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a little relief.
    Damn him.
    I turned on my heel and headed for the dressing room to do what I had to do.
    Jason Hodges was wrong. I was a walking mistake. I just hid it better than anyone else.

Four
    BENNY
    The glowing numbers on my phone stared at me, all ugly-like. Twenty minutes until American History started, and I had to call my grandmom and move my car out of the senior parking lot. I’d been running behind this morning—lots of traffic on 76 headed out of the city—and it was the only spot I could find. But I’d learned the hard way that you got a “ticket” for taking one of the precious senior spaces. This school was too much. No way was I gonna let some security guy tow my Mustang. My Mustang was my one true love.
    All the kids in the Upper School were squeezing through a tiny little door out of assembly. If I went that way, I’d be late for class. I couldn’t afford to have any teachers giving me detentions. I was one of exactly six kids “of color”—we were all lumped together—at this place. I couldn’t afford anything bad on my record. It had to be perfect if I was going to get into college.
    I backed up, remembering there was another exit down by the front row of seats that led out to the Arts Center classrooms and the Drama Studio. That was the way to go if I wanted to get out quick.
    Nobody noticed me as I wove back through the rows of seats. That pretty much summed up my life at Haverford Friends: nobody ever noticed me. Even on the football team, where I was the best wide receiver they’d probably ever have, the guys mostly grunted at me. They were clueless.
    To be fair, they did invite me to their keggers once in a while. Well, really only once, but I couldn’t go. They were always being held in some park where all the prep school kids got together, but it was an hour from my house. Not to mention my grandmom would go bananas if I was arrested for underage drinking or got a DUI. Maybe if I did stuff like that, I wouldn’t be so invisible. Then again, I could be just as invisible at a party, a red Solo cup floating around.
    The first kegger was in September, after we won our first game in, like, one trillion years, and I guess I blew my chance because no one had really asked me to anything since. No biggie. Not like I had anything in common with these rich dudes with their overpriced cars and blonde girlfriends and dads with pink pants. My car was a 1993 model someone had abandoned at my uncle’s garage, where I worked nights and weekends. It took me awhile to get it back into order, but I’d tricked it out myself, slowly adding new parts whenever I could afford them. I always gave my grandparents most of my paycheck when I got it, so there usually wasn’t much left for me. My uncle and my buddy, ‘LT,’ had helped me with the labor—lots of Sunday afternoons working on that thing. It was nothing like the Range Rovers or Beemers people drove to HF, but none of those kids had any idea how satisfying it was to mend a brake line, replace an oxygen sensor, or fix a Pitman arm.
    As for my dad, he was back in the Dominican Republic. I hadn’t seen him since I was four. We talked on the phone, but he wasn’t coming back to the States any time soon—wasn’t allowed to. And the only girlfriend I had was in my head: Jennifer Lawrence. My buddies at my uncle’s garage made fun of me that I picked the Hunger Games chica over the bikini calendar girls that hung on the walls at the garage, but I didn’t care. She was hot. If I ever got to meet her, it’d all be over. She’d forget all about those Hollywood dudes.
    The Arts Center was quiet like a funeral. I’d never really hung out here much except for Design class. That was another crazy thing. Design class. Who needs a design class? I’d taken it ’cause my advisor said it was the way to go, since I wasn’t into photography or video.