Aadhya's mother told her that in elementary and middle school, she might be popular (it's half on purpose because of her parents, with the pool and the toys and the snacks and the professional cleaners coming by three times a week so Aadhya's family doesn't burn out on keeping up with a pack of kids trashing the place every afternoon, watching the movie versions of the books they're supposed to read and throwing popcorn at the big screen, taking out all her train tracks at once and building a loop that goes through the kitchen and the living room and the front hall, putting on improvisational plays wearing a hundred dollars of anything Aadhya wants from the thrift store every time they go, an endless supply of every kind of soda, pizza and ice cream on her birthday and her half-birthday and her quarter-birthday and at any other flimsy excuse, the spare bathing suits and the shark-shaped pool float and the water guns, all these things and stuff to make sure that Aadhya's popularity and Aadhya would survive any individual falling-out, middle schoolers are the cheapest guards all things considered). In the Scholomance, though, the popular kids are the ones who have something everyone wants - just like outside - only there, the thing everyone wants is survival. Aadhya cannot possibly carry enough chips and dressup jewelry to compete with enclavers. She can't sell people a safe place for themselves, their families, their kids, and that means she can't easily buy one.

The right strategy for Aadhya, according to her folks, is to be solid. Fair and straightforward and steady and reliable, willing to talk to the other losers who might have any number of hidden qualities or just luck she can get a sliver of, available to make exchanges and take a reasonable cut, and working on figuring out what she's good at - they think it's something to do with artificing but have yet to divine the pattern in what comes easily and what doesn't - so that she presents an extremely defensible case for joining the best available graduation alliance. Not valedictorian - there can only be one of those and people can and do die trying - but the sort of person who can walk up to an enclaver's alliance-in-progress, say hello, have someone say "hey, how about Aadhya", and have no one object.

Aadhya has enchanted clothes courtesy of her mother the weaver, and a little credit-card-sized calculator that charges off ambient light courtesy of her technomancer father, recipes and assembly instructions from her grandmothers, a thin book of spells she can't cast yet, a new haircut, a tub of healing balm, some artificing tools, a game plan, and one friendship bracelet chosen randomly out of a pile her friends made her when she said she was going to boarding school. It's the pink and blue chevrons from Summer, who has been told she's still welcome to come swim in the pool any time and who has a weird horsey laugh that she deploys constantly when watching TV and whose main concern the year she turns fourteen is that her parents won't let her get a chihuahua.

Aadhya's two grams closer than her father likes the look of when she steps on the scale. She leaves Summer's friendship bracelet behind.