Page 7 of Barbie: Dreamscape

“No.”

“She can’t be top of the class and be entertaining these kinds of—”

“No.”

Paige brightens. “Okay. So she’s demoted, and I’ll—”

“No,” the whole class says in unison, because they are tired.

“Okay. Gossip time over,” Teacher says, snapping his fingers, directing us all to our seats. Callie and I walk over the rubble of the hole in the wall toward our desks.

“It’s just Boxing Day jitters,” I whisper to Callie from across the row as everyone gets their notebooks out for our final exam. “Tell me if you still feel like this in a few hours. We can talk more. Okay?”

“Yeah, okay,” she says back.

But I don’t get the feeling she’ll bring it up again. I want to say something else, make her feel better, but I don’t know how. Before I can keep trying, Teacher places the final on my desk, and our conversation fades away in light of the task in front of me.

Because if there’s one thing I do know, it’s how to take a test.

Exactly one hour later, the bell rings for the last time, a sound as familiar to me as Misty and Bonbon’s rousing tweets.

I’ll never hear that sound again, I think, with a pinch of mourning, as I turn in my final exam to Teacher.

No one else seems too torn up about it. I walk out of the room, only to see confetti made of paper from past assignments being thrown around the hall, and some of Robin’s birds angrily squeaking at the mess.

“I’m so glad school is over, so my real life can begin,” Paige says, smirking at me as I lean against the lockers closest to Callie. “Who cares about school, anyway?”

I roll my eyes at Paige’s comment—if anyone has cared just as much as I have about school all these years, it’s her—but her words sink into my chest, piercing like claws.

I’m good at school. I like school.

School has order. Routine. It’s… expected and learned and controlled.

It’s the only thing I really know. Outside being a student, who am I?

I think of Sunny tinkering for hours on end in his garage, or Callie utterly engrossed in a book, pure joy coursing across her face as she loses herself in fictional worlds. I don’t have hobbies. I don’t have passions. I used to paint when I was little, but I haven’t picked up a brush in years. I consider Callie’s last question to me before the final.

No, I don’t wish I had a choice.

Because I don’t know what I want; I don’t know who I am…

And I don’t need to.

The Fates are going to tell me.

Chirping birds knock me out of my thoughts, and I startle as a pink ribbon is dropped from their beaks, settling across my chest.

I look down.

#1, the sash says. Glitter erupts as all the heart-shaped balloons burst at once, confetti raining down, disappearing just as the flecks of paper touch my skin.

Valedictorian.

It’s official now.

“Congratulations, Barbie,” Teacher calls from the classroom doorway, his smile creasing the corners of his eyes. One of Teacher’s accessories is a pen that grades fast as lightning. “You earned it.”

“Yes, she did!” Callie says, throwing her arms around me, all signs of her previous distress gone.