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  After about a million years, the bus wheezes to a stop in front of the old farmhouse where I live with my grandmother, spits me out, and groans away. It’s not a pretty house—it’s supposed to be white, but it’s gone kind of gray and flaky where paint is peeling off—but today I’m incredibly happy to see it.

  Oomlot races toward me like a bolt of yellow-white lightning. I must reek of humiliation, because Oomlot licks my wrist so much that I have to dry it off on The Pants.

  This is one of the things I’ve really learned to love about dogs—they are the exact opposite of middle schoolers. You can do everything you’re supposed to do in school—smile at people, use deodorant, join clubs—and still most people will look at you like you’ve just pooped in the middle of the School Rules! Welcome Back assembly. And dogs, well, you could actually poop in the middle of a back-to-school assembly, and they’d probably love you even more because of it.

  Ferrill, a Great Dane of gargantuan proportions, lumbers down the porch steps toward me and nuzzles my hand. The screen door squeaks open and Queso, our tiniest dog, follows Ferrill off the porch, yapping, until Corny slaps her hands together, meaning “stop” in their language. Then she waves at me from inside the screen door. I squat down to pet Queso. I am surrounded by dogs. Oomlot pushes in closer and leans against me, placing his front paw on my foot. I squeeze him into a hug. Even though his main ingredient is yellow Labrador retriever, it’s whatever secret ingredients he has that make him especially cute. His coat is surprisingly soft and thick, and he’s got a little white patch of fur over each eye, like those Swedish punctuation marks—that’s why Corny named him Oomlot. After she got his dog tags made up, she found out it’s supposed to be spelled umlaut, but she stuck with her version. With his big round eyes, the O’s really suit him.

  Corny walks out onto the porch, followed by our most polite and proper dog, Tess. Tess is a greyhound. She’s smart and fast, but not fast enough. She was a race dog that never won any races, so now she’s ours.

  “Will you just look at this?” Corny says from the porch. “I keep saying I should take a picture.”

  “Well, take one if it makes you so happy,” I say, revealing how incredibly cranky I am.

  She gives me her little closed-mouth smile. That’s one of the funny things about her. She’s never liked her teeth—they’re crooked and kind of gray. She says she was always teased about them when she was my age, and I guess that was before they had braces and white strips. You’d think by the time you’re old and people stop expecting you to be pretty, you wouldn’t care anymore. But I guess the things that happen to you in middle school stay with you basically forever. So I can just imagine what I have to look forward to.

  “You know, I can’t believe how scared you were of these dogs when you first moved here,” she says now.

  “They seemed so huge!” I say in my defense. Besides, that was a whole year ago. Yeah, I was afraid of them—okay, like deathly afraid. But at the time they seemed like a pack of hairy, salivating, fanged, bloodthirsty creatures. But that was all before. Before Corny sprained her ankle and I had to get over my fears just to help keep her business going. Before Oomlot claimed me as his favorite human. Before I got to cuddle a freshly born puppy.

  “Yeah, that Queso is a monster,” she says, with fake seriousness. Queso’s a full-blooded Chihuahua who was given away because she wasn’t perfect enough for the dog shows. Her ears were too floppy, and she was one pound heavier than she was allowed to be. Sometimes I wonder if the whole world is just some supersized version of Hubert C. Frost Middle School.

  Queso hears her name and runs back onto the porch toward Corny, who scoops her up and tells me she has a T-R-E-A-T for me inside. She has to spell it out or the dogs will start spazzing, bowing and panting, practically doing pirouettes just to get a biscuit. But I follow her inside, stepping over Bella, our laziest dog—a hound mix who has the round shape and gray-brown coat of an Arctic seal—and find that Corny’s actually baked me a cake.

  “It’s all for you. No bonemeal. No yeast,” she says, over her shoulder. When Corny cooks, she likes to do it efficiently. In this house, that means using stuff that can be eaten by both species—canine and human. “Not even a drop of beef broth,” she adds.

  She turns around to hand me a knife. Then she almost drops it, finally seeing me at full-length. “Good God, Olivia. What are you wearing?”

