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cheese dressing smothering her greens. “This is so not BP.”
    She reached across and swapped our plates with a conciliatory smile. “This is way more your style—go for it. You deserve it tonight.”
    The shot echoed through the theater and a hot blast of spotlight landed square on my face. I looked down, horrified, and gave a very convincing performance of someone about to meet her death as I flopped into my plate of creamy dressing, forgetting, until the moment it met my forehead with a sickening squish, to dodge the cherry tomato.

Chapter Three

    I could hear the clink of my parents’ silverware in the dining room as I stood at the door watching for Anne’s mom. The urge to kill my good friend for the dinner theater fiasco died when she borrowed the Art King’s cell at lunch, pretending to want to show off his
Quigley’s Body
film of me being tossed around stage with lettuce and croutons glued to my cheeks and, instead, deleted it forever. It also helped that the rash from the acid of the cherry tomato had finally faded from my forehead.
    My family was probably the last one left in America who actually sat down to dinner together every night. Anne thought it was cool, but I’d have traded for her brie-with-crackers or Thai-takeout-in-front-of-the-TV life, any day.
    I pulled at the shoulder strap of the bikini Anne had lent me. She claimed that it was “one size fits all” since the straps just tied at whatever length you needed. I probably couldhave fit one cheek into the narrow cloth at the back meant for both of Anne’s. But Anne didn’t believe in one-piece suits, and we needed to wear something so we could get fitted without flashing half of her mom’s design class. I’d have to find a time when Mom was out of the house to go digging through the summer storage up in the attic.
    I decided not to go into a lot of detail about the job over dinner. My parents were already a little edgy over my hanging out with Ms. Parisi. Her frequent jaunts to Milan and Madrid when Anne was little were not my folks’ idea of proper motherhood. Even the fact that she’d scaled back once her career took off and had done a complete one-eighty, discipline-wise, after Anne’s first brush with trouble at school didn’t help her reputation with them.
    Fortunately, I’d convinced my parents that Anne had taken the fall for the real troublemakers—that there was no way a lowly freshman could pull off rewriting an entire student newspaper not only to feature several teachers in compromising stories but also to announce a water main break–induced day off from school that the student population was all too eager to honor. I’d kept a straight face while proclaiming my friend’s innocence, despite the coincidence that each of the teachers Photoshopped into the home-ec sweatshop-ringarticle had recently reprimanded her timeliness-challenged ways.
    I thought, mom-wise, Ms. Parisi did pretty good, considering her history. It can’t be easy having to see the face of your kid’s secret biological father plastered across the cover of the “sexiest man alive” issue of every other publication on the news rack. I was one of the few people in the whole world Anne had let in on her parentage and was under threat of death if I ever let it slip. Her parents had a onetime fling at a runway show when her dad was just an unknown model straight from the cornfields of Iowa. She liked to say she got her good looks from her dad and her taste in guys from her mom.
    I thought she got a lot of other good things from her mom, like her independence and her crazy impressive smarts. Not that I would say that to her right now. Anne hadn’t dealt with the crackdown of supervision with a whole lot of grace. She was currently using the majority of her brilliance to find the most cutting things possible to say to Ms. Parisi. This was in revenge for the injustice of having a curfew—a phenomenon that had neatly escaped Anne so far in life.
    The