Free Lock and Key by Sarah Dessen Page A

give Jake here some advice, it would be what?”
    “Get a haircut,” someone said, and everyone laughed.
    “Or,” Ms. Conyers said, “get a good night’s sleep, because napping in class is not cool.”
    “Sorry,” Jake mumbled, and his buddy, sitting beside him in a Butter Biscuit baseball hat, punched him in the arm.
    “The point,” Ms. Conyers continued, “is that no word has one specific definition. Maybe in the dictionary, but not in real life. So the purpose of this exercise will be to take your word and figure out what it means. Not just to you but to the people around you: your friends, your family, coworkers, teammates. In the end, by compiling their responses, you’ll have your own understanding of the term, in all its myriad meanings.”
    Everyone was talking now, so I looked down at my slip, slowly unfolding it. FAMILY, it said, in simple block print. Great, I thought. The last thing I have, or care about. This must be —
    “Some kind of joke ,” I heard someone say. I glanced over, just as the backpack suddenly slid to one side. “What’d you get? ”
    I blinked, surprised to see the girl with the braids from the parking lot who’d been running and talking on her cell phone. Up close, I could see she had deep green eyes, and her nose was pierced, a single diamond stud. She pushed the backpack onto the floor, where it landed with a loud thunk , then turned her attention back to me. "Hello? ” she said. “Do you speak?”
    “Family,” I told her, then pushed the slip toward her, as if she might need visual confirmation. She glanced at it and sighed. “What about you?”
    “Money,” she said, her voice flat. She rolled her eyes. “Of course the one person in this whole place who doesn’t have it has to write about it. It would just be too easy for everyone else.”
    She said this loudly enough that Ms. Conyers, who was making her way back to her desk, looked over. “What’s the matter, Olivia? Don’t like your term?”
    “Oh, I like the term,” the girl said. “Just not the assignment. ”
    Ms. Conyers smiled, hardly bothered, and moved on, while Olivia crumpled up her slip, stuffing it in her pocket. “You want to trade?” I asked her.
    She looked over at my FAMILY again. “Nah,” she said, sounding tired. “That I know too much about.”
    Lucky you, I thought as Ms. Conyers reassumed her position on her desk, a slim book in her hands. “Moving on,” she said, “to our reading selection for today. Who wants to start us off on last night’s reading of David Copperfield ?”
    Thirty minutes later, after what felt like some major literary déjà-vu, the bell finally rang, everyone suddenly pushing back chairs, gathering up their stuff, and talking at once. As I reached down, grabbing my own backpack off the floor, I couldn’t help but notice that, like me, it looked out of place here—all ratty and old, still stuffed with notebooks full of what was now, in this setting, mostly useless information. I’d known that morning I should probably toss everything out, but instead I’d just brought it all with me, even though it meant flipping past endless pages of notes on David Copperfield to take even more of the same. Now, I slid the FAMILY slip inside my notebook, then let the cover fall shut.
    “You went to Jackson?”
    I looked up at Olivia, who was now standing beside the table, cell phone in hand, having just hoisted her own huge backpack over one shoulder. At first, I was confused, wondering if my cheap bag made my past that obvious, but then I remembered the JACKSON SPIRIT! sticker on my notebook, which had been slapped there by some overexcited member of the pep club during study hall. “Uh, yeah,” I told her. “I do. I mean . . . I did.”
    “Until when?”
    “A couple of days ago.”
    She cocked her head to the side, studying my face while processing this information. In the meantime, distantly through the receiver end of her phone, I heard another phone ringing,