You would think this would please me. It did not.

You can be a genius and still eat a peanut alone. You can be charming and still laugh at your own joke in an empty hallway. Human connection is not a math problem. It’s a train schedule written in disappearing ink on a moving train. And no algorithm — not even mine — can predict when someone will choose to sit next to you.

Her failure was instructive. She succeeded at first. Then she made the fatal error of being genuine for eleven seconds. She laughed at her own joke — a genuine laugh, not the rehearsed one — and the group froze. Authenticity, I’ve learned, is a social death sentence among adolescents.

Missy, on the other hand, has the opposite problem. She craves social connection but treats it like a high-stakes poker game where everyone else knows the rules except her. In this episode, she tried to reinvent herself — new hairstyle, new laugh, new opinions — to fit in with a group of girls who change their loyalty as often as I change my socks (daily, by the way, sometimes twice if I’ve been near a chalkboard).

For the record, I was right. About the peanut, about the train seating algorithm, and about the futility of unsupervised social gatherings. However, being right offered no tactical advantage. In fact, it yielded the opposite: isolation.