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whatever all day long and who cares, right?”
    “Sorry.” Fiona checked to see if I was upset. Yes, she’d be a good invite. Joshua could probably score a sale from her. Unless her retired rock-star dad had a better dealer, which was a real possibility.
    Oh. Ouch! This thing had been happening with my body lately. Like sometimes when physical stuff went wrong with me, it took me too long to react. A good example is back in November when I jammed my pinkie with my hockey stick and broke it in two places and it sort of veered off like a twig. Everyone came flying in from the field, going
“Ahhhhh! Ewwwwww! Are you okaaaaaaay?”
    For a second or two, I’d just stared at the finger. All I’d wanted to do was scream along with them. As if that finger was twisting off another girl’s hand, not mine.
    So it took me a moment for that knot in my stomach to get my attention. Another moment to identify why I felt so bad. This time, the reason wasn’t expressly physical.
    Bulimia? Seriously? Is
that
what the kids thought?
    VIP juniors like Fiona got their information from their VIP senior equivalents, like the Four Blondes (of this group, none were blond, and Alex was a member).
    This was what Al’s three best friends were saying about her?
    What a trashy rumor.
    Because it
was
a rumor, wasn’t it?
    Of course it was. Had to be.
    “Bulimia, that’s cute. She’ll love that,” I said to the freckle-lipped McBride.
    “No, I am not kidding. What’s the deal? Senior stress? Chronic fatigue? Lyme disease?” asked Fiona. “My cousin had tick-bite fever. He got disgustingly skinny.”
    “Not at all. It’s nothing like that,” I answered. “Alex is a catalog model. She was discovered by a modeling agency when she did an internship at
Haute
magazine this past winter. It’s pretty easy for her to gain and lose weight. I should be insanely jealous, right?” As I gave it my best, most unjealous, most proud sister laugh.
    Approving nods met me all around the table.
    Nice save, Thea. Nobody can argue modelrexia.
    Bulimia made Alex sound pitiful and sickly. In need of help. Bulimic was the wilted opposite of the heartbreaking warrior story I’d just told about her. The fierce baby who’d had to leave her twin behind. Who beat the odds to live. (And there were truth germs in this story, too. Alex had been born a couple of weeks early, with jaundice, and had spent a few days in the hospital.)
    But I wasn’t breathing evenly. The lunchroom was closing in on me. I wanted to chase down the other Blondes—Palmer andJessie and Maureen—and demand to know which one of them was rumormongering my sister.
    And I probably would have done it, too. If I’d been sitting anywhere else. But it was so hard to grab a power seat. And now that I was here, it didn’t make sense to give up the Figure Eight. Lose your turn and then you might miss everything.

Friday, afternoon
ALEX
    She is empty. There’s nothing new inside her body except for a tampon and half a cup of black coffee, and all the pent-up apologies she will shower on Leonard for not showing up yesterday. She lets the passenger-side window unroll so that the air can find her face.
    Lulette is maneuvering the Bronx-bound traffic every bit as well as Hector, who used to drive race cars. Lulette smells sweet. If Alex had to assign her a signature perfume, she’d call it Lipstick Print on a Warm Glass of Coke. Lulette has found Joshua’s ont he-go Glen Washington playlist on the docked iPod, and she settles happily into the reggae and her stories, which come easy. As if Alex is a real friend and not her boss’s daughter. Except Alex knows Lulette does this with everyone. It’s her usual charm. Now she’s talking about her house in Grenada. She recently transferred the deed to her sister.
    “Good to be done with that house. It was from a time when I was with Delroy, and you wouldn’t give that man a dog to love.”
    “Why did you marry him, again?” Alex knows why. She’s