Three.

“Here, I made you these.” Madison Bell handed me a disposable tray of six brightly frosted cupcakes, her arms outstretched. “I know they won’t make up for our grade yesterday, but everyone loves cupcakes. Right? Next time I promise to try harder.”

I’d spent the evening wondering about Madison. Did she sincerely think the poster was her fault? I had the grading rubric folded up in my backpack: almost everything nicked was my responsibility. Was she stupid, or dense? Was she simply trying to take the pressure off me? I didn’t know. Either way, I took the tray from her and she skipped off to her seat.

That was the story of Madison Bell and Jamie Lawson. With the end of our project came the end of our tenuous friendship. Or so I thought.

The weekend came and went and I had stopped thinking about Madison entirely. Polly and I took a trip upstate to a publishing conference. I was a junior editor in the Writing Workshop at school. Polly wrote Charmed fan fiction. I’d never seen an episode of Charmed, but I edited her stories all the same. She had a knack for romance, in my opinion.

I didn’t have my future planned out. I wasn’t interested in anything, not really, and my mom would never be able to afford for me to go to college anyway. But I knew what I was good at. The rules of the English language always came easily to me. I’d read so many books, so many sample works, and so many essays that I could find the strengths and weaknesses of each sentence. I wondered if professional editors needed a college degree…

I spent a lot of time in panels, learning about what publishers liked and didn’t like. I picked up samples from some of the stalls to take home and read through in my leisure. A few times, I’d even called or emailed the writer and asked for more chapters! They were always so generous. But that’s what people do when they don’t have talent: they admire the people who do.

Monday, at school, I brought two stories from the conference to read at lunch. I always spent my lunch period in the Writing Workshop, in case a student needed help. No one ever did. Why come in during lunch when you could ask for a pass in fourth period?

I was on page eighteen of a fantasy novel when Madison Bell walked in.

“Jamie?” Her voice brought me out of the paragraph - a much too-detailed description of a woman’s hair. I looked up. “I didn’t know you worked in here! That’s so great! I didn’t think anyone would be in here at lunch time, but I thought I just had to check. You know?”

“Uh huh.”

“Am I bothering you?”

“No,” I lied, closing the stack of papers. “Did you need something?”

“Yes, actually…” She pulled out a stapled set of papers and pushed it across the table toward me, a nervous smile on her lips. “I have this essay due on Friday for my composition class, and… well it’s just really no good.”

“I’ll be the judge of that.”

I read through the first two lines. It was really no good.

“I can’t organize it right. I tried doing an outline like Mr. Snyder told me, but it’s not working. I know what I want to say. I just can’t say it.”

“It’s about dolphins?”

“Marine life in general, I guess. I really want to be a marine biologist. Or a watch maker. But I think those are out of style nowadays.”

“Those are some pretty diverse interests.” I kept reading through her opening paragraph. It was a wonder she spoke English…

“I get new hobbies all the time. Right now it’s watches. I took my dad’s apart and tried to put it back together, but it’s not going very well.”

Was she good at anything? I sighed and turned the page.

“Can you help?”

“I’ll try,” I told her.

She sat down, holding the edges of her chair and kicking her feet. I took a deep breath.

“So you tried making an outline?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Did you try doing it in reverse?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, when writing essays, you should always write your introduction last. That way you already have everything written down.”

She nodded, her eyebrows tilted together in… concentration maybe. She was really trying to listen. I inched my chair closer to hers and took out a pen.

“What’s this paragraph about?” I asked.

“Pollution.” I wrote ‘Pollution’ next to the paragraph.

“This one?”

“Laws about the ocean and stuff.”

“So the whole paper is an environmentalist view on marine life.”

“I think so.”

I put a few notes in the margins.

“So these are your three talking points,” I told her. “You need to put the topic in the first sentence of each paragraph. Don’t make lists like this.”

“But Mr. Snyder said…”

“He probably meant the first sentence of the introduction. Don’t do that with the body paragraphs. Actually, don’t use any commas at all for the opening sentences of the body. Make them clean and to the point.”

“Okay,” she mumbled.

“You look overwhelmed.”

Madison blinked, looking up from the paper for the first time since she’d sat down. Overwhelmed didn’t describe her. She seemed… bewildered.

“Do you understand this?”

“Of course,” she said with a smile. I was beginning to recognize her smiles. This one didn’t wrinkle the skin under her eyes or show her incisors. I’d seen this smile before, but I couldn’t remember when…

“It’s okay if you don’t understand it. That’s why I’m here.”

The smile trickled off Madison’s face like raindrops off a window on a misty day. But she didn’t look sad, not at all. Her milky brown eyes were soft behind her glasses and her mouth parted like she had a word hanging off the tip of her tongue.

“Let’s go over it again,” I told her. Without protest, she nodded.