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papers get read aloud to classes years later as examples of super-galactic perfection.
    As if he actually believes that if only I’d be that girl and if he drove that big car over to Winston School, we would all be magically transformed. As if parents who pay the humongous tuition out of leftover pocket change would leap out of their even bigger cars, bang on the Mercedes’ slightly darkened side window, and beg him to sell them a strip mall in the Philippines.
    Because a guy with such a perfect kid must be hot shit.
    It is as if he’s never actually met me, an ordinary student with the normal amount of friends, who doesn’t like sports, and is somewhat good at art.
    Art?
    Did somebody say art ?
    Hell no.
    After Winston, I would be attending the totally impossiblecollege of my parents’ dreams. Biz school from the sound of it, between Bloody Marys. Because: Do you know what twenty-three-year-olds who graduate from Wharton make even in this economy? Six figures!
    Gabby Gardiner, shake hands with your totally impossible, not-going-to-happen future.

VII
     
    IN ACTUAL FACT, THE HIGH POINT OF THAT YEAR AT Winston is when Miss Cornish, the art teacher who does the crafty part of art—ceramics and pottery and sculpture—puts my ceramic spoon holder on a pedestal outside the teachers’ lounge because it is an outstanding example of really good glaze.
    At my old school, I had always been this sort of regular person. At Winston, I figure out quickly that I am sub -regular. Basically, everybody else is either gorgeous or super-smart or incredibly good at something important, born with the popular gene or richer than God. And I’m not. So, big surprise, I do not get a whole crowd of popular friends and a round of applause when I walk down the hall.
    Look:
    There I am, telling myself all these helpful affirmations such as, Oh Gabby, you really are smart. Oh Gabby, you’re totally normal and everything is fine. Oh Gabby, aren’t you just the most adorable thing that ever got out of bed in the morning?
    Only if any of this were true, it is hard to explain why I’m standing around Winston School watching Billy Nash and the Slutmuffins lounging in the Class of 1920 Memorial Garden, owning benches and tables and patches of grass that are instantly cool just because they own them, watching the smart kids and the über- rich kids and the weird kids in the manga club all hanging out together in big happy clumps, while I am alone with my unimpressive grades and no one to talk to except for Lisa Armstrong and Anita Patel.
    “Your little friends called again,” Vivian says from what sounds like far away across the vibrating green room.
    Friends?
    You would think that after all these enlightening sessions with Ponytail Doc trying to get me to tell her all about myself, it would be easier to connect the dots.
    I open my eyes, but everything stays in a lot better focus when they’re closed. “Who?”
    “That Lisa and Anita,” Vivian says. “ Those friends.”
    Making her little puke face as if having to be reminded that her daughter is once again reduced to counting these poor excuses for fashionable teens as her only friends makes her physically ill.
    As if she can’t stand to remember.
     
    What I remember is the smell of burnt, melted bittersweet chocolate and charred marshmallows. The backs of their heads—Lisa’s strawberry-blond fluff and Anita’s black braid—blurring in the smoke that billows from the wall oven in Lisa’s kitchen. Grabbing for the mitts and the fire extinguisher and waving magazines at the smoke detectors to try to get them to turn off.
    How long ago was that?
    There I am, thirteen years old and slouching around Winston School in the shortest blue uniform skirt in the history of man over tiny black bicycle shorts. The only cute thing about this skirt is the pocket on the butt. Anita is wearing a similarly truncated skirt over a pair of leggings, which is also, God help us, a Winston School style,