally, “but we’ll keep an eye out.”

  Carl gave me a look. “An eye out on Daphne, or on Delia?” I laughed though none of it was funny.

  “Both?” Both were potential HR problems. Potential associate friction. “And hands off the chocolate.” He dodged my swat, but it drove him away from the cooling chocolate squares.

  “One?”

  “No. They’re dessert and school treats. Beat me at chess.”

  “You’re on, old man.”