Free Don't You Trust Me? by Patrice Kindl

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8
    JUST LIKE IN BROOKE’S NEIGHBORHOOD, the high school grounds were one gigantic lawn, and there was hardly any chain-link fencing there, either. Yeah, the tennis court was fenced in, but the whole, sprawling campus was not, unlike my school in LA. Brooke’s school was wide open, so that anybody could walk in. People around here seemed to be awfully trusting, like nobody would ever need to be excluded, nobody would ever think to do anything bad. I suppose that’s the difference between the city and the suburbs; people in the suburbs think they have put enough distance between themselves and evil so that they can relax. In my opinion, though, greed and selfishness are a basic part of humannature. People can move away as far as they like, but their vices will come slinking along after them like a pack of half-tamed pariah dogs.
    My old school wasn’t bad. It sent a lot of kids on to college and met most of the state competency requirements even though an awful lot of the student body qualified for free lunches. You could tell that the average family income in this district was a lot higher. The cars in the parking lots were nicer, and so were the clothes worn by both faculty and students. I wasn’t used to so many people being white-bread-white either, even though I am pretty white-bread-white myself. There was a scattering of black and brown faces in the halls here, but most of the students looked like they’d blister and burn after twenty minutes in direct sunlight. Coming here from Southern California, this place had the look of a school in a 1950s teen movie.
    But who cares about the differences? School is school is school. So long as the class work wasn’t a whole lot harder, I’d survive all right. I always do.

    It was a lucky thing that Janelle was such a dope and expectations of me were therefore low. It was harder here. Well, for one thing, I skipped a full academic year because Janelle is six months older than I am. And I supposedly had two years of French under my belt. Forget that. I said I hated French and wanted to switch toSpanish. Janelle was failing anyway, so that made sense.
    But the math and literature classes were way harder than I’d expected, and instead of being goof-off periods like they were in my old school, you were actually expected to work in art and gym. Spanish was easy. I’d been taking it anyway, and living in LA, you absorb some through your pores.
    The thing was, I had a moment when I totally blanked out on “my” last name. Janelle— Um . . . yeah. I knew it—it was on her driver’s permit—but I hadn’t used it since I’d been here, so I sat there staring at the form I was filling out. Good thing Aunt Antonia had filled out nearly everything already. I had no idea what school I’d supposedly gone to, or where I’d been born or any of that stuff.
    Finally it came to me: Janelle Johanssen. Right. With a double s and an e not an o . I wrote it out as: “Morgan (Janelle) Johanssen.” I wasn’t going to be called Janelle by all these people.
    So far as social interactions went that first day, I sat back and watched as Brooke did her thing. It was hard to guess what place Brooke would occupy in the hierarchy. She was not bad-looking, even if kind of chubby, her family was rich, and she was in advanced placement classes. But she was clueless when it came to any kind of street smarts; she assumed everyone was like her, well-intentioned, friendly, and bubbly. She did not evenseem to know that there was a hierarchy. I could tell that some of her dear friends, if they thought it would do them any good with the most popular crowd, would drop her so fast, she’d bounce. She obviously had no idea.
    Personally, I didn’t care about being in with the in crowd. I like being by myself, and have no need of peer approval to make me feel important. True, I wanted to be admired and respected here,