Once Upon a Toad Read Online Free Page B

stand beside my stepsister. I steeled myself for torture, Olivia-style. It was uncanny the way she knew exactly how to bug me the most in any given situation. By picking the first friend I’d made at school all day, she was hanging me out to dry. There was no way Olivia was going to pick me for her team, and the other girl, Taylor, didn’t know me from a hole in the ground, so no way would she pick me either until she was forced to. And since she was picking second and there were an even number of girls, that meant not only would I not be onthe same team as Rani, but I would also be the absolute last person picked.
    Which I was.
    â€œYou should go home to Texas,” Olivia whispered to me in the locker room afterward.
    Can I please go home to Texas? I wrote that night in my daily e-mail to my mother. The D’Angelos said I could stay with them.
    The answer was no, of course.
    Pull up your socks, she replied. You’re a star—and a Starr! Things with you and Olivia are bound to get better, once you settle in.
    But they didn’t, and the rest of the week pretty much went downhill from there. Tuesday and Wednesday were no different. Olivia kept up her campaign to send me packing, and the only bright spots at school were band and Hawkwinds practice. Especially Hawkwinds practice. I slipped into the trio-turned-quartet effortlessly, and Mr. Morgan found us a new piece to play for the talent show, a Bach fugue that was one of my favorites.
    But even that couldn’t make up for Olivia’s Reign of Terror, as A.J. had dubbed it. My stepsister talked about me constantly to her friends behind my back and made a big show of giving me the cold shoulder whenever she could, which was often, since we were in the same homeroom and most of the same classes.
    Life at home wasn’t any better. Because it had been raining nonstop since my arrival, I couldn’t even escape outside for a walk. In order to avoid Olivia, I was forced to spend most of my time in either the kitchen or the living room, where Geoffrey would pounce on me to play LEGOs with him. He’d been following me around like a puppy ever sinceI arrived, which was cute and everything, but sometimes a person just wants to be alone, you know?
    The problem was, there was no place to do that in a house as tiny as my dad’s.
    If I went upstairs to our room, Olivia would inevitably be there talking about me on the phone to Piper, or worse, sitting there with Piper in person, the two of them making loud, snarky remarks about my clothes (what was wrong with jeans and a T-shirt?), my hair (why should I have to brush it more than once a day?), my lack of makeup (who wanted to smear that goop all over their face?), and everything else they could think of. Oh, and forget practicing my bassoon. I had to barricade myself in my dad’s office if I wanted to do that, otherwise Olivia would moan about it hurting her ears.
    On top of everything else there were the stupid dioramas. My bed was an island in a sea of art supplies, as Olivia’s stuff had soon crept over into my half of the room. Iz had spotted the duct tape on the floor that first night and made Olivia take it off, but it quickly reappeared in the latest Barbie vignette—an exact replica of our bedroom. On one side of the decorated box a Barbie meant to be Olivia (I could tell by the curly blond hair) sat on the bed with her arms folded, staring across the room at the other Barbie—actually a vintage Skipper, Barbie’s little sister, thank you very much, Olivia—who was standing by the door with a suitcase in her hand. From it hung a luggage tag that said HOUSTON, TEXAS. Above the Skipper-who-was-me’s bed hung a little poster of a red circle with a slash through it. The word inside the circle? “CAT.”
    Nice.
    I got even by sneaking another Barbie into the diorama—this one with dark hair just like Piper’s. I placed her by the tiny window in her