The Key and the Flame by Claire M. Caterer

Noring wrote: Next time, follow the proper format for labeling your test. It seemed unfair that this would be the test on which she forgot to write her name and date. Noring wrote: Next time, work more on your test and less on your art. She spent so much time decorating the dragon’s scales with alternating diamond patterns that she completely forgot to answer three of the test questions.

Holly worked very hard on them, creating thick bodies coiled like springs, and curly forked tongues. Thinking about rattlesnakes had led to drawing three small but vicious Chinese dragons in the margins of her test paper. Noring wrote at the bottom of the page (she had to squeeze it in): Next time, answer the question. You would remember, as Holly did, that the last social studies test you’d taken had earned a C because you didn’t exactly answer the essay question at the end: What was the significance of the Louisiana Purchase? Holly was supposed to write four sentences, but instead she wrote fifteen and had to use the back of the page because she’d wandered off topic and described how Lewis and Clark had fought malaria and rattlesnakes and dysentery, and how their trip was kind of like exploring the Amazon, with lots of wild animals and sometimes unfriendly native people.

You would sit at your desk during the five minutes and study the fake wood grain and wonder if anything in this school was real. Noring was tired of being second-guessed every single day. Noring and said loud enough for everyone to hear that you didn’t see how this week’s spelling words were ever going to help you in the real world, like if you had to escape from a mountain lion or a shark-you would get a stern look and a tally mark next to your name and you would give up five minutes of recess because Ms.

If you were the sort who longed for more than that-if, for example, you interrupted Ms. Every June, the town put on a carnival with two inflatable rides and a Ferris wheel. Everyone bought clothes at the same mall and saw movies at the thirty-theater megaplex and ate dinner at the same reasonably priced family dining establishment. She attended a midsize school in a town that was neither bustling with glittering skyscrapers and dark alleyways nor quaint with eccentric musicians and Main Street bookshops. It might have been mildly interesting if she had lived in the exact middle, but when Holly looked it up, she saw that her suburb was off by a few hundred miles, so it lacked even that distinction. Holly Shepard lived on a block of identical houses in the middle of the American Midwest.

The Key and the Flame by Claire M. Caterer