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I said, feeling like an idiot. She’d looked right at me—that was more than she’d ever done—but I guess she didn’t like what she was seeing ’cause she was rushing off. Good job, Yizar .
    As she was walking away, it hit me—why she was acting so freaky. She’d just thrown up. My cousin Luisa had done the same thing when I’d caught her puking once. The nervous eyes, flicking side to side, not meeting mine. Wiping her mouth. Keeping her distance. Pretending like everything was normal. People say poor kids don’t get anorexia, but that’s not true. They also say rich kids don’t act ghetto, and I’d seen plenty of kids at HF walking around with their pants low, throwing gang signs in the halls, using the n-word like it was going out of style.
    I stood there for a moment, watching Dakota walk away. She was hot and all, but the girl clearly had some issues. If she was just gonna ignore me like everyone else, then I wouldn’t waste my time talking to her again.
    Then I remembered: time. I was going to be late to History.
    Shit.

Five
    ALICE
    â€œSo what were you saying the other day, about the Mint?” Jason asked. He was sitting next to me in Design class, for the first time ever.
    I frowned. “The Mint?”
    â€œAbout the security. The network?”
    Of course. The day when he’d talked to me. It was about hacking. “Just that for a place so important, they’re practically inviting a zero-day.”
    â€œA what?”
    â€œAn attack that takes advantage of vulnerabilities or weak spots,” I explained. My stomach was doing weird things that felt like hunger, despite the fact that I’d just eaten a corn muffin during morning break. He was right there —inches away—my body knew it even if my brain wasn’t admitting it.
    Come on, Alice. Get a grip.
    â€œHuh.”
    Well, it was obvious he was there because he had nowhere else to sit. Within days of the news about his dad, Jason had become persona non grata at Haverford Friends. No one wanted to be associated with a crook, or in this case, a crook’s son. It was sad, really. He was still making snarky jokes whenever anyone mentioned his dad, but everyone had stopped laughing at them. Social math: In set theory, there’s a hierarchy, organized by how deeply the sets are nested into one another. Every day, Jason was slipping down the hierarchy a little more.
    So I couldn’t get too excited. In fact, there was nothing to do but focus on my Mint project, which was a rendering of a new commemorative coin. My plan was to scan the design I was drawing by hand into the computer once it was approved and turn it into some kind of three-dimensional rendering. Given a choice, I generally preferred to do everything auto-magically, since computers were my language, my art.
    I had some questions for Mr. Rankin about my plan, but he’d already retreated into his office. He’d been acting off lately—he never showed us any funny videos or asked us about our weekends anymore. It was like everything that went down with Mr. Hodges had cast this big shadow over the whole school. I mean, I got why people were bummed out about their activities and stuff, but it was all going to blow over, wasn’t it? A place like HF, which had been around forever, would have to bounce back. I’d heard they were going to do a search for a new headmaster. By next year, there would be a whole batch of new students, and they’d raise more money and everything would be forgotten. Our evil headmaster would be reduced to a little eraser smudge on the school’s history.
    Speaking of smudges, I snuck a glance over at Jason’s paper. It looked like he was drawing a coin, too.
    â€œWhat do you have there?”
    â€œI don’t know,” he mumbled. “It’s just in the early stages.”
    â€œI hope you’re not making a commemorative.”
    â€œWhy? Do you