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Emma scowls back at Edgar Ridgemont, holding her hurt arm away from her body.

She can feel the pain all the way from her shoulder deep down into her stomach, even though the actual burn is just a hot, blistery circle on her forearm, in the middle, between her wrist and her elbow.

Taking a shower is going to be excruciating.

She knows she ought to go to her next class, but what’s the point when she’s already failing? What’s the point of anything? Why does a diploma matter in a world that is falling apart?

She watches two students taping a poster on the wall next to Triple R, which is what everyone calls the Ridgemont Reading Room, a place where kids can study if they don’t want to be in their rooms or the library.

Triple R has vending machines and computer terminals and drawers full of school supplies for the taking, but Emma never goes inside anymore.

It’s try-hard territory. It’s where students with long-term goals go.

Emma’s one goal is decidedly short-term.

The poster, she sees, is hand-painted—a sloppy picture of Earth underneath a smiling sun. H APPY E ARTH D AY , it reads. L OVE Y OUR M OTHER .

Emma snorts. One of the students, a freckled freshman, turns around.

“Great poster,” Emma says. “Way to stand up to Big Oil.”

He looks at her in confusion.

“Earth Day!” she says. “I mean, seriously? As if paying attention to the planet once every three hundred sixty-five days could ever make any kind of difference. But really, I do like the painting. The sun’s very nice.”

Before he can answer, she walks away, heading toward the nearest open classroom door.

A teacher whose name she doesn’t know is lecturing a roomful of wide-eyed ninth graders.

“Now the twenty-two letters of the Phoenician alphabet are basically simplified versions of Egyptian hieroglyphic symbols,” he’s saying.

“But does anyone want to guess what the Phoenician alphabet was missing?”

Silence. Then two tentative hands get raised.

“Vowels,” Emma says from the hallway. “The Phoenician alphabet didn’t have vowels. Like Hebrew.” Everyone turns to look at her. “You know—A, E, I, O, U.” She pokes her head into the room. “ A is for animal species, thousands of which are threatened with extinction due to climate change.”

“Can I help you?” the teacher asks, walking toward her with a concerned look on his face.

“I don’t know, can you? E is for emergency, as in ‘We are in a climate emergency.’ I is for the ice in the Arctic, which is melting a hell of a lot faster than anyone ever thought it would.”

The teacher says, “This is extremely disruptive. Go find your own classroom.” And he shuts the door in her face, after taking a quick glance up and down the hallway, as if expecting to see white-robed orderlies coming after her with syringes.

Emma turns away. Raises her voice, backpedaling as she moves away from the classroom.

“ O is for our oceans, which are becoming more and more acidic because they’re absorbing so much of our excess carbon dioxide.

” She knocks her fist against the wall as she walks, dragging down the Earth Day poster.

“That’s only one of their problems, though.

They’re also getting too warm, and we’re totally overfishing them.

And hey, let’s not forget that giant garbage patch of microplastics in the Pacific. ”

She passes open doors, catching glimpses of classes, students craning their necks to see what’s going on out in the hallway. “ U —what should U stand for? Oh, I know—how about underwater ? Sea levels on the East Coast will rise a foot in the next thirty years. That should be fun!”

The bell rings. Students stream into the halls. They glance at her, then away when recognition sets in. It’s just Emma Blake, breaking down again, making a scene. If only they would realize she’s not trying to gain their attention for herself—it’s for the world. Ultimately, it’s for them .

“That takes care of our major vowels,” Emma says, walking among them, raising her voice so people can hear her over the din. “So let’s do consonants! Gotta back up to B, of course. B is for burning fossil fuels, which is what got us into this mess.”

Most kids elbow past her, some giving her a wide berth, like they might catch her crazy. But Emma isn’t daunted; there is method to her madness. Her voice gathers power. She sees a boy with floppy brown skater hair stop to listen.

“ C is for the carbon emissions that come from burning these fossil fuels. C is also for Celsius. Earth’s temperature has increased by almost one point two degrees Celsius in the last hundred and fifty years. Once we hit one point five degrees, C is for all the coral reefs that’ll die.”

“What is she talking about?” someone behind her asks. Not “What the hell is wrong with her?” Maybe she’s getting through, gaining a foothold.

