The Class - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Frances O’Roark Dowell is the bestselling and critically acclaimed author of Dovey Coe, which won the Edgar Award and the William Allen White Award; Where I’d Like to Be; The Secret Language of Girls and its sequels The Kind of Friends We Used to Be and The Sound of Your Voice, Only Really Far Away; Chicken Boy; Shooting the Moon, which was awarded the Christopher Award; the Phineas L. MacGuire series; Falling In; The Second Life of Abigail Walker, which received three starred reviews; Anybody Shining; Ten Miles Past Normal; Trouble the Water; the Sam the Man series; The Class; How to Build a Story; Hazard; and, most recently, Then a House Fell on Her Head. She lives with her family in Durham, North Carolina. Connect with Frances online at FrancesDowell.com.

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Chapter One Chapter One

Ellie

Thursday, September 28

Ellie closed her notebook with a satisfied pat and leaned back in her seat. Done. Finished. Complete.

Hermione Granger, Fifth-Grade Muggle was ready for publication.

She’d have to figure out how to publish a book, of course. Could a sixth grader find an agent? Because Ellie was pretty sure you had to have an agent if you wanted to get a real book published, which is to say a book with a cover and pages, a book people could buy in bookstores.

Mrs. Herrera would know what to do, Ellie thought. Mrs. Herrera was the sort of teacher who would have a dozen great ideas for getting your first novel published. Even better, she wouldn’t look at Ellie like she was crazy. Publish a book? You just started middle school and you think you can publish a book? That was the sort of thing other adults might say, but not Mrs. Herrera.

Ellie reached into her desk and pulled out her spelling notebook. There were fifteen minutes left in study hall, plenty of time to finish her LA homework. She’d still have Spanish to do when she got home, but Spanish never took long, ten minutes tops. She could zip right through it and then get started on a new novel now that she was done with Hermione. It was the perfect sort of day for starting a new novel, Ellie thought as she uncapped her fountain pen, the air just cool enough that she could sit on the front porch swing wearing her cozy green sweater, the perfect sort of sweater to wear when you were writing your second novel in the last week of September.

Cerulean, Ellie wrote down, her pen making a satisfying scratch on the paper. A shade of deep blue. Sentence: As we stood on the beach, we looked out on the cerulean-blue ocean.

But what should her new novel be about? When she’d started Hermione Granger, Fifth-Grade Muggle in June, she’d known exactly what she wanted to write. J. K. Rowling had barely said anything in the Harry Potter books about Hermione’s pre-Hogwarts years, and Ellie was dying to know what she’d been like before the books started. When had Hermione discovered she had magical powers? Was she always the smartest one in her class? Did she have any friends? If she did, what kind of friends were they? Good friends, or the kind of friends who turned on you? When Ellie realized she might never know the answers to these questions unless she made them up herself, she’d started writing.

Paradigm, Ellie wrote now. An example or pattern of something. Sentence: I could write a book about how Lila Willis is a paradigm of a terrible friend.

Ellie glanced up from her desk. Lila was in the book nook with Rosie Nichols, passing a notebook back and forth. Ellie could just imagine what they were writing about—who liked who, who liked someone who didn’t like them back, who was best-looking, who was worst-looking. After school, they’d send out a series of group texts to everyone in Mrs. Herrera’s class with all the information they’d compiled. If Ellie made one of their lists, it was usually the biggest geek list. She was typically number three, after Stefan Morrisey and Ben McPherson, although sometimes she nosed ahead of Ben into the number two slot.

It was hard to believe that at the very beginning of school she and Lila had been friends. Well, sort of friends. They’d both been new, although Ellie was used to being new. Up until that summer, her father had been an army lawyer, and her family had moved every two or three years—Texas; Kansas; Washington, DC; even Germany. Then last spring her parents decided they were ready to settle down. They moved to Milton Falls and bought an old house with a big front porch two blocks from downtown, and Ellie’s dad opened up his own law office and became the sort of lawyer who helped businesses get set up.

Every morning last summer, Ellie woke up, got dressed, ate a bowl of cereal, and then waited on her front porch for someone her age to walk by so she could make friends with them. She was good at making friends. She’d been doing it all her life. But no kids walked by, and when Ellie started exploring her neighborhood, she didn’t find many kids there, either. There were old people and there were young people with babies. One of the moms with a baby told Ellie that most of the families with kids Ellie’s age lived in another part of town, where there were more soccer fields and youth activities.

So Ellie couldn’t wait for new-student orientation, which took place a week before school started. She’d finally get a chance to make some friends. And sure enough, after the principal gave a talk about what a great school Milton Falls Middle School was and how every student mattered, all eight hundred of them, a girl came up to Ellie and said, “Are you in sixth grade too? You look like you’re in sixth grade.”

Ellie had never had a friend like Lila Willis before. Lila was the kind of friend who called her up every night to talk about what they should wear the first day of school and if their outfits should match exactly or just have the same theme. “Maybe patriotic?” Lila had asked the night before her mom was going to take them to the mall to go clothes shopping. “You know, red, white, and blue, maybe with star earrings?”

“I don’t have pierced ears,” Ellie had told her. “I’m not allowed until I’m twelve. My mom’s really old-fashioned.”

“You can get your ears pierced at the mall tomorrow,” Lila said. “And then you can tell your mom you thought she meant sixth grade.”

“I can’t do that,” Ellie said. “I don’t want to lie to my mom.”

“Everybody lies to their moms,” Lila said. “Like, when my mom asks me how long I’ve been watching Netflix, I always say ‘about twenty minutes,’ even though it’s been two hours. She always believes me.”

They’d ended up getting matching T-shirts in different colors—pink for Lila, purple for Ellie—and white shorts. Instead of earrings, they got matching necklaces with blue butterflies on them. Sitting in the back seat of Mrs. Willis’s car on the way home from the mall, they’d taken their outfits out and admired them. “You know what I just thought of?” Lila asked, and Ellie had shaken her head. “Our clothes match and our names sort of match too—Lila and Ellie. I think we’re going to make an amazing first-day impression!”

Ellie guessed that was a good thing to do. Mostly she was glad to have a friend to sit with at lunch on the first day and to play with during recess. She bet it wouldn’t take long for her and Lila to make friends with other girls. In a way, Ellie thought, everyone in the sixth-grade class was new. This was the first year of middle school for all of them.

The two prettiest sixth-grade girls, Rosie Nichols and Petra Wilde, kept to themselves the first two weeks of school, while other girls hovered nearby and looked for opportunities to offer a Kit Kat bar or a compliment. “Rosie and Petra think they’re so special,” Lila had sneered. “Let’s ignore them.” Ellie thought that was funny. How could you ignore someone who was ignoring you first? But she was happy that Lila didn’t seem interested in being...