She had been thinking about Ananya all weekend.
Not about what to do with her — that wasn't the question. Ananya had not committed a crime. She was thirteen years old and she had done something complicated, and the complexity of it was exactly what made Naina keep thinking about it. She had, with genuine intelligence and genuine loyalty, set up a structure that had inadvertently served the people who had hurt her teacher. She had believed she was protecting Kavitha Rao, and in believing that — in recruiting twenty-nine other children into the belief — she had helped the school maintain its silence for three weeks longer than it otherwise might have.
