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There were two girls sitting at the table Lacey selected. One looked much too small to be in high school. Lacey introduced her as Camille.

“Hey,” the small girl said.

“Hey,” I repeated.

I already knew the other: Pink Teeth.

“So she does talk,” Pink Teeth said to no one in particular.

“Uh…I’m sorry about ignoring you in choir. I meant to talk to you. I was…nervous.”

Pink Teeth flashed a grin, displaying her jumble of colorful teeth.” No prob. Nothing to be nervous about with us. The name’s Serena. You ready to tell me yours?”

I put my tray on the table next to Lacey’s and sat down. “It’s Mira Johns.”

“Uh hum,” a voice just above us interrupted our conversation. Two skeletal-like females stood nearby, dressed in clothes that were considerably more adorned than what most other females wore. They held trays covered in vegetable matter similar to what Mom had fixed last night for dinner. “This would be
our
table,” one of the skinny things said.

I took advantage of the distraction to pick up the cheeseburger, hold it to my nose, and inhale deeply. Last night’s dinner had been the most incredible experience ever. But something told me it was nothing compared to this.

“I didn’t realize it was reserved,” Lacey said, looking straight ahead. “I guess the cooks forgot to put out the name cards.”

“Look,” the skinniest of the two said. “We waited all last year for this table. It’s right in the middle of everything.”

The drama unfolding was only mildly interesting compared to the food in front of me. But I tried to pay attention. I’d never met anyone so thin, but still knew the type well. These Skinnies clearly had a far higher opinion of themselves than they deserved. I half-listened while lifting the top bun, which had red and yellow circles.
Ketchup.
And
mustard
—I knew this from television commercials. I removed a circle of lettuce and a tomato slice. A square of gooey yellow cheese hugged the meat. It was absolutely mesmerizing.

“Heartbreaking,” Serena said. “What do you think, girls?”

“I think I’m too busy eating my lunch to care,” Lacey said.

“And it’s only too obvious how important eating is to you.” Skinniest smirked and nudged Skinny with her elbow.

 “You new?” Skinny asked.

 I waited, hoping they were addressing someone else. Eventually I pulled my gaze away from the cheeseburger. “Um…yes.”

“Why don’t you come with us?” Skinniest said. “We’ll find a table that’s more…
suitable
.”

I had heard enough conversations like this one to realize the significance of the invitation. If I got up and left, I’d mark the girls at the table as unacceptable. But if I stayed, I’d place myself in a lower class at the school and possibly make a couple of enemies. I looked at each of the girls at the table—their expressions suddenly serious, their emotional odors heightened—and then studied the smug Skinnies.

“You coming?” Skinny smacked her gum and impatiently placed her hand on her protruding hip bone.

“No thank you,” I said. “I’ll stay here.”

Skinny raised her eyebrow. Skinniest tossed her hair. They turned and walked with swinging hips to the other side of the room.

“So, Mira.” Lacey’s nostrils were slightly flared. “It appears you’ve just been unofficially introduced to the school’s biggest butt heads, Hailey and Dionne.” The other girls giggled. Lacey continued. “Hailey’s cheer captain. Dionne was esbioveepee last year.” She smiled graciously. “Thanks for not leaving.”

I nodded my head. I had no idea what an esbioveepee was, but I did know all about cheer captains.
Save the cheerleader—save the world
. I’d hoped that was a stereotype. I figured a place with so much variety would be tolerant of differences. Besides, this world was more confused than I realized if they placed those Skinnies in a higher class of beauty than Lacey.

But I couldn’t say any of that to these humans. Besides, I’d ignored the cheeseburger as long as I could. I picked it up again, and did possibly the most rebellious thing of my entire seventeen years of life.

I took a bite.

And moaned with pleasure. I rolled the juicy meat around in my mouth, reveling in the unfamiliar texture on my tongue. I swallowed. My tongue sought out the remnants of lingering food against my teeth. I hurriedly put another bite in my mouth, tears forming in my eyes. I savored the juice that splashed against the inside of my cheek, the smooth texture of the melted cheese.

