Chapter 1 CHAPTER 1
The Cranberry Bog Middle School mascot was, not surprisingly, a cranberry. They tried to make it look tough by drawing its fists on its hips and a snarl on its face, but in the end, it was still a cranberry: a small, sour, bog-based fruit.

The cranberry scowled down at Lena Lennox from a rumpled pep rally poster as she stood outside the main office pretending her right forefinger wasn’t tangled in her hair. Lena twirled her hair when she was nervous, and she was so nervous now that she’d gotten her finger good and stuck. This had never happened at school before, and she was starting to panic.

Facing the wall for a tiny amount of privacy, she did her best to appear fascinated by the poster, though the pep rally had come and gone a week ago, and Lena hadn’t bothered to go. She studied the cranberry mascot’s cartoon features as if there would be a test on them as she yanked at her finger, which only tightened the snarl.

The poster’s headline read WARRIORS, UNITE! Cranberry Bog Middle School’s official team name was the Warriors. Lena had no idea why, but they were Warriors with a cranberry mascot. She was sure every team that played Cranberry Bog made fun of this—if not to their faces, at least on the bus ride home. She couldn’t blame them.

Switching from panicked yanking to the slow but reliable reverse-twirl method, Lena freed her finger at last. She moved ever so casually in front of the school’s trophy case to check her hair using the glass as a mirror. Whoever had designed the case had been way too optimistic about how much space the school’s trophies would need. Lena was surprised there weren’t tumbleweeds rolling around in there.

The simple truth was that the Cranberry Bog Warriors weren’t good. At any sport. The sheer consistency of the Warriors’ ability to lose gave Lena a small stirring of school pride. Even puny Flounder Bay, whose mascot was a flounder with a goofy smile on its flat face, trounced Cranberry Bog every time they met. After which the flounder mascot would trounce the cranberry mascot, which was plain humiliating.

Despite the ridicule it invited, Lena appreciated the fact that the word “warriors,” if you mispronounced it slightly, became “worriers.” If there had been inter-school worrying competitions, Lena, who carried her load of worries around like an extra backpack, could have led her team to one championship after another. Cranberry Bog’s sad trophy case would have contained some serious hardware.

Right now, she was worried about why the vice principal wanted to see her. And why the vice principal even knew who she was. Before she’d sat down this morning, Lena’s homeroom teacher had told her—without explanation—that she was wanted in the office. Of course she was nervous about that. Anyone would have been. But this was Lena Lennox, champion worrier, so by the time she had arrived outside the office, not only was her hand stuck to her head, but she was convinced she was about to be expelled and possibly arrested.

As Lena gave up on her lopsided hair and turned from the trophy case, Sam Shah joined her, cracking his knuckles loudly. Then Sofie Guerrero arrived, gnawing her cuticles as if she hadn’t eaten in days. Four more kids Lena didn’t know lined up beside them.

What were they doing here—and what kind of trouble were they in?

Lena was about to ask Sam and Sofie what they knew, when Vice Principal Sanchez emerged from her office and beckoned the seven of them inside. Ms. Sanchez took a seat behind her desk. The school counselor, Barbara “Call Me Barb” Weller, was in the visitor’s chair, holding an enormous mug of coffee and smiling encouragingly. Call Me Barb’s resting face was “encouraging smile,” so this didn’t necessarily mean anything.

“Greetings, friends,” Ms. Sanchez said when they were arranged around her desk.

Ms. Sanchez’s lipstick was the exact same shade of red as the cranberry mascot. Lena wondered if this was on purpose and if there was such a thing as taking school spirit too far.

She glanced at the others. Fidgeting and nibbling and cracking away, they seemed as nervous as she was. A small, skinny boy gulped audibly, as if he were fighting a rising tide of puke and the puke was winning.

Ms. Sanchez appeared to recognize this warning sign. “No one is in trouble!” she reassured them. “Quite the opposite.”

Call Me Barb’s encouraging smile widened a notch.

“You seven,” said Ms. Sanchez, “have been chosen to participate in an experiment of sorts.”

As Lena reached for her hair and the puke-prone boy gulped again, louder, Ms. Sanchez added quickly, “More like a review panel. Does that sound better?”

A tall boy who was probably an eighth grader nodded eagerly, as if he were thinking, Yes, a review panel sounds great! Lena didn’t see much difference.

“We’re considering starting a mindfulness meditation series to reduce student stress,” Ms. Sanchez said. “In fact, CBMS is going to be the pilot school for a new program. Before it goes school-wide, we want to try it out on representatives from each grade: a Cranberry Bog Meditation Group. Your teachers recommended you because they thought you could benefit.”

Lena eyed the other experimental subjects with horrified understanding. In spite of their best efforts, their teachers had noticed them. Their teachers had noticed them enough to think they would benefit from stress reduction. This was even more humiliating than being trounced by an overly cheerful flounder.

“Starting Monday, every day for two weeks,” Ms. Sanchez continued, “the group will report to the small gym instead of homeroom for meditation training. We’ll supply yoga mats, but you’ll need to bring your own phones and download the app, which the school will pay for. Do all of you have phones?”

Lena nodded. Students were allowed to have phones as long as they stayed inside lockers during school hours. Being caught with a phone outside your locker during the school day was an automatic detention. Lena’s heart sped up unpleasantly as she pictured being caught with her phone. Especially by Ms. Campbell, school secretary, who had eyes everywhere and a pad of detention slips at the ready in her cardigan pocket.

Ms. Sanchez was starting to seem psychic when she said, “Staff will be alerted, and you won’t be given detention for having your phones with you during this time.”

The tall boy raised his hand.

“Even by Ms. Campbell,” Mind Reader Sanchez added.

The boy’s hand went down.

“If you have further questions,” said Ms. Sanchez, “Barb can talk with you individually. She set up the pilot program for us, and she’s going to take charge of the Meditation Group.”

Call Me Barb’s smile cranked up to high beam. “The company reached out to me personally,” she said. “They’re interested in expanding to group sales.”

Group meditation made about as much sense to Lena as group sleeping or group toenail clipping or—

“Here are the permission slips,” said Ms. Sanchez, handing out sheets of paper fresh from the printer. “Think of this as having om-room instead of homeroom,” she added, raising her eyebrows expectantly.

Call Me Barb alone chuckled.

“Tough crowd!” Ms. Sanchez said. Barb shrugged. “But I urge you to take advantage of this opportunity. Meditation is a proven stress reducer, and this app is supposed to have amazing results. And let’s face it,” Ms. Sanchez said. “Excellent meditation puns aside, it’s got to be better than homeroom, right?”

She had a point. Homeroom was no one’s favorite block of the day, and it was especially rough on those, including Lena, who didn’t like unstructured time at the mercy of their alphabetical peers. Lying on a yoga mat and surreptitiously checking her phone seemed like a pretty good trade-off, as far as she was concerned.

At least it did at the time.