  I try not to break into tears as I explain what happened. And somehow I manage not to. Her wrinkled face gets even more wrinkled as I talk.

  “I’m so sorry, Liv. I can’t believe they put you through this. If only I had known—”

  “It’s okay,” I say. Which it isn’t, but still, it’s not like it’s her fault.

  “I’m going to call that nurse lady and tell her, if anything like that ever happens again—”

  “It won’t,” I reassure her. But inside, I’m not so sure.

  “I don’t care if they got a zillion sanitary napkins and a pair of gold-sequined pants worn by Elizabeth Taylor—”

  She hugs me. It always surprises me how warm and soft her hugs are since she looks so old and bony.

  The cake has white icing, and she’s made little pink asterisk-looking things across the top with a tube of frosting. “Those are supposed to be flowers,” she says.

  “Thank you,” I say, and mean it.

  You know how sometimes you can be sad all day and not cry, but then someone does something nice for you, and it should make you really happy, but instead it turns you into a sobbing mess? Well, this is one of those times.

  I call my dad after I eat a piece of the cake, which is surprisingly good, considering Corny’s cooking habits. He asks me about school, which I don’t want to talk about. Then I ask how things are going at work.

  “Unfortunately, very well.” He laughs apologetically.

  My dad is supposed to be moving here with me and Corny when things start to slow down with his job. He’s a carpenter, and his boss keeps promising to retire when the work stops coming in so quickly. But I guess everybody and their brother in Valleyhead, where I used to live, is building additions onto their houses, and my dad’s boss keeps giving him more and more money to stick it out.

  “Wish I had better news,” he says.

  Oomlot settles on the floor next to where I sit, and I reach out and ruffle his chest. Yellow-white fur floats into the air. A few years ago, Corny found Oomlot living behind the Food Lion. She took care of his worms and his fleas and his manners—but his shedding, it’s the one thing she couldn’t fix.

  “It’s okay,” I lie. I don’t bother telling my dad I miss him, because I think he already knows that. Plus I might cry all over again, and crying is one of my least favorite activities.

  He says, “I’m glad you’re okay with this,” and I wonder if I’m becoming a better liar.

  It’s hard missing my dad. Just this past summer, I did have the chance to move back home with him. But I didn’t. I loved my old cat Grey, but I couldn’t see leaving the dogs for her. There’s also another reason, a secret reason, I didn’t go back home, and it’s this: apparently, living people can have ghosts. Last time I was there, I could still smell the cinnamon my mom used to put in her coffee. I swear, one time after she left, I heard her goofy laugh coming in from the back porch. It’s not like it was scary or anything—I mean, I loved her laugh—but still, it made me feel a little haunted.

  But now, on the phone, my dad won’t drop the school question. He comes right back to it and asks why I don’t want to talk about it. So I have to say something. I don’t tell him about the ketchup packet, but I do tell him about my new science teacher, Ms. Flamsteed, and how yesterday, the first day of school, she told us how proud she was of her last name because she comes from a long line of scientists, including the guy who first sighted Uranus.

  He breaks into a monstrous laugh, just like we all did in class when she said it, despite the fact that she carefully pronounced it YOUR-uh-nuss. I say it
the normal way when I tell him.

  I’m glad he’s not one of those adults, like Ms. Flamsteed, to use the word inappropriate. That word might not be dirty, but it sure can make someone feel that way.

  It’s good to hear him laugh. And it’s good not to feel like crying.

  IT’S BEEN LESS than twenty-four hours since the ketchup incident, but already Corny has washed and ironed the life out of the Sassie Lasses and folded them into a thick, tidy square. I’d tried to “forget” them this morning—and hopefully forever, actually—but Corny ran out to the bus stop, clutching them to her chest as if they were spun from gold or something, and made me promise to return them to Mrs. Arafata.

  I find Delia at her locker before first period. “Can you go to the clinic with me?” I ask.

  “Why? What happened?” She spins me around and examines the butt of my jeans.

  “Nothing. Except, oh, yesterday,” I say, turning back around quickly. “And now I have to turn the old-lady pants back in.”

  “But I’m supposed to get to Math five minutes early—I get extra credit for writing the warm-up on the board.”