Then I looked up. Three sets of eyes watched me. I grinned, realized how disgusting I must look, and clamped my mouth shut.

Until my arrival on this planet yesterday, my nutrition had come in the form of a cube, ingested five times daily. The development of the cube as a nutrition source was hailed as the single most important advancement of all mankind. It would normally take dozens of generations to implement such a drastic nutritional transformation into society. Somehow the brilliant geneticists on Nreim had done it in only four. The cube had wiped out many major illnesses and freed a multitude of valuable economic resources. Not to mention all the good it supposedly did for the goal of purified genetics. At least that’s what they taught us in school.

I shoved three fries in my mouth and decided that the cube was, in reality, a wide-scale tragedy of untold proportions.

 “Mira…are you okay?” Lacey asked, her blonde eyebrows lifted in concern.

“Yes…thank you…” I mumbled as best I could with my mouth full. I chewed the last of the bliss and swallowed before attempting to speak again.

The girls hadn’t stopped staring.

“I’ve never been better.”

***

The subtle, lingering taste of cooked onions, hamburger meat, ketchup, and fried potatoes stayed with me for my next two periods. The question of why I grew up thinking that the words food and repugnance were synonymous kept my mind occupied, much like the food’s aroma had before lunch. A full stomach, and the odd sensation of my body digesting the food, made me drowsy. And surprisingly relaxed.

As the end of the school day neared, I also felt an increase in my confidence. I began to get a feel for the layout of the buildings, recognized some of the students in my classes, and was getting fairly adept at not running into boys. I even remembered to think of them as
boys
much of the time rather than
males.

Then I turned a corner on my way to sixth period and spotted Choir Boy leaning against a locker at the end of the walkway. He fixed his gaze on me, a shy smile playing on his lips. I veered to a walkway on my left—even though it was in the wrong direction—rather than approach him. Then I took what I hoped was a shortcut between two buildings. But the new row of buildings looked just like the ones I’d come from. I rushed through the maze of walkways and throng of students and made several passes across the large patio where students gathered between classes until the campus was almost empty. It was hard to believe one high school campus was allowed to spread out over so much land.

Twice I passed the correct classroom before figuring it out: 3C Art History. I rushed in just after the obnoxious bell sounded and dropped into the only empty desk on the front row.

“Ms. Johns!”

I looked up, startled. I’d let myself get too distracted to mentally prepare for this, the real purpose of this assignment: the infamous Dr. Alison Stone, who was by now standing in front of my desk. The teacher’s head was held high. But her gaze was focused down, past her perfectly-proportioned nose, to me, trembling in my hard plastic seat.

 CHAPTER FOUR

The doctors Tom and Alison Stone were widely regarded as Nreim’s most revered citizens. The pair of research scientists had provided Nreim with more data since the discovery of the young planet Earth twenty years ago than all other sources combined. An entire unit of my Neoearth Studies class had been devoted to the brilliant linkmates. My dad practically worshipped them.

Meeting Dr. Tom in my first period chemistry class had been rather anticlimactic—other than the disturbing discovery that the females seemed to find him attractive. To me, he was no more interesting than any of my teachers back home.

But I wasn’t so sure about this Dr. Alison. For one thing, the room reeked of a mix of angry, ugly emotions. For another, the woman was downright scary. She remained in front of my desk, staring down at me. I glanced to my right and then my left. All eyes in the room were focused in my direction.

“How nice of you to join us,” Dr. Alison continued. “You’re from Albuquerque, isn’t that right?”

I nodded, confused.

“I believe I know your parents.”

I couldn’t think of a response. Keddil had told me Dr. Alison would pretend to not know anything about me. Besides, the woman had never met my parents, I was sure of it. Dad would have bragged endlessly if he’d ever even seen her in person, let alone met her. Dr. Alison strode back to the white board and wrote her name in a fanciful, cursive script. The strident aroma decreased, but only slightly.

