This Is My Brain on Boys by Sarah Strohmeyer

have set Kara straight about Tess’s mothers from the get-go. He should have told her about the check they wrote and the supportive emails that followed. While he was at it, he might have stopped Kara and Mack’s plans to vandalize the lab.
    Vandalism had never been part of the plan. In fact, neither Mack nor Kara had ever mentioned destroying anything. The idea was to free the animals. That was it. Clean. Simple. Innocent. Release the mice from their cages and the frogs from their tanks so they could scamper to freedom. And after listening to Kara’s horror stories, how could he not be on board?
    â€œDo you know what they do to the frogs?” she explained as they sat cross-legged on her dorm room floor, strategizing. “It’s almost too awful to describe.”
    Kara was still furious over what she’d witnessed the semester before when she took anatomy and physiology. She claimed she couldn’t sleep or eat until she stood up for those poor, defenseless animals.
    â€œIn anat and phys you need real muscles to test sodium and potassium reactions, okay? That means you have to kill the frog in the lab. First, you stun it.” She mimicked slamming the frog’s head on a table. “And it lets out a little croak.”
    Kris’s heart flipped. As a kid growing up in rural Connecticut, he’d loved to watch tadpoles swim around vernal pools as the miracle of evolution revealed itself stage by stage. Fins turned into legs. Gills closed. The tadpole became a frog and crawled out of the water onto the mud. And he fell asleep at night with the windows open, listening to the cacophony of the bulls singing their mating chorus. “They take them to a guillotine,” Karacontinued. “No joke. Like Marie Antoinette. You put the frog underneath it and push down the blade and . . .” She drew a line across her throat. “That’s what they do to frogs. Don’t even get me started on the cats.”
    The cats came preserved. Bags and bags of them to be dissected by the upperclassmen. Fetal pigs—“yanked from their mothers’ wombs at the slaughterhouse”—were also splayed on dissecting boards, pickled in formaldehyde.
    â€œThe Academy is so backward,” Mack said angrily. “Other schools have stopped torturing animals. Kara’s right. If we don’t do something major, nothing will change.”
    It wasn’t until Kris witnessed Mack going berserk, spray-painting random, violent images, smashing beakers in a rain of glass, swinging a baseball bat into terrariums, and almost—until Kris stopped him—tossing a laptop into the moray eel tank, that he realized it had never been about frogs or gerbils for Mack. It was something else.
    But Kris didn’t find out about that until it was too late. And now, here he was being condemned to a summer of hard labor and community service to pay for what had started out as a seemingly worthy cause.
    â€œMr. Condos!” Foy called.
    Kris snapped to attention. “Yes, sir.”
    â€œCome here. I want you to meet our visiting students.”
    Tess pivoted slowly. “ Kris? What are you doing here?”
    â€œMr. Condos has been to China and speaks fluent Mandarin. Isn’t that true?” The headmaster waved him into the gazebo.
    â€œI don’t know about fluent,” Kris said, nodding to the exchange students.
    They nodded in return.
    Tess introduced the girls. “This is Mindy and Fiona.” The girls smiled.
    â€œHi,” Mindy said shyly.
    â€œYou guys learned English really young, right?” Tess said. “I wish I’d learned another language.”
    Fiona butted in. “Yeah, I’m planning on majoring in hospitality so I can travel the world and run international hotels.”
    â€œOoh, like the one I stayed at on Moofushi Island in the Maldives. The water is gorgeous,” Tess chimed in.
    â€œIt’s awesome,” Fiona said.