It was Lisa's last class of the day study ball. After being picked up precisely at noon from the bus depot, Lisa had been brought directly to school. She'd met the principal, a short, frail, balding man, who had said no more than "How do you do?" and then had handed her class schedule and waved her out of his office. The principal had seemed no more interested in her than had Miss Sacks, the head of the foster home for girls where Lisa would be living.

Miss Sacks, a fast moving, fast talking redhead in her mid-thirties, had snatched Lisa out of the bus depot and whisked her over to Sutton High before Lisa had had time to think. "Have fun. See you tonight," Miss Sacks had said while revving the engine of her Saab. And then she had squealed away almost before Lisa could close the car door behind herself.

Lisa looked around the classroom. This class, study hall, was the first class in which she had seen any boys. During her first two classes, English and History, she was beginning to wonder whether Sutton High was sexually segregated. Not only were there no boys in her classes, but there were no boys in the halls. She had wondered whether the boys attended classes in a separate wing of the school. But now, with study hall, the boys appeared. Some boys were already sprawled out in their desks when she had entered the room. Other boys had staggered in during the first fifteen minutes of the study hall. The study hall moderator, a skinny, round-shouldered little man who resembled the principal, sat at his desk at the front of the room with his nose in a book. He'd assigned Lisa her seat when she'd come in, but aside from that, he kept his nose in his book, apparently disinterested whether students came in late, and apparently unconcerned with what was going on in the room.

Despite the moderator's apparent disinterest, the study hall was the quietest class Lisa had ever been in. The girls read, and the boys slept. Lisa had been surveying the classroom for half an hour now, from the moment she had entered it, and still, every time she looked out the window then back at the classroom, she blinked her eyes, wondering whether she was seeing things. This was the strangest school!