I leaned back in my seat and tried to relax. I noticed that the boy next to me had his gaze on Dr. Alison. As did the one next to him—much the same way the girls had reacted to Dr. Tom. No surprise. Dr. Alison was beautiful, even by Nreim standards.

The heightened testosterone levels of the males might account for a portion of the concentrated emotions in the room. But not completely. The over-riding emotion was not lust. I could mostly detect anger; but there was also disgust, confusion, and resentment. Yet none of the students looked as though they were in foul moods. In fact, just the opposite. The boys joked, shoved one another, and laughed—even more than in the previous classes.

Dr. Alison didn’t seem to notice. She walked up and down the aisles—her high heels clicking rhythmically—and spoke in a steady, almost robotic voice—the way a teacher back home would give a lecture. As if she was reading a script directly behind her eyes: “This course presupposes an overall knowledge of the general concerns of particular historical periods of art and a familiarity with the basic skills of the discipline.” The students probably thought she had her speech memorized, but I could tell the difference. Each time Dr. Alison’s clicking heels drew near, I became more certain the ugly concoction of emotions permeating the room had one primary source: Dr. Alison herself.

My head buzzed and my throat ached from the effort of keeping my breath shallow. When the final bell sounded, my knuckles were white from clutching the desk. I raced through the door—pausing for a moment near a wall to gulp in the clean outside air—then bolted across the lawn towards my locker, anxious to put as much distance as possible between myself and that awful woman. In all my years of sensing emotions, I had never come across anything so intense.

***

Locker number two-eight-three was like all the others—except for the word
nerd
scratched in the red paint of the door, which seemed sadly appropriate. I tapped my wrist. Which, of course, resulted in nothing happening. In order to release the door, the circular knob surrounded by numbers had to be spun in a complicated pattern that had taken what felt like hours to figure out this morning—just one more thing Keddil hadn’t bothered to teach me.

I’d have to start a list of all the things he’d
forgotten
to mention. Not that I could do anything with it. But it might make me feel better.

This time it took just three attempts to open the door—a huge improvement from this morning. I retrieved the backpack the agency had provided and slammed the door shut. A boy was leaning against the lockers, facing me, just inches away. My head was still so filled with Dr. Alison’s stink that I hadn’t noticed his scent until that moment. I recognized him from some of my classes. In fact, he was one of the smelly boys that I’d been stuck with in the choir room door.

“So, where you from?” He displayed a row of perfectly white teeth.

I turned my head away. “New Mexico.”

“Ooh, hot.” He put an emphasis on the
t
. Trying to be clever, I supposed, paying me a compliment with a play on words. I’d never been the object of such obvious flirtation before, and I might have been flattered if he didn’t make my eyes water. “The name’s Nick,” he continued.

“Thank you,” I said, vaguely aware that it was the wrong response. “But I really must go.” I hurried away in the direction of my new home, walking as fast as I could without drawing attention to myself. When I reached the sidewalk, I opened a stream to Mom.

  Mom replied.

Mom sighed, never patient with my ramblings.

I paused at a street corner, waiting for the red light to turn green. At least Keddil had warned me about those. The light changed and I stepped into the road, breaking into a jog.

is
 a solar-force. They tend to be moody.>

I shook my head, frustrated, and stepped up onto the safety of the sidewalk.

Mom replied.

At that moment, a horn honk startled me. I glanced back to see a vehicle pulling to the curb. I turned away, trying not to panic, and sent the poorly-chronicled memory of Dr. Alison’s class to Mom. The vehicle trailed me, inching along the curb, then honked again. I looked in earnest at the vehicle this time. A blue Toyota Corolla with the window rolled down.

“Hey there!” It was that tiny Camille from lunch. Serena was in the back seat looking up at me. I stooped and saw that Lacey was driving.

“Need a ride?” Lacey asked.

I hesitated, blinking. So many rule violations packed into one small question.