“It’s all bullshit,” she had heard Christopher tell his friends at lunch one day. She had taken her usual seat—not at the popular table but at one nearby, where she could eat with her back to the group and listen, unbothered and unnoticed, to its conversation. Lunch immediately followed English, and so the subject of Christopher’s diatribes was often Mrs. Mitchell, perhaps the only teacher in the seventh- and eighth-grade wings who seemed unimpressed by the charming, handsome boy who’d moved to Roma, Kentucky, last year from Michigan. “I never got a B in Ann Arbor. And that was Ann Arbor. How can some English teacher from the boonies give me a B? You don’t even speak English here.”