It was the first day of school, and Tess was terrified.

She had gone to the same school back in Minnesota since Kindergarten. Now, she faced senior year at a new school in Virginia, where summers were hotter than Hades and she didn't know anyone. Her only friend, if Rebecca could be called a friend, was at another school who-knew-where-else in the city.

To top it off, Tess's schedule was packed. It had to be if she was going to graduate on time. She had missed the second half of her junior year, and missing a whole semester of high school was not a joke.

For the first time since she was small, Tess was scared of walking into a school building.

"You're going to do great, Theresa," said Robert, her father. She knew this was a Solemn, Heartfelt Moment, because the only time he ever used her full name was when he was being sincere. (Her mother, on the other hand, only pulled it out when "Theresa Sue Morrison" was in trouble.) Robert was smiling at Tess over the center console. There was a smudge on his glasses.

Tess reached up and plucked the frames off his face. "Gross, Dad." She used the hem of her T-shirt to wipe the lenses clean.

"I wish you wouldn't do that. I was used to the world with spots. I'm going to have to re-calibrate now."

"Gross," Tess repeated. She handed him his glasses back and looked out the window at her new high school.

"Really, punkin. You're going to do great."

All of a sudden, Tess felt like crying. She twisted her fingers around the strap of her backpack. "I just don't know how I'm going to do this, Dad."

"Like you do anything that's hard. Start, and then keep going."

She looked back at him. The look on his face, so tender and so sad, made it impossible to keep the tears down.

"Now, don't do that," he said. He offered her a crumpled tissue from the breast pocket of his button-down shirt. "Don't go in there looking scared, okay? Go in there like Wonder Woman. That scene in the movie when she's coming up out of the trench? That's you today. Your hair isn't quite as majestic, but let's be honest here: her hair was the least realistic thing about that movie."

Tess laughed. "You're such a dork."

Grinning, Robert said, "Go on. You don't want to be late on your first day."

"Will you pick me up?" Tess pulled her wrinkled class schedule out of a side pocket of her backpack. "I guess Mondays are long days; it looks like the last class ends at 3:20. This schedule is going to take some getting used to."

"Your mom will probably get you. Until I get some tenure at this new office, I think I'm going to be—"

"—working late," they said together. Tess continued, "Have a good day, Dad. You do your own Wonder Woman thing, only with teeth."

Tess's dad chuckled as she closed the car door and stepped out onto the sidewalk, joining the stream of students making their way to the plain brick building. During registration, there had been a tour of the school for parents and students, but Tess felt completely lost as soon as she stepped into the doors.

She'd scrawled her locker number, 1185, onto her hand. She was not the most organized person at the best of times, and when stress was high like it was today, she needed all the help she could get to remember where she needed to be and when. Thankfully, finding her locker was not very hard; lockers tended to be in numerical order, after all.

Another girl was stationed at the neighboring locker, unloading her school supplies. Glancing past the girl's shoulder, Tess noticed that she had upgraded her locker with additional shelves and magnetic cubby-holes. The girl wore her hair in braids that were black at the top, but transitioned into an eye-popping violet at the ends. Purple nail polish and purple Converse suggested that she had a preference for the hue.

As Tess reached to open her locker, the girl looked up and said, "G'morning." Even her lip gloss had a purple tint.

"Good morning," Tess replied, aiming for a friendly tone and landing somewhere between anxious and relieved. She always preferred it when the other person spoke first.

"I'm Jacqui Gaines." Jacqui extended her left hand—the right was filled with sticky notes and pens.

"I'm Tess. It's nice to meet you." Tess took the hand and gave Jacqui an awkward right-hand-to-left-hand shake, wondering if it was obvious she was new.

"So, are you a senior? At my last school, the lockers were divvied up by class, but I can't tell here. Just trying to get the lay of the land."

Tess smiled, surprised. "You're new, too?"

Jacqui was quick to respond with a matching smile. "Yeah! Hey, girl!"

"I am a senior. Gosh, it's good to know I'm not the only new student."

"Can we just talk about how much it sucks to start a new school for senior year? Because it sucks." Jacqui shoved her sticky notes into one of the cubbies on the back of her locker door and began to separate her pens and highlighters by color. "I used to go to Armstrong, but my father got a promotion a while back and works out of a new office. The morning commute through the city is brutal. He finally got us up and moved at the end of last year."

"I don't really know the city yet," Tess said. She hoped Jacqui's array of writing utensils and note-taking materials was a personal preference and not indicative of how hard classes here at Eagle Point would be. She began to unload her own, much more limited, school supplies: black pens, folders, notebooks, a single highlighter. She had not even taken the trouble to label them for her classes yet. She hadn't wanted to think about it. "But I've noticed the traffic gets pretty crazy."

"Where you from, Tess?"

"Minnesota."

Jacqui gave her a startled look. Then she grinned. "Wow. How long you been here?"

"We moved in June."

"Y'all like it?"

Tess nodded. "So far, yeah. It's different, but people here are friendly."

"So they ain't friendly in Minnesota?" Jacqui said, her expression teasing. She had finished arranging her supplies and now turned her full attention to Tess. "What classes do you have?"

Tess fumbled for her class schedule again and held out the crumpled paper. "All I know is I have to be in room 201 for Spanish at the first bell."

Jacqui looked at Tess's schedule with interest. "Calc, SAT prep—nice!—and hey, we'll be together in Chem for blue block. Woah."

"What?"

"You know how much reading you're gonna have with two English classes at once, girl?"

Tess shrugged a shoulder. "You know, I like to keep busy."

"That's good, because you're gonna be—but I have two science classes, so I guess I don't have any room to talk. Well, we'll be together in Senior English and Chem!" Jacqui looked genuinely pleased. "But I take French instead of Spanish because je veux voyager à Paris and I'm totally gonna when I get to college."

Having known her for only a few minutes, Tess could tell Jacqui was an extrovert. She was grateful for, and a little exhausted by, Jacqui's bright kindness and apparent interest in striking up a friendship. Their conversation had taken away all the time Tess had planned to devote to stressing out before her first class.

"Tess?"

"What? I'm sorry."

Jacqui cocked her head. "I was just asking if you had a copy of the map." She offered Tess a piece of paper which was printed, front and back, with a layout of the first and second floors of the school. "I brought an extra so I could keep one in my backpack, but I think I'll be good."

Tess took the sheet and looked up at Jacqui with a smile. "Thank you. I'm so stressed out I'm lucky I remembered to brush my teeth this morning."

"I'm lucky you remembered, too," Jacqui said.

They both laughed, and by the time the first bell rang, Tess felt almost ready for what lay ahead.