Allie Finkle's Rules for Girls: Glitter Girls and the Great Fake Out Read Online Free Page A

up slowly.
    “None of us,” she said, looking Cheyenne straight in the eye, “needs ‘help’ like yours, Cheyenne.”
    “Speak softly to your neighbors, please,” Mrs. Hunter called from her desk, where she was sitting preparing a lesson. We all looked over and saw that Mrs. Hunter was staring at us with her green eyes crackling…
    …which is exactly what you didn’t want from Mrs. Hunter, who was the prettiest, nicest teacher I’d ever had, and who’d once told my grandma that I was a joy to have around the classroom.
    But Mrs. Hunter could be very scary when she got angry.
    We lowered our voices immediately.
    Cheyenne, who had to tilt her head a little to look Rosemary in the eye because Rosemary was so much taller than she was, seemed a bit scared. And not of Mrs. Hunter.
    “Whatever,” Cheyenne whispered. “I was only trying to be a friend. That’s all. Geez.”
    Cheyenne and her two pals M and D slunk back to their desks, where they were busy doing what they usually did on rainy days: drawing fairies with Mrs. Hunter’s collection of glitter gel pens (which I did, too, sometimes, when I wasn’t busy drawing zombies to show Stuart Maxwell that I could, or playing the Game of Life).
    “Don’t listen to her, Allie,” Caroline said after Cheyenne had left. “You don’t have to get Brittany a huge, expensive gift, no matter how much her parents are paying for her party.”
    “Right,” Sophie said. “Remember for your birthdays last year, Caroline and Erica, I made you each photo albums of pictures of us together?”
    “I loved that!” Erica smiled. “You scrapbooked that cover for it using funny things we used to say last summer.”
    “‘Hey, you in the yellow swim trunks,’” Caroline said.
    “‘I’ll have another doughnut, please. No, I’ll have two!’” Sophie cried.
    Caroline dissolved into giggles — which was unusual for her, since Caroline wasn’t a giggler. “Remember Little Hiawatha?”
    Sophie screamed politely.
    “I was so sure we were going to get caught!” Erica said.
    “Girls!” Mrs. Hunter said. “Please keep it down. We don’t want Mrs. Danielson coming in here, now do we?”
    “No, ma’am,” Rosemary said. She glared at Erica, Caroline, and Sophie, who were crying, they were laughing so hard. “You guys,” Rosemary said. “Shut up. It isn’t that funny.”
    Seriously. It wasn’t that funny. Rosemary and I had no idea who Little Hiawatha was, or why the mention of him — or the boy in yellow swim trunks, or the thing with the doughnuts — should make Erica, Sophie, and Caroline laugh so hard.
    To tell the truth, it sort of made me feel left out. This made me worry about other things I was going to feel left out of. Like Missy’s Twirltacular. Were they going to come home from that with all sorts of private jokes, like the Little Hiawatha one, that I wasn’t going to understand?
    Maybe I’d made a mistake choosing to go to Brittany’s birthday party instead.
    And that was the other thing: I couldn’t make a lovely photo album (because I didn’t even have any photos of myself with her) to give to Brittany Hauser on her birthday. I didn’t even have any private jokes with Brittany Hauser (unless you counted the fact that she’d put her mom’s cat in a suitcase and shook it around and I’d told on her and she’d tortured me about it for weeks afterward by calling me Allie Stinkle).
    Because she and I weren’t even that good friends. We were frenemies, really. Which is a mix of friends and enemies. We’d started out friends, then become enemies, then she’d tried to become my friend, then I’d shoved a cupcake in her face.
    And now, for some reason, she was still trying to be my friend.
    I was sort of starting to regret saying I’d go to Brittany’s party.
    Especially when I went home for lunch that day and yelled from the mudroom (which, for once, really was filled with mud, because it was raining so hard, Kevin and I got soaked walking from