To Miss Snark, who loved it first;
to Kara, who bugged me for two years to finish,
and to Bill Bernhardt, who showed me how.
Contents
About the Publisher
I HATE THIS SCHOOL.
I tugged at the lame plaid tie that was about three milli-meters away from suffocating me, and revised. I hate this tie. The whole uniform get-up—tie, buttoned shirt, slacks, sweater-vest, I kid you not—was worlds away from the baggy cargoes and T-shirt I’d worn to my old high school just last week.
I caught sight of the name tag the chubby advisor with too much lipstick had slapped onto my chest—HI! MY NAME IS JEFF—and changed my mind again. I hate the name tag the most, the tie second, and I still hate this school.
What started out as an idea my dad had six months ago to move us all from Phoenix to Cali had morphed into an exciting but unlikely adventure three months later, and then a nightmare when I literally came home from school and the SOLD sign was up on our house. Yeah, I agreed to it in the beginning, but how many of Dad’s ideas ever came to fruition?
The big ones, I guess. Maybe I should have known better.
I tried to make the case that it was the middle of the school year and transferring credits was going to be a nightmare, but apparently private schools are more interested in bank-account numbers than GPAs.
I looked down at the piece of paper in my hand and then up at the rows of lockers. I was pretty sure my assigned locker was on this floor, but I must have taken a wrong turn out of the office. I backtracked, trying to stay out of the way of the stream of students, and finally found the right corner.
The first thing I saw was the pink bubble gum, four feet lower than it should have been, inches above the ground, framed by a set of perfectly painted lips.
It was one of those huge bubbles you just know is going to pop and cover the girl’s face, and she’ll shriek and yell and whine that her makeup is ruined, blah, blah, blah. But the bubble didn’t pop—she did that thing where you suck all the air back into your mouth, and the bubble deflated into a
