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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 than 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.

“Well, you know what?” I say now. “I'm tired of being picked on. We've got to do something about it. We need justice.”

“Oh, so we're talking about revenge, right?” Joey leans forward. “Cool. What do we get to do?”

“Nothing,” Phoebe says sternly. She puts her hands on the table. “Look, I don't want to get suspended or anything.”

“Yeah, I don't either,” Delia says. “I can't believe Brynne's like this now. We used to be such good friends.”

“Yeah, in
fifth grade
!” Mandy says.

“Maybe you should just try to talk some sense into her,” Phoebe suggests.

“Sometimes you're so naïve,” Mandy tells Phoebe.

Delia shrugs. “I guess it's worth a try. She hasn't always been such a monster. I mean, she used to spend like every weekend at my house. We even played Scrabble together.”

“Just because she used to play Scrabble with you doesn't make her a saint, you know,” I remind Delia.

“Well, Clue too. She liked Clue,” Delia adds. “And you know what? She actually used to let me win sometimes.”

Something about her words makes me uneasy. Am I jealous maybe?

“Okay, fine. I don't care. That's settled. Now let's play Yahtzee,” Joey says.

“No way. Scattergories,” says Mandy, getting out the game. Delia rolls an
E
.

“How come we never play Yahtzee anymore?” Joey complains.

Just then, we hear “Did someone say ‘Yahtzee'?” All of us—including our club sponsor, Ms. Greenwood, in the back of the room—look to the door to see her and her wavy auburn hair glide into the classroom. Brynne is here.

“I'm so sorry I'm late,” she gushes, approaching the table.

“You're not here for the Bored Game Club,” Mandy says. And then adds, “Are you?” Like it might, in some crazy parallel universe, be possible. She's usually a little smarter than this.

“Oh, well, I like games,” Brynne answers, her blue eyes widening. Her head bobs as she rattles off her list. “I like Monopoly. And checkers. And cards.”