Four.

“Do you want to get Taco Bell or something?” Polly asked. “I’m so over cafeteria food.”

“I’m busy today,” I told her, packing up my bag.

“Writing Workshop? I thought no one came in during lunch.”

“Yeah, that’s usually the truth.” I slung my backpack over my shoulder and leaned against the desk. Madison was supposed to meet with me again. “Madison Bell needs help with an English paper.”

“The ball of sunshine you despise?”

“I don’t despise her,” I admitted. “She annoys me.”

“But you’re helping her with her project now?” Polly sounded accusatory. That annoyed me too.

“It’s my job. I’m not going to turn her away because she bothers me.”

“Look at you. A pillar of ethicality.”

I rolled my eyes. “I gotta go. See you after school?”

“Have fun with Sunshine!”

I’d spent about an hour the night before poring over Madison’s paper. Beyond the structural issues, there were a ton of grammar mistakes. But before Biology had begun - the last class before lunch and the only one she and I shared - Madison was already at my desk pushing her new draft into my hands.

“I totally reworked it!” She was almost jumping with excitement. “It’s so much better now, just read it. I took all your advice. It’s definitely an A paper!”

“You meant to use a colon here,” I said, pointing to the first sentence, “not a comma.”

I could see the air rush out of her, like a deflating balloon. She stopped rocking on her heels and her shoulders fell two inches down. She scrambled to pick up the paper, reading the first sentence over and over, until the bell rang. Finally and slowly she made her way over to her desk and took a seat. She never took her eyes off the paper.

I sighed.

Twenty minutes into class, a note appeared on my desk. I looked around the room, but nobody was staring at me. I had been paying attention to Mrs. Hancock and hadn’t noticed how it got there. With trepidation, I opened it up to find in familiar handwriting and sparkly blue ink:

“What’s the difference between a colon and a comma?”

I looked toward the window, where Madison was clearly paying no attention to the teacher. I thought her cheeks might be a little more red than before…

“Google it,” I wrote on the same piece of paper and passed it to my left. I told Ellen to pass it up to Madison. She did.

I watched Madison unwrap the note under the desk and read it. For two words, it took her an awful long time to read, though. Finally, she pulled out her pen and wrote back. A minute later, the note was on my desk again.

“Okay sorry.”

I rubbed my eyes and pulled out a fresh piece of paper, tearing off a scrap from the corner. She was so annoying.

“A comma is a pause in a sentence, usually connecting two thoughts. Colons are for lists and explanations.”

I handed the note to Ellen. She knew what to do. After another few minutes of listening to Mrs. Hancock go on about the reproductive system of reptiles, the same paper was on my desk again.

“Thank you ♥”

…oh.

I folded the paper up and tucked it into my backpack, just beside the grading rubric from our poster presentation. One mistake and one good deed, side by side. Is that what redemption is?

It was a week later, on Monday, when Madison Bell slammed her paper down on my desk in Biology. Maybe she couldn’t wait until lunch to tell me. The paper in front of me, printed in red at the top: A. Great arguments. Much improvement.

“That’s amazing,” I said with a genuine smile. But it paled in comparison to hers. Her eyes were bright and wrinkled, her teeth showing in full between glossy, shining lips. And before I knew what was happening, she wrapped her arms around me and pushed her cheek against my own. Either I could hear both of our heartbeats, or mine was beating at twice the speed. I could feel blood rushing through me so quickly it made me dizzy. Stars filled up my eyes.

“Thank you so, so much! I couldn’t have done this without you!”

Somewhere in the midst of it all, I’d forgotten how to breathe. The mechanism was zapped away from my brain by the heat of her body. But just when I thought I might faint, the memory came rushing back. A lot of things came rushing back. She pulled away and skipped off to her seat in a way that only Madison Bell could do.

After class, while I was packing up my books, I could hear voices outside the door, voices I only barely recognized. Maybe someone from class.

“She’s so stuck up. She always thinks she’s better than everyone else. Why? Because apathy and depression is so trendy now?”

“And you see what she wears, right? I swear I saw that shirt at Walmart.”

“She’s friends with that girl in the yearbook club, with the nose piercing.”

“What were you even doing hugging her, anyway?”

Then I heard a voice I very much recognized. Definitely someone from class.

“I dunno,” Madison said. “I like her. I think she’s cool.”

“You like everybody,” one of the girls laughed.

“Well,” Madison spoke up, “I really like her in particular.”