Free Trying to Float by Nicolaia Rips

the wrong idea about what had happened to Doris’s mom.
    The unexpected, but welcome, effect of this was that I was given a brief rest from people disliking me, as teachers, parents, and even some students came to believe that my unfortunate personality was less my doing than the weedy outgrowth of a deranged couple.

THE TRAITOR
    THE HOTEL WAS close enough to my elementary school that I could walk home. Most of the other kids lived farther away and took the public bus. Every day, Mother would meet me at the school, and often we would stop for tea on our way home.
    As a result of the bonding I had witnessed on the bus ride to Winter Valley (a bonding I was excluded from by nausea), I became convinced that if I commuted with my classmates, they would eventually come to accept me. At the very least, I would get an idea of what they liked to talk about, and that would help me socialize. After lengthy negotiations, my parents agreed to buy me a Metrocard for the NYC bus. My mother worried about this because she thought the bus was dangerous, even though many of my classmates took it as well.
    For the first few trips, everything went as I hoped. Though no one spoke to me, I was able to overhear what the other kids were saying, and in a notebook, I would write down thenames of the singers, television shows, and computer games they mentioned.
    It was not very long into this new routine that I noticed some girls gathering at the back of the bus, laughing. I didn’t pay much attention until one day when the bus was very crowded, and I ended up in one of the back seats. It was then that I saw why they were laughing.
    A woman in torn blue-and-yellow checkered overalls, no helmet, with paint splattered across her hands and face was cycling madly, dangerously, in back of the bus.
    My mom.
    Still very concerned about me, she had decided that if she couldn’t walk me home, she would secretly follow me, pedaling after the bus until I reached the hotel. Her outfit was what she wore when she was in her art studio.
    Once Mom gave up modeling, she was happy to never worry again about what she looked like when she appeared in public; so it was not unusual for her to go around in her shredded overalls, paint on her face, hair a mess.
    Even this, to my amazement and envy, did not affect her beauty. But it made for an odd sight, and I stopped taking the bus.
    â€”
    For the few days I was on the bus, my classmates talked mostly about middle school—a concern we all shared because our elementary school ended after fifth grade.
    We were required to list five different public schools (in any borough) in order of preference. Some of the schools asked for interviews and supplementary material. Our choices were then fed into a citywide computer program where schools would process our answers. If a student didn’t get into their first choice, the computer would shuffle down their list of schools until there was a match.
    Parents, school counselors, and teachers were obsessed with the selection process. Parents would spend months looking at schools, reading through pages of catalogues and “inside” guides, and forcing their children to endure endless interviews. Worst of all, we would have to go through it again when we applied to high school. This was how the New York public school system worked, and it was brutal.
    If we did not get accepted into the handful of superior middle schools, we would not, when it came time to apply to high school, matriculate into the two or three superior high schools—which meant that we were doomed for college, and thus for life. It was that competitive. Or so everyone thought.
    While we skidded down the middle school abyss, a small number of parents received an e-mail from our teacher, Rebecca.
    She explained to these parents that their son or daughter was very smart, brilliant even, and that she (Rebecca) wanted to make certain their child got into a top middle school. Having worked in the