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seated, I was feeling more covert. When you’re not sitting at it, the Figure Eight is Shangri-la. It’s like everyone over there has achieved a kind of coolness nirvana that you, in your lowly, B-list lunchroom state, can only jealously chew over at.
    Once inside, however, you see the nuances. The hierarchy.
    And this was my seventh time here since last fall, when I’dfirst made Emma McBride squeal over that story I’d told on myself, about me strutting around the Indian Harbor Yacht Club with my skirt bunched into my underwear. No, it hadn’t happened. But it had achieved two things:
            1. Made me seem like a fun girl who could tell a story on herself.
            2. Dropped that I belonged to the super-exclusive Indian Harbor Yacht Club.
    And that is a true fact, courtesy of King Arthur’s membership. A fact that used to somewhat mortify me. Who wants to be part of a club that would have shunned me for my entire pre-Arthur life? But I was mostly over it. Arthur’s money was like a giant Band-Aid. If it didn’t heal, at least it concealed the wound.
    As I watched Monty, wondering if I could cruise him into my party on his coolness frequent flier miles alone, I sensed Fiona scrutinizing me.
    “Thea,” she said, breaking through another conversation about which sucked worse, Vail or Tahoe. “Can I ask you something?”
    “Mmm?” I made my eyes go hard and half-mast. On guard.
    “Considering everything you just told us about your sister, isn’t Alex being on the reckless side? Lately, I mean?”
    “Mmm?” I repeated in the exact same inflection, which got an easy, mild laugh from the table.
    Fiona looked self-conscious. She could be awkward. She had Figure Eight status more on rock royalty than her own merit. “Notto judge. But if Alex really was born with this shared, Siamese-twin stomach,” she continued, her voice gaining decibels as people started listening in, “then why isn’t she more careful with her health? Like, I guess what I mean is, isn’t it really bad that she’s lost all that weight? Medically?”
    The problem with seat-of-your-pants storytelling was that you just had to hope nobody started picking its wedgies. And my story today had been way too spontaneous. Partly because it was inspired by Grange.
    “Pathos” was the word Grange had used. The word that stuck with me all morning. The word on which I’d hung this lie that burst from me like a tragic anthem after someone mentioned seeing Alex’s bestie Jessica Torres’s name on the “Who’s Having a Birthday” list, and joked that springtime seniors were harder to find than Waldo—especially on their birthdays.
    Birthdays. Missing. Alex. I’d cast my pathos right there in the lunch line, with a McBride in range. How, technically speaking, my poor sister Alex had been born with a sister attached to her. A conjoined twin who’d been too small and weak to live.
    I’d spun every detail I could remember off that PBS documentary I’d seen on conjoined twins. Lily Genovese had actually gotten surprisingly teary, grabbing her bagel off her tray and fleeing the lunchroom. Cole Segal then told me Lily’s twin brother had died in infancy from some kind of heart defect.
    But how could I have known that?
    On the bright side, a McBride had nudged me. “Siamese twin, for real? Creepy. I’ve got to ask you some things—don’t tell Alex, but I’m curious. Come sit over here. With us.”
    And I was in.
    But now Fiona was waiting for my answer. How to play it? I stalled.
    “Jeezus, Fee. Did you trade your brain for a pistachio?” Monty had jumped to my defense before I could invent one. “Alex Parrott isn’t Siamese
anymore
. Last I checked, she didn’t have a sister fused to her hipbone.”
    “Exactly,” added the other McBride—Ali, I think, had the freckle on her lip. “One was sacrificed so the other could live a normal life. Which means Alex can do what she wants to her body. She can have bulimia or