Chapter 15

Half an hour later, Dolce, who was full after a single plate of pasta, sat in stunned silence, staring at the pile of empty plates in front of Juniper. Her expression had shifted from one of mild surprise to utter disbelief. Juniper was tall and looked like she barely weighed a hundred pounds. How could she eat so much and not gain any weight?
Dolce surreptitiously pinched the flesh at her own waist. Sometimes, being at a dinner table felt like a crime scene.
Just then, Qadir and his friends passed by the cafeteria on their way back from lunch with Queenie. Seeing Juniper’s “battlefield,” he exclaimed, “Whoa, is the new girl a reincarnated hungry ghost or something?”
“Seriously, this doesn’t exactly fit the image of the delinquent princess we heard about,” one of his friends added.
Qadir smirked. “Yeah, she can really pack it away!”
Curious, Queenie, who had been reviewing vocabulary, glanced over. She saw the new student holding a bowl bigger than her face and slurping down the last of her soup, even picking out the last few bits of green onion from the bottom. She was a model citizen of food conservation.
“Don’t you guys think Queenie closed her book, her gaze fixed on Juniper, who was now leaning back in her chair with a satisfied, dazed expression. the new girl is kinda cute?”
Qadir and his friends looked again. “You know, she really is!” Fiercely cute.
…
After lunch, Juniper got a meal card and returned to the classroom. The afternoon was devoted to math, and the lesson was on advanced problems from past college entrance exams. The difficulty was cranked to the maximum. While the teacher lectured with passion, the students below sighed in despair, the air thick with more gloom than a haunted house.
As a transfer student, Juniper hadn’t received the review materials. Her desk was empty except for a blank sheet of paper and a pen, so she had to rely solely on listening. Halfway through, she realized she’d encountered similar problems when she was six. They weren’t difficult at all; in fact, she could think of even simpler ways to solve them.
Utterly bored, Juniper propped her head on her left hand and began doodling on the paper with her right.
“I couldn’t solve this last problem myself, so I want you all to give it a try. We’ll go over it tomorrow,” the math teacher announced.
As he finished, he looked up and saw Juniper staring off into space. He sighed internally, “Another lost cause.”
His blood pressure started to rise. Shifting his gaze to calm down, he unfortunately landed on Qadir, who was fast asleep under his jacket.
His blood pressure skyrocketed. What had he done to deserve these two?
Qadir woke up, feeling refreshed. He instinctively glanced at his new deskmate and saw her holding a pen, seemingly working on the math problem. Her scratch paper was covered in numbers, letters, and a mess of symbols. He recognized them individually, but together they were completely foreign, like some kind of coded message.
He’d always thought his own handwriting and formatting were bad, but the new girl’s was a disaster. He’d heard she’d attended a rural school for elementary and middle school and had dropped out not long into her sophomore year of high school. Now she was jumping straight into senior year material. There was no way she could solve these problems. She was probably just like him, putting on a show to pass the time.
Thank God. Barring any miracles, his long-held title of “Last Place King” was about to be passed on. The thought made Qadir’s mood soar, a grin stretching across his face.
When the final bell rang, Juniper slung her bag over her shoulder and left.
Queenie was collecting homework for the teacher. As she passed Juniper’s desk, she noticed the scratch paper in her drawer. The handwriting was messy, but the strokes were confident. More importantly, she recognized the problems on the paper -they were the ones the teacher had just covered. But the solutions sketched out here were far more concise than the teacher’s methods.