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decidedly ordinary girl with a name that always promised so much more, grinded the gears as she found reverse.
    “You mean that freak with the black eye makeup?”
    Jenna fished for the seat belt, wincing as her fingertips touched an apple core stuck between the door and the seat. Got it. She pulled the belt across her lap. Her mom was a cop and she followed every rule. It irritated some of her friends, but that’s the way it had to be.
    “I had that art class with him,” Jenna said. “He was kind of cool in the obviously tortured-soul-seeking-attention way.”
    Shali checked her makeup in the rearview mirror, permanently tilted toward her for just that purpose. The blush on her right side was heavier than the left, so she evened it out with her palm.
    “What did he do? Meth?” she asked.
    Jenna shrugged, but Shali kept pushing for details. She did that even when she didn’t know Cherrystone’s criminals and losers, but had merely read their names in the paper and knew that Jenna’s mom had the dirt on someone.
    “I’ll bet it was meth .” She spat out the words. “Or pot. He comes to school baked half the time. Must have been doing a lot of it if your mom’s on the case.”
    Shali’s Volkswagen sped by kids without wheels who’d lined up to catch the bus to the high school a few miles away. A few stared hard at the car as if they could stop it and get a ride. Anything was better than the bus—even a ride with Shali Patterson behind the wheel.
    “Probably. But I don’t know. My mom’s been out there all night.”
    “Yeah? Cool.” Shali scrunched her long dark hair, overgunked with a hair product she’d ordered from a TV shopping channel. She wore a hooded sweatshirt and a baby-T, cropped pants, and chunky gold ankle bracelet (also from the home shopping channel) she had put on in the car. Jenna wore her uniform— 7 blue jeans and a sweater. If Shali was the ho’ in the video—or at least an all-talk wannabe—Jenna was the good girl who never got any airtime.
    Their friendship worked because Jenna was confident about who she was. A friend like Shalimar Patterson could be over-the-top annoying, the type that sought the spotlight whenever she could find it. Jenna wasn’t like that. She just didn’t feel the need to sell herself so hard. Shali did.
    Jenna changed the subject. “Want to get a latte? I could use a boost.”
    “No kidding. Me, too. A white chocolate soy mocha sounds kind of good.”
    Shali pressed the pedal to the floor as they drove the short stretch of roadway to the school. They passed a place where the twister had set down. Shali scrunched her hair again and made a face as the splintered house zoomed from view.
    “Never liked the color of that house anyway,” Shali said. “What were they thinking?”
    Jenna nodded in slight agreement, though she hadn’t really felt that way. Shali could be such an idiot. The people who owned that house were without far more than good taste. They no longer had a place to live.
    “You can be such a bitch,” she finally said.
    Shali knew that. This almost a game between the two best friends. She smiled.
    “You got a problem with that?”
    “No. Not really.” Jenna hesitated. “ Maybe sometimes.”
    “Make up your mind.”
    Jenna reached for her coffee card as they pulled up to the window of Java the Hut.
    “Just sometimes . Like after a tornado trashed someone’s house. Times like that.”
    “I can be harsh. But that’s why you love me.”
    Jenna looked out the window as Shali gave the kid at the drive-through their espresso orders. Her thoughts had turned back to her mother. She must be beyond frazzled. She got that way every now and then. As cool as her mom could be, she could also unravel. She did that more than once during the divorce. It might have been justified but even so it wasn’t pretty. She hated seeing her mother cry or talk bad about herself and her life. It stung deeply. She wished she could run a triple tall latte to