The first day of the spring semester was a Tuesday.
Mia arrived at Riverside Charter Academy at 7:10 a.m., which was fifty minutes before the first bell, which was exactly how she had always arrived on the first day — early enough to have the room to herself, to walk through it with no one watching, to make it hers before anyone else arrived to inhabit it.
Room 112 was smaller than her Austin High classroom and had better light — two windows on the south wall that would catch the afternoon sun directly. The desks were arranged in the default rows she always rearranged. She pushed them into a circle before she took her coat off, the way she had at Austin High, the way she had explained to every class on every first day: *we are not an audience. We are a room of people who talk to each oth
