The Kid cares hugely about being liked. I wish I could immunise her against that need. It's hard to do the right thing, to stick up for yourself or others under pressure, or just to be yourself, when you live in fear of being unpopular. She's not alone in this affliction.
Fortunately, she is reasonably popular at school. I suppose she has a certain exotic appeal, because she knows different things to the rest of the children school. I'd anticipated she would be learning all the games and rhymes and slang expressions of her schoolfriends, and I thought they might look down on her because she wasn't in the know. But I forgot that she had plenty to teach them too! She can "shoot" people by popping dead flower heads off at them. Her daisy chains are in a different style to theirs. She has plenty of songs to teach them, including some which are rather unsuitable - of course, those have gone down particularly well! She's the only one at her school who can do a duck call by blowing on a wide blade of grass.
She'd expected to be given a hard time for having been home educated, but after the first few days it seems to have faded from everyone's minds. No one asks, and she doesn't mention it. They do seem surprised that she has friends outside of their world. On her third day, someone asked her, "Who's your best friend?" She explained that she didn't exactly have a best friend at the moment, but did have several close friends, and rattled off their names. None of them attended her new school. She was asked about them: which year were they in? She didn't know. And two of them were BOYS? You can't have a boy as a best friend. The girl persisted in trying to get her to declare a new best friend: "But who's your best friend: Katie or Susie or me?" The Kid had no answer. She didn't want to give offense, but thought it very strange that she was expected to throw off her oldest friends in favour of someone she'd only known for two days.
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