Not only has she not read the short story they're discussing, she's never heard of it or its author!

The short story is about a teenager who gets in a car wreck and tells his father. His father congratulates him on being honest and says that he should be more careful in the future to avoid damage to the car. The teenager is proud of telling the truth.

...that's not a short story, that's an after-school special. 

Everyone in class thinks it is a short story!

They discuss the theme of Honesty and how it is always good to tell the truth to adults.

Ahahaha it is never good to tell the truth to adults. Not that she's going to say that out loud. 

Also, how is this the story they are reading in a high school literature 3 class. Not that she's going to say that out loud either. 

Painting and Choir are similar to Fashion and Design except that they're painting and singing, respectively. Both classes are coed.

In History they're working on their family genealogies. The shirtless boy from Physical Education is there. He smiles at Raine while he's reporting on the lives of his great-great grandparents. (Everyone in this town, it seems, has incredibly dull great-great grandparents.) 

She smiles back. 

Raine has actually done genealogy projects before, because middle school is hell. She's not totally sure if her family history is supposed to be the same here but she will happily write a report about her maternal great-great grandfather the horse thief and how her paternal great-great grandmother was banned from seven bars. 

Class ends before she gets to see the teacher's reaction to this!

She's carpooling home with Lee.

She does her best to look like she just had a totally normal day at school and not an experience that was incredibly freeing and really upsetting and extremely confusing all at once. She is probably not super succeeding at that but she can't really tell which direction she's failing in. 

Lee, conversely, keeps nervously looking like he wants to say something and failing. 

"You okay?" she tries after a couple of minutes. 

"Fine! Fine. I'm fine. Um. AreyougoingtothedancetonightmaybeIwillseeyouthere." 

"I am! And I will probably see you there, if you're going?" 

"Yeah I'm going." Intense grayscale blushing. "Maybe you would like to. Um. Dance with me? If you want to and you're not too tired and--"

"That sounds nice!" 

(This is admittedly at least half because there are two (2) boys at this school whose traits Raine has any idea of and Lee is the only one whose name she knows but it is nonetheless true.) 

Lee has used up all of his courage having these two sentences of conversation and is going to spend the rest of the ride STARING OUT THE WINDOW.

She will not poke him. She will thank whoever is giving them a ride when she gets out of the car and then she will flop onto her bed and try to think about the day and what happened in it in a way that makes literally any sense at all. 

No one disturbs her!

Incidentally, she's alone in a bedroom with a door that locks for the first time in months and there were some very pretty shirtless boys during P.E.

....yeah. Yeah, fuck, there really were, and she is. She takes full advantage of that opportunity, and then starts looking around her room to see if there's anything it looks like she was obviously planning on wearing tonight. 

There's a fancier dress hanging over a chair!

Today is Friday so she doesn't have to do homework if she doesn't want to. 

Yeah she's super not going to. She will, however, make further use of that locked door, and at some point it will be time to get dressed and go to a school dance, whatever those turn out to be like when you're a girl in wherever this is. 

Her dad drives her to the school dance! He instructs her in a paternal fashion to make sure to be nice and dance with everyone who asks. Also, she shouldn't dance too close to anyone. She's still young and not ready for a serious relationship. Now is a time for having fun, not for getting excessively involved with anyone. Her dad remembers when he was Raine's age and going to dances in the school gym. High school is the best years of your life and he's so glad that Raine is getting a chance to enjoy them. 

She readily agrees to all of the instructions she's given, thanks him for the ride, tries very hard not to think about how last time she saw her actual dad he was driving her to ex-gay camp, and gets out of the car and — 

— okay c'mon brain, given everything she's seen and everything she just heard it is not going to be a mosh pit filled with weed smoke and the occasional group of friends hanging out in the corner, it will be something that bears absolutely no resemblance to that, but like, still. 

The theme is The Beach! There are palm tree decorations; the wall is covered with blue construction paper on which someone has painted a bunch of fish. (They're quite good.) A parent volunteer is serving pina coladas and other tropical mixed drinks; presumably they're virgin. The DJ is playing Rock Around The Clock. A few dozen teenagers are dancing, all in heterosexual couples; some of them seem to have gotten the memo about not dancing too close.

Huh. Weird. She ignores the drinks — not because she doesn't like piña coladas but because some habits dont break in twelve hours — and hangs vaguely near the set of people who aren't currently dancing. 

One of them breaks off. 

"Hello, Raine," he says. "Want to dance?"