  “Please? I really don’t want to go alone. It’s like reliving the whole humiliating event,” I explain. “You’re my best friend. I need you!”

  It was just last week that these exact words were spoken, and that time, she was doing the pleading. Delia was worried she had a chronic foot-odor problem, so I had to take a whiff of three pairs of sneakers and some flip-flops and let her know if it was just her imagination. (It wasn’t.) So we both know she owes me.

  “Okay, you know I will.”

  We wind our way through the crowded hallways until we are close to the clinic. Then I brace myself and pick up my pace, and she follows me through the door.

  “Oh, Olivia! Hi!” Mrs. Arafata says, way too loud, giving me the same wide-eyed, spacey smile that adults sometimes give to preschoolers.

  “I’m supposed to give these back,” I murmur, studying the floor tiles.

  “Oh, honey,” she says, extra-syrupy. “You didn’t have to. Consider them a gift.” I glance up just enough to see her looking very pleased with herself.

  I try to stay polite. Maybe she’s the type of person who would offer them as a gift to anyone. Maybe she secretly knows how horrible they are, and really doesn’t want them back. Maybe. But then she lowers her voice to just above a whisper, and says, “And Olivia, you know you can let me know if you need anything else. I understand your situation.”

  My situation. That my own mom ran away from me. So it’s perfectly clear. The pants are charity. She’s judging me. It’s not just girls like Brynne who see me as a reject; it’s the whole freaking human world.

  I want to throw the pants at her and run, but my arms seem stuck to my sides and my feet are like bricks. Luckily, Delia remains fairly pliable. She takes the pants from me. “She actually doesn’t need them,” she says, and hands them over to Mrs. Arafata, who blinks and smiles.

  And then Delia pulls me out of there.

  “Thank you,” I say as we walk down the hall together.

  She puts her arm around my shoulder and gives me a little squeeze.

  Then we spot Tamberlin Ziff and Carolyn Quim standing in the hall in front of us. I stare at the floor and concentrate on keeping my feet walking forward. As we pass through the cloud of Tamberlin’s strawberry-scented perfume, I hear her say, “You think those two are a couple?”

  “I know, right?” Carolyn screeches with laughter—a sound that feels like it will stay with me all day, like an annoying song you can’t get out of your head.

  After school, I summon Delia, Mandy, Joey, and Phoebe to an emergency session of the Bored Game Club.

  Okay, so it’s not actually spelled like that on the Hubert C. Frost Official List of Student Activities. It was just the backfire from one of Phoebe’s brilliant ideas—the one part that stuck.

  Halfway into seventh grade, she decided we needed some new members. We all spent a week designing flyers to advertise the Board Game Club—drawing squares around the borders with things written in them like (her idea), “You made a new friend! Advance three squares,” and other things that make me cringe now. Two days after we got the flyers up, the Chess Club fired back, plastering the walls with their own “The ‘King’ of All Board Games” signs. And then—the nail in the coffin—by the end of the week, the Sudoku Club had managed to produce about two billion of their own full-sized neon-orange posters, which they used to cover every square inch of space in the math and science halls, and even the creative arts alcove, screaming in eight-inch letters, “Who needs BORED Games? Sudoku + U = Fun!”

  The Sudoku Club recruited eleven new members. The Chess Club, a respectable seven. And us, well, we got Joey.

  I’ve started rehashing the scandalous details of the ketchup incident when Mandy sighs and clunks her head down on her desk, revealing the blond roots in her jet-black hair, and says, “We’re all a bunch of Marcies.” This word—Marcie—may be by far the biggest contribution I’ve made to my group of friends. Marcie was the name of the head ribbon dancer of The Great Me! Self-Esteem Tour, which came to my elementary school every fall, so naturally, my then-best friend Rachel and I used this as a code word for “loser.” Last year, I moved away from Rachel and left my old school, so this word is one of the few things left of my former life.

  Joey twists up his face and says, “Shut up, Mandy. Your mom’s a Marcie.” This really has nothing to do with Mandy’s mother at all, it’s just Joey’s way of saying he disagrees.

