Three men in unfortunately gray overalls stare at the wooden knight.

It hasn't even been up for twenty-four hours. Yesterday they spent the better part of the afternoon trying to get it to stand up, despite the knight's sword constantly pulling the figure downward to the left. We'd all sat around, watching them swearing and arguing about how best to fix it. A whole audience of people with nothing better to do.

They finished just as it was getting dark, and now here they are again, first thing in the morning, trying to scrub a spray-painted penis off the sign.

It had to be expected. If you call a housing complex for people who can't afford housing Castle Estates, and then you think a wooden knight galloping his way toward the squat brick squalor is going to make people feel good about living there, you kind of deserve to wake up in the morning and find a dick on your sign.

"That lasted long," Marcus Cotero says, sitting beside me on the bench.

I've lived at Castle Estates for all of nine days, but I already know I'm supposed to stay away from Marcus Cotero. My aunt warned me he's often in the middle of local gossip, and whether or not anything people say is true, the last thing I need is to be right there in the middle with him. Still, it's early morning, it's the first day of my senior year, and he has nice eyes.

"Not really surprising, I guess."

"True story. You can't stop the dick. Try as you might, you just can't stop the dick." He shakes his head as if he actually feels bad for either the men in gray overalls or the cartoonish knight. No reason to feel bad for the knight; given the graffiti artist's poor sense of perspective, the knight has received a substantial upgrade.

"That should be the motto," I say. "Right under the knight. 'Welcome to Castle Estates. Where You Can't Stop the Dick.'"

Marcus Cotero laughs and takes out a pack of cigarettes. He offers me one, and although I don't smoke, I take it anyway. He lights his, but I just pull mine apart, investigating the strange brown flakes people are always in such an uproar about. No, it's not healthy, but lots of things aren't. Starting with Castle Estates.

"You're new, right? Alexia Lawlor?" he asks.

The name sounds weird. Too much alliteration. I took my aunt's last name when I came to live with her. It's how I've managed for the last five years. Every year choosing to move in with a different relative during the summer so I can start school in a new town or state each fall. I have one goal: Survive a full school year — 180 days — hiding behind a new name, new home, and new persona. Sure, it hasn't worked for me yet, but this year I only have to last 162 school days. Seniors get the privilege of needing only 90 percent of an education, I suppose.

Maybe this time it will all turn out okay. I'm nothing if not hopeful. Despite everything, I can't seem to give up on the hope that maybe, just once, it won't end up the same. I mean, hey ... percentages are with me this year, right? Fewer days mean fewer chances to screw it all up. Again.

I shake off the thoughts and turn to Marcus. "Lexi. Call me Lexi. And, yeah, I just moved here a few days ago."

"I'm Marcus."

"I know."

"Already been warned?"

The way he asks bugs me. It's like he's expecting me to confirm it. I have a serious antipathy for taking another person's version of someone else to heart. One of those things I've picked up these past five years.

"No," I lie to Marcus, because I'm determined not to let anyone else define him for me. More so now that I know he expects different. "I just have a good memory, and my aunt gave me a tour when I moved in."

He doesn't seem to believe me, but he nods and looks back at the three men, who are now arguing about the best way to remove spray paint from a wooden sign. I wonder what kind of emergency hotline you have to call to get grown men out of bed on a Monday morning to scrub genitalia from housing-project signs.

"So, Green Arrow, huh?" Marcus asks.

I look down at my shirt. I've never seen the show, but the shirt's green, and today's Monday, and Mondays are green days. They've been green days for a while now. I don't remember anymore when I chose which day went with which color, and I definitely can't recall the rationale I hope I had at the time. All I know is that, in all my iterations of myself, Mondays stay green. Mondays and green never change. No matter where I'm living or what name I use, that's something secure. Constant.

"I've never watched it," I tell Marcus. "I just needed something green."

He looks at my green Chucks, olive-green army pants, green T-shirt, and dark-green hoodie. "You really like green, huh?"

"On Monday."

He pauses, takes a last drag from his cigarette, and stubs it out. "Want to tell me about it?"

"Not really. It's complicated."

"Isn't it always?" he asks, picking up on my cliché refusal to talk about myself.

We don't get to say anything else because the bus pulls up.

It's embarrassing to start a new school and ride up on the crappy old school bus, but I didn't have time to meet anyone in the neighborhood in the past nine days. Besides, the neighborhood seems to consist of Marcus Cotero, a phallus-obsessed graffiti artist, a bunch of old people, and Mr. Simmons, who fell asleep drunk in the community fountain on my first night here. He'd been trying to build a device to make the fountain dance to music, but all he'd done was nearly electrocute himself. Oh, and now we permanently get to hear the opening of Beethoven's Ninth at approximately 3:17 p.m. and a.m. So there's that.

When you live in shitty public housing and you take the school bus, you get stuck at the beginning of the morning route and on the end of the afternoon route. I guess no one cares if you have to get up before five or if it takes you more than an hour to get home. I'm not surprised. I might be new here, but that's the way of it all, isn't it? If you're poor, people just expect you to be irrelevant.

I watch Marcus head to the back of the bus, looking brooding and intense. I almost go with him but decide instead to settle into the front seat. I'm not here to create anything permanent.

I can't say I'm nervous about starting at a new school. I mean, I'm terrified, but not more nervous than I usually am. About life in general. But this ... this is what happens every year. School starts, and I try to blend in. As well as I can, despite everything about me that just seems to beg for attention. I do my best not to get involved with anyone, to keep my head down, and to just get through one damn school year. Maybe people will look at me with my weird wardrobe, but if I say nothing or give them nothing of myself, there's not a whole lot they can do with that.

Or there shouldn't be, but of course someone always seems to find out. Someone says something to someone else, and then there's a connection, and suddenly I hear Scott's name one day and it's all out there again. Then off I go to find another place to hide.

No, I tell myself. Not this time. Every year you tell yourself you won't get close to anyone, and then you let down the walls a bit at a time, until you can't get back behind them. Not this year.

I sigh and lean back against the seat, taking in the students as they reconnect with friends they didn't see all summer, despite proximity. I watch the freshmen as they get on the bus, and I recognize my...