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Now it's my turn to be shocked. “Hurt?” I say, loudly. “No one was
hurt
? First she tricks me into sitting in ketchup so it looks like I got my period all over my pants, which is painful enough. And now, just look at what I have to wear!” I step back so Mrs. Forester can see the Sassie Lass “slacks” I've been sentenced to spend the rest of the day in. I mean, I'm no style icon, but even I know better. I grab the material at the hips and stretch it out so she can see their width. I snap the elastic waistband. I lift my ankle so she can witness the exposed stubble. “It's sheer torture.”

She sits back, looking me up and down. “Well, Miss Albert, I'm sorry you're not happy with your outfit, but you look fine to me. Absolutely fine. Personally, I think those slacks are
darling
.

Now, would you like me to call in a peer mediator?”

I shake my head no. This is how clueless middle school administrators are. They send the nosiest, most gossipy kids in school out on a ropes course somewhere in the woods, maybe throw in a few trust falls, and then stick them right back into the center of everyone's private business. It's a known fact that behind every juicy Hubert C. Frost Middle School rumor stands a peer mediator with at least a couple of team-building awards to his or her name.

“Well, then, I suggest you get back to class and think about some ways that you girls can get along. Maybe there's a hobby you both enjoy—I bet you hadn't thought about that.” She gives me a fingernails-on-chalkboard smile.

I slowly make my way backward to the door. She sighs, turns back to her computer, shakes her head, and mutters, “Honestly,
ketchup
,” under her breath.

That's when I start to realize that if justice is ever going to be served, I'll have to do the serving.

ON THE BUS
home, Brynne sits by a window, her knees bulging into the back of the seat in front of her. Next to her is minion Danny Pritchard, a former geek who is enjoying recent fame based on rumors that someone saw him driving a car to CVS. He's one of the ten thousand guys in school who is madly in love with Brynne. I mean, sure, she's beautiful. If I didn't know her, I would swear that she was a model for Abercrombie or something. She has this long, wavy auburn hair and these eyes that are so blue you kind of wish you had a gem of the same color so you could wear it as a necklace. The only thing that doesn't look exactly right on her is this scar along her chin. It's like someone was drawing her and got the chin-line wrong and went back to fix it, but forgot to erase the original line.

And it's not just the boys who flock to her—the girls do too. Even if you don't like her, you kind of have to be in awe of her. Not only because of the way she looks—she just has this air about her like she's scared of nothing and entitled to everything. It's like someone really
did
die and make her queen of the universe.

You'd think that someone who can be so mean would have trouble making friends, but unfortunately that's just not true. Brynne is sort of the middle school version of a fancy country club. If you can get her to like you, then everyone seems to think you must really be pretty cool. And there are two categories of people at Hubert C. Frost: 1. her friends and/or those trying to be, and 2. fair game.

As a prime example of “fair game,” I duck my head and practically tiptoe down the aisle, but Brynne is too busy being annoyed by Danny to even look up and see me in my social-suicide Sassie Lasses. For that, I am thankful.

“Danny, move over!” she is saying.

“What?!” he says, pretending to be equally annoyed. But it's clear he really doesn't want to move another inch away from her.

“God. Your breath smells like fart,” she says to him and her audience. Everyone but Danny laughs.

“You told me to save you a seat!” He's forcing himself to smile, but you can just hear the humiliation in his voice.

“
Please
. Aim away when you talk to me,” she says, waving her hand in front of her nose. “When I told you to save me a seat, I didn't mean next to
you
.”

There's more laughing. I find an empty seat in the back, next to a kid who is so small that I didn't realize anyone was there until I was practically on top of him. He's got to be at least in seventh grade to be in our school, but his feet don't even touch the ground. He is reading
Car and Driver
magazine.

I pull out a piece of gum and stuff it in my mouth, which feels stale and sticky and like it might stink the way Danny's apparently does. I think of offering a piece to the kindergarten-looking kid, just to be nice, but when I glance over again, his pointer finger is about an inch into his nostril, so I just (very slowly) stick the package back into an outer pocket of my backpack and pretend not to notice. I spend the rest of the ride folding and refolding the foil wrapper into different shapes, and pretending that I'm some kind of origami artist and not just a humiliated middle schooler riding home in a loaner pair of elastic-waist pants. Every time the bus stops and one of
them
gets off, it feels a little less like a big fat lie.

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.