  Phoebe’s pale little eyes have been blinking wildly since I started talking. Now she turns to Mandy. “Excuse me, Mandy. Olivia just got attacked—in the worst way possible—and you call us all Marcies?”

  Joey jumps in. “I don’t think it was the worst way possible. It’s not like she got mugged or anything.”

  “Joey, you don’t understand. You’re not a girl,” I tell him, and immediately regret it. He is taking this as a compliment.

  “What I mean,” Mandy says, “is that we might as well all walk around with, like, bull’s-eyes or something across our backs.

  I can’t stand it. Why does stuff like this keep happening? Why do they always make fun of us?”

  “Well,” Joey starts. He sucks in a breath like he’s about to spew out a list.

  “Don’t answer that,” Delia pleads.

  We all sort of look around the table and answer it for ourselves.

  Take Phoebe, for one. She’s almost invisible. Not personality-wise, I mean. She’s actually really out spoken, so it’s not like you can ignore her. It’s just that Phoebe is so pale she’s almost see-through. Her eyes are the color of water in the shallow end of the pool, and her skin also has a watery quality, like skim milk. Her hair is long and white-blond, which kind of adds to her ghost-ish looks. She’s also got some serious braces on her teeth, which gives her a smile about as pretty as a box of nails. But she’s mostly serious and doesn’t smile very often. It’s almost like she got cheated out of the gene for humor—but if that’s the case, she makes up for it with a double serving of brains. In fact, everyone seems to think that if it weren’t for Phoebe, Mandy would have failed both the third and fifth grades. Or, as Mandy tells it, “I probably eventually would have been the only sixth grader with an assigned parking spot.”

  Not that Mandy’s dumb. Not at all. Actually, most of the time she “gets” things that leave the rest of us clueless—jokes, people, that kind of thing. She’s just not great with things you learn in a classroom. And people don’t always “get” her. Mandy’s what you might call emo. In some schools this would be cool, but Mandy, she takes it just a little past that point. She dyes her hair black and sometimes gray, and wears black Sharpie on her lips. Also, she has a pierced eyebrow, and it sometimes gets a little infected, so half the school calls her “Bubonic,” and the other half is just afraid that she really is.

  Joey’s the only guy in our group. He’s a full year younger tha
n the rest of us (and acts it!) because he skipped fourth grade on account of being some weird type of math genius. He’s kind of round and looks a little like the kid in the Far Side cartoons, which makes him a favorite target of ninety-nine point nine percent of all middle school boys. We’ve gotten used to Joey—he’s obnoxious, but sometimes he can be pretty funny. Also he has the unique ability to keep score when we play board games without writing down any numbers at all, which is an added plus.

  Delia is probably the most socially acceptable of us all. She’s got these really pretty light brown eyes that remind me of root beer candies, and wavy black hair, and she’s small and thin and wears good clothes. But her social problem is acne. Really bad acne. The skin on her arms and neck and hands is smooth and the color of, say, a Frappuccino, but her face is rough and blistery and different shades of red. Her mother won’t let her wear makeup because she’s afraid it’ll make Delia’s acne worse, so she just tries to hide it with her dark tumble of hair. I love Delia—she’s my best friend out of all of them and the first friend I made when I moved here—but even I have to admit it’s pretty bad. The worst thing about it is that it’s made her shy—maybe not with us, but with the outside world. I hear that she used to be really outgoing and stuff in elementary school, but when she got zits, she crawled into her shell.

  And then there’s me. My outward defects are that I’m almost six feet tall and kind of scarecrowy in parts. If you took the word AWKWARD—with all those pointy A’s and W’s, and that unwieldy K—and made it into a person, that person would look a lot like me. My clothes fit me strange. I also have really frizzy dark brown hair. Actually, it’s beyond frizz—it’s more like fuzz. So sometimes I wear knit hats, even in August, when it’s ninety degrees out, like today. My inward defects are that, thanks to a bunch of bad genes, I’m probably destined to a life of social problems and insanity. Also, thanks to Brynne Shawnson, people say I smell like dog. There may be some truth to that, since I live with a bunch of them, but I do bathe.