“Floods and droughts both become more frequent,” Emma goes on. “Lightning strikes will increase! It’ll mess up your daddies’ golf games. Do you think that’ll make them pay attention to the earth?”

She feels a hand on her arm. “Emma.”

She shakes it off. “Where are we? D. Let’s see—”

“Emma.”

She’s pulled all the way around, and now she’s facing Rhaina Johnson, the uber-nerd from her English class. They’ve probably never said one word to each other before, but Rhaina is gripping her now by the shoulders and looking straight into Emma’s eyes.

“Hey,” Emma says wryly. “If you give me a second, I can get to F . I’ll try to find a way to get French horns into the climate crisis.”

“Are you drunk?” Rhaina demands. Her cheeks are pink, and her yellow hair is escaping from its double French braids.

“Of course not,” Emma says. “I feel a little weird, though. Can you OD on Advil?”

“Okay, are you having a breakdown or something?” Rhaina blinks up at Emma, who’s three inches taller at least.

Emma shakes her head side to side. Nope, no breakdown here!

Spencer walks past, staring at them. Ava, hurrying to catch up with him, widens her eyes in their direction.

“Hey, babygirl,” Emma says, and Ava’s eyes look like they might pop out of her head. “Your hair looks fantastic, by the way. Do me a favor and recycle that two-hundred-dollar shampoo bottle, okay?”

“What the hell are you doing?” Rhaina asks.

Emma brings her attention back to Rhaina. “Why do you care?”

“You’re acting really weird!”

“What does that have to do with you?”

Rhaina is visibly sweating. She’s watching everyone else watching them, and she clearly isn’t enjoying it. Emma, on the other hand, feels lighter than she has in days. What’s a good fact for the letter D?

“Look,” Rhaina says quietly, taking Emma by the elbow and leading her away from the small crowd that has gathered.

“You weren’t born weird, okay? So take it from someone who was: it’s not any fun.

It’s actually kind of awful. Don’t do it.

Try to blend in. Avoid being an outcast. Go back to being the popular girl you used to be. ”

Emma blinks at her. “Go back to the girl I used to be? Wow. Thanks for your input, but that’s impossible. A lot of things would have to have not happened. I’d basically need to time-travel.”

Rhaina says, low and urgent, “The people here—they can be vicious.”

“I know,” Emma says. “But they can say whatever they want about me. I don’t care.”

And it’s astonishing to realize that she actually doesn’t. When the flat well-wishes flooded into her text messages after her mother died, she felt cared for … until she actually responded honestly to the people who asked how she was doing.

She was supposed to say she was okay, she was supposed to act like she was okay, she was supposed to be okay.

Anything else just meant emotional work for someone else, personal responsibility, and time spent away from furthering their own lives.

Lives that would play out on a stage where the lights were dimming, and the actors were pretending not to notice.

“I don’t care,” Emma says again, relishing in the freedom of it.

“Well, I do,” Rhaina says. “I care about you, even though I shouldn’t, after how you treated me when—”

Emma is startled. “When what?”

But Rhaina only shakes her head, a clear veil of disappointment shrouding her eyes. “You don’t even remember.”

“I don’t,” Emma admits. “But I am sorry. Actually, truly sorry.”

Maybe Emma even likes Rhaina a little now, for being the one person brave enough to come up to her. But still.

“Just stop,” Rhaina pleads.

“I can’t,” Emma says. “The things I’m talking about are way bigger than you or me. Way bigger than Ridgemont.” She lifts her chin and yells, “ D is for desertification, which is occurring thirty-five times faster than it used to!”

“You really don’t see it, do you?” Rhaina says, stepping back from Emma. “You think you’re going to make this big impact on the world, but all you’re doing is dragging everyone around you down.”

Emma stops, finally listening to someone else. “That’s not true,” she begins, but Mrs. Coleman, her French teacher, suddenly appears and says, “Ms. Blake, you’re coming with me.”

“Bonjour, madame,” Emma says quickly. “Je préférerais ne pas aller avec vous—”

“I don’t care if you’d rather not,” says Mrs. Coleman through clenched teeth. “You are. ”

“Au revoir!” Emma calls to Rhaina, who’s standing alone in the hallway now. “ F is for fucked! As in we’re all—”