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already be accepted at Brown by the time we moved back and it wouldn’t matter. Goes to show what I know.
    Lucy and Josie were waiting for me in the cafeteria after fourth period, just like they used to. They’d even saved me a seat, even though I was running late after having to go see Heywood’s secretary about getting my own locker.
    “How were the rest of your classes?” Lucy asked, scooting over to make room for me. “I heard you knew all the answers to Mrs. Blackwell’s questions about The House of Mirth. What’s up with that?”
    I carefully laid my tray on the table, making sure not to spill my chili, and sat next to her. “Yeah, well, I read it last semester.”
    “Every time I open that book, my eyes glaze over. There’s no way I’m going to do well on our test next week.”
    Josie peeled open her peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich and scraped the purple goo off the bread with a plastic spoon. Josie’s hated jelly ever since seventh grade, when she bit into her pb&j and a glob of grape jam fell into her lap. Josie claims jelly is disgusting, but I think part of the reason she still goes to all the trouble of scraping her sandwiches until they’re jelly-free is that Curtis Ludlow told our entire class Josie had gotten her period and no matter how many times she insisted the reddish stain was Welch’s grape jelly, everyone had liked Curtis’s version of the story better.
    I thought maybe Josie’s mom would have finally given in and let Josie bring her lunch from home to avoid the daily scraping. But when meals are included in tuition, I guess it’s hard to justify brown bagging it—at least that’s what Josie’s mom told her when she brought up the idea right after the Curtis incident.
    “Oh, who are you kidding?” Josie asked. “The test hardly matters. You’ve got UNC and Duke battling it out for you.”
    Lucy rolled her eyes. “They’re not ‘battling it out.’”
    “Then what would you call it?”
    “They’re ‘actively interested,’” Lucy paraphrased, even though we all knew it pretty much meant the same thing.
    “Hi, Emily, welcome back.” Mandy Pinta put her tray down on the table and took a seat across from me. “Are you guys talking about what you’re going to do for the time capsule?”
    “They’re still doing that?” I asked, kind of flattered that Mandy would automatically assume Lucy, Josie, and I would be doing something together for the time capsule even though I’d been back at Heywood for all of four hours.
    “Of course,” Mandy assured me. “It wouldn’t be Heywood if we didn’t have the time capsule, right?”
    Ever since Heywood Academy’s class of 1973 came up with the idea of creating time capsules before graduation, every single senior class has created one, throwing in stuff like a few magazines (mostly Sports Illustrated s from the guys, and Seventeen s or Cosmo s from the girls), some Boston Globe s, and music. It sounded cool in theory, but the truth is every time the capsules are opened nobody really cares. The most interesting thing that was ever uncovered was the roach clip the class of 1983 claimed to have used on a senior trip to a Police concert. When they opened the time capsule ten years later, the class of 1993 supposedly put the roach clip to the test, but I think that’s just Heywood legend, like the year they claim a class opened the time capsule and discovered somebody’s middle finger with a mood ring still on it.
    Lucy shrugged. “We haven’t even thought about what we’re going to do. What about you?”
    Mandy waited until she’d finished chewing her turkey sandwich. “Pam and Carolyn and I were thinking that maybe we’d do a scrapbook of our senior year.”
    Not exactly original, but then again, nothing in the time capsule ever was.
    While Mandy continued to give us a rundown of the other mundane options they’d considered for the capsule—a video, a photo collage, or a collection of quotes from everyone in the senior